TIC TAC TIMELINE

World AIDS Day/Day With(out) Art  (December 1st)

Tic-Tac-Timeline is a durational, task-based performance that enacts a commemoration of World AIDS Day/Day With(out) Art through the simple repetitive gesture of lining the performance space with thousands of the titular objects while counting aloud each one. It also serves as the sole memorial to date for a specific individual, Jonathan Schwartz, my partner who succumbed to HIV-related lymphoma on December 1, 1994, a.k.a. World AIDS Day. Each candy represents one of the 8000+ days he might have been alive if current treatment modalities had been in existence then. Through the dual operations of hand and voice, a timeline is created that reaches from the horrors of the worst day of the AIDS crisis to our present-day amnesia regarding them. 

The candies utilized in the performance are some of the most banal imaginable: the ubiquitous cheap breath mints manufactured by the Italian confectioner Ferrero and marketed internationally under the brand name Tic Tacs. In this piece, however, they function as a stand-in for another, costlier global product: the once-daily combination regimen of antiretroviral drugs that I and nearly 21 million other HIV-positive people around the world require to stay alive and healthy. 

In its everyday, non-performative existence, a breath mint serves a sanitizing social function: masking the unpleasant odors that result from the biological imperative to consume food and the biological reality of the bacteria that reside in the human mouth. In much the same way, pharmaceutical companies sanitize the reality of living with HIV through marketing campaigns for their products that feature physically flawless models as the “face” of the disease.  

At one point, the website for the drug I take every day featured on its homepage a gorgeously produced black-and-white promotional video starring presumably HIV-positive patients. Every person on camera was gym-body fit, conventionally beautiful, and immaculately dressed (literally, they all wore white). With the sound off and the cool, sophisticated aesthetics of the filmmaking, they could have been selling clothes or perfume or top-shelf liquor. 

Tic Tacs not only sanitize, they satiate as candy. Made up of 95% sucrose, they could be a miniaturized materialization of the “sweetness of life.” They might also suggest the placebo sugar pills people dying from AIDS were given in the randomized clinical drug trials during the first decade of the epidemic. The total wholesale price of the Tic Tacs used this evening came to $75 (including shipping). The same number of Genvoya tablets would cost nearly one thousand times as much wholesale: $72,752.24.