‘I need a dyke for president,” reads the opening of Zoe Leonard’s I Desire a President. “I need an individual with aids for president and I need a fag for vice-president and I need somebody with no medical insurance and I need somebody who grew up in a spot the place the earth is so saturated with poisonous waste that they didn’t have a alternative about getting leukemia.”
Initially supposed to be printed as “a press release” in an underground LGBT journal, I Desire a President was written within the run-up to the 1992 US presidential race. This came about on the peak of the Aids epidemic, a medical situation turned political disaster that was, within the earlier decade, catastrophically silenced by Ronald Reagan. President from 1981 to 89, Reagan did not acknowledge Aids till hundreds had died. The queer group was in turmoil, within the grip of a illness that took the lives of so many, and stigmatised much more.
Though not supposed to be an “art work”, Leonard’s piece spoke passionately about her need for a progressive chief. Her sentences demanded empathy from politicians who had clearly by no means shared the experiences of these from the “flawed” race, class, sexuality or financial bracket: “I need a president who misplaced their final lover to aids … who has stood in line on the clinic … the welfare workplace … has been unemployed … and gaybashed and deported.”
When the journal ceased publication, the work was as a substitute photocopied and circulated. With its easy, accessible typeface (its errors have been left uncorrected), the piece shared a visible language with different politically targeted artists in New York on the time. In 1987, the activist collective Act Up used the traditional SILENCE = DEATHposter. Two years later, the Gran Fury collective drew consideration to the false declare that Aids may very well be transmitted by way of kissing with their billboard-style work Kissing Doesn’t Kill: Greed and Indifference Do. These have been works designed to seize the eye and emphatically name out the inequalities of the period.
The inspiration for I Desire a Presidentcame from Leonard’s pal, the poet Eileen Myles who had mounted their very own presidential bid. Like Leonard’s sentences, Myles’s bid provided an alternate set of political wishes worlds away from the Reagan administration and the one which adopted with George Bush Sr. Myles spoke of their imaginative and prescient for the US to be “inclusive. Everybody can come. All lessons, races, sexes & sexualities” and expressed a refusal to “stay within the White Home whereas there are homeless in America” – wishes which are easy and humane, but are nonetheless completely extraordinary in in the present day’s politics.
Leonard’s strains deliver house the truth that empathy, as a trait, just isn't considered highly effective: “I need somebody who has been in love and been harm … who has made errors and realized from them …” Why are these in energy so afraid to say after they have been flawed? Certainly, empathy can deliver us collectively, permit us to attract on our collective expertise and make us stronger.
The work stays simply as efficient and, sadly, simply as related. In 2016, it was mounted on a colossal scale beneath the Excessive Line, the New York park constructed on an previous elevated railway line. Echoing its origins, this was within the run-up to the presidential election that noticed in Donald Trump. However Leonard’s work additionally hits house within the UK, as Liz Truss’s authorities embarks on a programme of fracking and tax cuts for the rich.
Thérèse Coffey, the brand new well being secretary, has voted towards abortion and same-sex marriage. In July, Nadhim Zahawi, the minister for equalities, signalled his views on gender identification by suggesting that kids have been having “damaging and inappropriate nonsense being pressured on them by radical activists”. After years of austerity, we've seen the Tories demonise immigrants and other people on advantages, triple college charges and, because the SNP’s Mhairi Black bluntly warned in a speech in Could, “do away with the Human Rights Act”.
A couple of years in the past, Leonard stated she wouldn't make I Desire a President in the present day: “I don’t take into consideration identification politics in the identical means: that's, I don’t suppose that a particular set of identifiers, or particular demographic markers essentially results in a selected political place.” But I consider her art work continues to resonate because it calls out what we nonetheless crave and nonetheless don’t see from leaders: illustration by these in minority positions, a fellow feeling for all backgrounds. As she says in direction of the top of the work: “And I need to know why this isn’t potential.”
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