A Leap in the Dark: AIDS, Art and Contemporary Cultures

Ian C. Nelson is Assistant Director of Libraries, University of
Saskatchewan; and Director, Saskatoon Gateway Plays, Regina Summer
Stage, and La Troupe du Jour.

Of all the articles in this volume that have been issued from the annual
international colloquia on AIDS research, one in particular seems to
speak for the rest: “Media Health Campaigning: Not Just What You Say,
But the Way That You Say It!” (italics mine).

The Fifth International Conference on AIDS, held in Montreal in June
1989, included a highly effective arts accompaniment entitled SIDART
(SIDA is the French acronym for AIDS). A Leap in the Dark bespeaks the
creativity of the artists who participated in the SIDART events.
Véhicule Press and the editors should be commended on the choice of
papers, the clarity and positioning of the illustrations, and the
inviting use of type and white space in this compilation. The papers are
no less eclectic and thorough in their appeal than those in other
similar compilations, yet the focus here is clearly on living people
rather than on postmortem facts. Was the Great Divide in the tenor of
these annual events attributable to the success of SIDART? Alas, the
controversies of politics and research claims are still with us (at the
time of writing, the bombshell of the Berlin Conference, of June 1993,
was the debated effectiveness of AZT as an inhibitor of AIDS for those
testing HIV-positive).

A Leap in the Dark makes an obvious leap of faith in presenting, via a
collaboration of artists and creators, important material in the
chronology of our global coming to terms with AIDS. It seems an
appropriate antidote to the devastating initial chronology so
depressingly described by Randy Shilts in And the Band Played On.
Recommended, despite its lack of index.