Blunt instruments

Art, of course, is never enough. But this fascinating and provocative show demonstrates how important a savvy way with visuals can be in raising awareness and bringing about change.

A word of caution: The exhibition is divided into two parts. The ground floor gallery has a fleet of monitors screening interviews with individuals who were associated with ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power). It’s billed as the premiere of the ACT UP Oral History Project. It’s also interminable. Most of the interviews are in the vicinity of two hours long, and it’s very difficult to know in each case who is speaking.

There’s clearly value in the project for historians and other parties closely associated with ACT UP, but the display is not exactly designed to ingratiate itself to passersby.

The posters, videos, and other items related to ACT UP’s visual campaigns are to be found in the Sert Gallery on the third floor of the Carpenter Center. They’re altogether more lively.

ACT UP formed in New York in 1987, when the number of deaths from AIDS-related illnesses in the US had hit 16,000 and politicians, both local and national, were still ignoring the problem. The aim was to force governments and the medical establishment to confront the crisis and effect change.

With fear-mongering, ignorance, and bigotry playing a huge part in public attitudes at the time, consciousness-raising was part of its agenda. But so were tangible shifts in policy.

Ronald Reagan, the president at the time, had failed even to mention AIDS in public until 1986 - five years after an epidemic was first declared. Not until 1987 did the Food and Drug Administration approve the first therapeutic drug, AZT. It cost patients around $10,000 a year. The Helms Amendment, meanwhile, had banned the use of federal funds for AIDS education that was seen to promote or encourage, directly or indirectly, homosexual behavior.

Fired by outrage, spurred on by a sense of urgency, ACT UP went to work. It organized protests that closed down the FDA in 1988. It infiltrated the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street and drowned out the opening bell with bullhorns as activists unfurled a banner reading “SELL WELLCOME.’’ (Manufacturer Burroughs Wellcome sold AZT at high prices.)

These activities got results. Four days after the demonstration, the price of AZT dropped by 20 percent. There were many other advances.

To get the message out, ACT UP sponsored and mobilized artist collectives such as Gran Fury, Silence = Death Project, and Gang to produce an array of posters, stickers, and other guerilla marketing techniques.

The graphics they came up with were blunt - as they needed to be - but visually witty and sly, too. An image of a bishop wearing a miter is set beside an inflated condom (roughly the same shape as the bishop). The slogan next to the condom reads “This one prevents AIDS.’’

Another poster shows Reagan’s laughing face beside a target. In a font reminiscent of the work of artist Barbara Kruger (a big influence on many of the designers associated with ACT UP), it says simply: “He kills me.’’

Artists used strategies of appropriation (sarcastic inversions, for instance, of the Coke logo “Enjoy’’ applied to the drug AZT) and no-frills typography. They used T-shirts and graffiti. They designed a backlit transparency that read: “Call the White House. 1 (202) 456 1414. Tell Bush We’re Not All Dead Yet.’’ And they delivered public health messages as directly and aptly as possible: “Men Use Condoms or Beat It.’’

The five graphic designers and one writer who together formed the Silence = Death Project in 1987 developed what would eventually become ACT UP’s logo. Along with the words “Silence = Death,’’ they took an upside-down pink triangle - the same sign the Nazis had used to identify homosexuals publicly - and turned it right way up.

Another ubiquitous logo was the red handprint created by Gran Fury. Originally accompanied by the words “The Government has blood on its hands’’ above and “One AIDS death every half hour’’ below, the handprint quickly appeared all over the city, often without accompanying text - a tart abbreviation of anger, delivered in silence and with accusatory force.

Gran Fury made its final poster in 1992. Called “The Four Questions,’’ the poster articulates a shift away from agitprop into something more closely resembling art. Ironically, it involved no imagery - just four questions written in small typewriter font against an enveloping white background.

“Do you resent people with AIDS?’’ it asked first, and then, “Do you trust HIV-negatives? Have you given up hope for a cure? When was the last time you cried?’’

Finally, with this heartfelt, strangely disorienting set of questions, we have a sense that the tragedy of AIDS is being registered not just with anger and accusation but with confusion, mourning, compassion, numbness.

The exhibition’s organizers, Helen Molesworth and Claire Grace, celebrate the ability of the artist collectives involved with ACT UP to exploit “the power of art’’ to help put an end to the AIDS crisis. But of course, in most cases they were exploiting the power of graphic design.

Inventive graphic design in the service of such an important message is indeed worth celebrating. But agitprop, because its aim is reeducation, has a tendency to treat people like children. It condescends. Gran Fury’s “The Four Questions’’ is so poignant because it treats its audience, finally, like adults. To the question “What group, exactly, is this poster addressing?’’ there is no clear-cut answer, for it is not addressing groups - it is addressing individuals.

Individuals eventually grow weary of slogans. They are soothed by success, but also worn down by defeat, by continued bigotry, by the deaths of friends and loved ones.

Most of the collectives of artists and designers working with ACT UP disbanded in the early ’90s. Many of the aims of ACT UP were achieved. Meanwhile, the nature of the AIDS crisis changed from an immediate emergency to what art historian Douglas Crimp called a “permanent disaster.’’ In this context, as Grace writes in an exhibition brochure, “the persistence and the increasingly complex demographics of HIV/AIDS lent themselves less readily to strident imagery and one-liners.’’

Art may not be enough, as Gran Fury declared in an earlier poster. Nor, finally, are strident imagery and one-liners. It’s when we recognize the inadequacy of posters and T-shirts and savvy copywriting that art, once again, becomes necessary.

Sebastian Smee can be reached at ssmee@globe.com.