Queer Art Under the Freeway

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• Keith Hennessy
• Sexually Transmitted Diseases
• Sexual and Reproductive Health

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Twenty years ago, San Francisco–based performance artist Keith Hennessy debuted an interdisciplinary work beneath a freeway South of Market. The piece confronted AIDS at a time when the crisis was ravaging the city: He collected saliva from the entire audience, combined it with black pigment and nonoxynol-9 lubricant (popularly used as a spermicide, and once thought to protect against HIV and other STDs), and painted himself with the resulting mixture. Calling on choreography, improvisation, and music, he presided over a ritual reclamation of his own body, addressing the rage and grief surrounding an epidemic, and ultimately capturing the attention of national gay media outlets like The Advocate. Tonight, the artist restages Saliva at its original site, as part of Keith Hennessy’s A Queer 20th Anniversary, which also includes several performances in January. Politically charged and alchemical, Hennessy’s pioneering work promises to resonate with a new generation in a city where queerness, art, and public action remain as relevant as ever. Attendees are warned not to wear “pretty shoes,” as presumably Hennessy lets fly the same unabashed combination of volatility and vital fluids as he did in 1989.
Sun., Dec. 13, 8 p.m., 2009