David Robilliard

1987

Painting, 100 x 150 cm.
Materials: acrylic, canvas

Collection: Collectie Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven.

From: A conversation with the ICA's Gregor Muir

It’s interesting because in some of these images from  he doesn’t seem to know. I presumed in 87, all the works would be elegiacal, whereas these are still flirtatious and got fun about them.

’87 you’ve got responses to the campaigns on TV [Gregor reads from a work in a catalogue that won’t be in the ICA show]. “I had safe sex last night. I went home alone”. That’s not the end of that poem, which is that he says, “I had safe sex last night” and someone asks him how, and he says, ” I just spat it out”. There’s a sense of those big HIV/AIDS ads creeping in. You already sense that it’s around, it’s there, and there’s this sense of unfortunately David beginning to become the most eloquent person to respond to this period. It’s as though he’s trundling along, and then suddenly he sails into this area, and it gets stormier and stormier. “The thing that thrilled them is the thing that killed them” is one of the lines. He probably didn’t wish to be, but as we know poetry becomes a form of testament. It can document periods in such an incredibly precise way, and in a way that’s what he found himself doing. And that’s the oddness because he then becomes a kind of the Samuel Pepys of the AIDS generation.

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