The National Gallery Australia’s collection includes Untitled (for ACT UP), 1990, a color screen print.
David demonstrated with AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) to raise awareness of the AIDS pandemic and created Untitled (for ACT UP), 1990 (a limited edition of 100 color screen prints) to raise funds for the activist organization. David himself died of AIDS just two years after creating this work.
In the text beneath the upper image, he writes:
“If I had a dollar to spend for healthcare I’d rather spend it on a baby or innocent person with some defect or illness not of their own responsibility; not some person with AIDS…” says the healthcare official on national television and this is in the middle of an hour long video of people dying on camera because they can’t afford the limited drugs available that might extend their lives and I can’t even remember what his official looked like because I reached in through the T.V. screen and ripped his face in half and I was diagnosed with AIDS recently and this was after the last few years of losing count of the friends and neighbors who have been dying slow and vicious and unnecessary deaths because fags and dykes and junkies are expendable in this country ”If you want to stop AIDS shoot the queers” says the governor of texas on the radio and his press secretary later claims that the governor was only joking and didn’t know the microphone was turned on and besides they didn’t think it would hurt his chances for re-election anyways and I wake up every morning in this killing machine called america and I’m carrying this rage like a blood filled egg…”
Ngunnawal and Ngambri Country
Parkes Place East, Parkes ACT 2600
