ABSTRACT
Take two images from gay culture of the 1980s. The first is a crack and peel sticker, used to deface advertisements and add to the collage of the city streets. Leaving traces of a presence, these gay calling cards promise the return of those who refuse to fade from view in the spectacle of the modern metropolis. The sticker reworks an image from the 'original' design by Barbara Kruger — itself a pastiche of a salesman's card - a hand proffering the message 'I shop, therefore I am'. In Adam Rolston's gay appropriation, the logo announces 'I am out, therefore I am'. 1 It was produced for the twentieth anniversary of the riots in the Stonewall bar in New York in 1969 when gays retaliated against another of the regular police raids. This event was to become the symbolic moment for the start of Gay Liberation and the coming out of gays from the easily policed bars to become 'street people'. 2 The Rolston logo is also printed on T-shirts, the wearing of which is a performative utterance in the exchange of signs in the city, suggesting not a nature to be deciphered, nor a code for those in the know, but a politicised identity. For Rolston and Douglas Crimp, co-editors of AIDS Demo Graphics, it is one of their compilation of city graphics dedicated to the memory of thousands who have died because of government inaction in the Aids crisis and the survival of thousands who are fighting to stay alive. Rolston and Crimp identified the work in their collection as part of what is radical in postmodernist art, since it calls into question issues of identity, authorship and audience, and the way all three are constructed through representation, while resisting the institutional isation to which postmodern practices have fallen prey. 3
