For four days starting August 7, artist
Mary Coble will protest the FDA’s ban on blood donations from gay men in “Deferral,” the latest
performance art installation in the Corcoran Gallery of Art’s contemporary NOW series.
Coble and a handful of gay male collaborators will work inside a makeshift anatomical
theater crafted from hospital curtains inside the Corcoran’s atrium, covering their
space with words and images. While Coble will use her own blood as a medium, her team
will use red thread to draw awareness to the legitimacy of their own bodily fluids.
There’s a lengthy history of using blood and other bodily fluids in art, from
Marc Quinn’s “Self” (a sculpture of Quinn’s head made from 4.5 liters of his blood) to musician
Pete Doherty’s blood drawings, in which he uses his own “arterial splatter” technique. In 2005,
Coble had the names of 436 LGBT individuals who were killed in hate crimes tattooed
on her body without ink in a marathon 12-hour performance art installation at what
was then Conner Contemporary. She pressed a sheet of paper against each name after
it had been completed, making a blood painting for each one.
In a statement on her website, Coble says, “The seriousness of intolerance that I
see in our society is one of the driving forces that leads me to create work. I want
to challenge people to reevaluate overly simplified and narrow understandings of a
much more expansive reality.”
The FDA has banned blood donations from men who have sex with men since 1983, during
the early days of HIV awareness. Critics of the policy point out that donor blood
is screened for sexually transmitted diseases, and that blood banks are continually
short of supplies. Earlier this month, gay men attempted to give blood at 53 sites
across the country after testing negative for HIV in protest against the policy. In
June, the American Medical Association called for the FDA to change its official doctrine
in light of advanced technology for screening purposes, saying, “It is antiquated
to keep this policy in place and to keep those units of blood from entering the blood
supply.”
“Deferral” begins August 7 and runs through August 10, from 10 to 9 the first day
and until 5 PM for the last three days of the performance.
