antipopper

History, strategy and the re-presentation of AIDS activist graphics

Benjamin Hoh, 1996

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On the general level on which U.S. academics and students take “influence” from France, one encounters the following understanding: Foucault deals with real history, real politics, and real social problems; Derrida is inaccessible, esoteric and textualistic. … [T]he substantive concern for the politics of the oppressed which often accounts for Foucault’s appeal can hide a privileging of the intellectual and of the “concrete” subject of oppression that, in fact, compounds the appeal… [Derrida] is less dangerous when understood than the first-world intellectual masquerading as the absent nonrepresenter who lets the oppressed speak for themselves.
— Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”

Looking critically at how one might invoke the “concrete” can open up a crack in the world. As part of that project, this essay considers the art-historical practices of AIDS demo graphics (Crimp & Rolston 1990), Douglas Crimp and Adam Rolston’s book about AIDS activist propaganda. I first wanted to do this because AIDS demo graphics was “alternative” — it challenged the institutional investments of art-history by apparently locating its voice and focus outside the academy, the museum and, indeed, outside “art” itself. It was also the direct product of a particular political organisation and movement, thus providing a materially situated, solid problematic with which to engage. But it can’t end there: a reflexive abyss must open up as I compulsively consider the question of how this “solidity” might be significant in Crimp and Rolston’s project, and what this means for the negotiation of institutionality in projects for social change.

These days, it’s a change for me to locate a particular political significance in the “concreteness” of its subject matter. This is not a matter of whether “political immediacy” should be a priority in cultural criticism, but of how this could be. Of course, like most people alienated by abstraction, my policy has always been, “this had better be about stuff, or I’m not going to bother…”. But following Deleuze’s movement towards technically engaged critical strategies that resemble science fiction rather than science, I also approach cultural criticism as a way of generating useful political techniques. What can criticism help us do? Lately, I have focused on this “conceptual virtue” in order to challenge the tendency of self-described radical cultural criticism to narcissistically found its sense of political responsibility upon its choice of content in itself. Such “content” may indeed concern an urgent material situation, but it may also may be mere fuel for what has been called “the self satisfaction of too much work in cultural studies”, or become, as Spivak describes, an alibi that re-cements the division of labour (Spivak 1988).

Against such a background, we can contrast an alternative approach to “immediacy”: taking concepts from unlikely places and seeing how they can be put into play within whatever problems are at hand — perhaps in an everyday activist project. But within the academy there are problems with such a practice: when concepts lack the consistent contextual framing (whose aura is appropriated for the construction of “responsible thickness”), their development can formally coincide (and be confused) with “abstraction” (or, the privileged disengagement of professional philosophy’s own institutionalisation). And without rigorous grounding, the application of such concepts can also implode into short-term utilitarianism or frivolous adventurism. Therefore, the reflexive abyss brought by my choice of subject matter is useful: the concrete is both an object of critique and a corrective. The crack, once opened, is beyond the control of any critic.

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It is impossible to fully determine the art-historical significance of AIDS demo graphics by explicating and then assessing its major points, simply because the book mostly avoids “theory”. It must therefore be seen as a cultural artefact, whose theoretical implications can be drawn out by putting it into play in a wider context.[1] AIDS demo graphics is an archive of the visual propaganda produced by ACT UP New York, an autonomous group that operates under the international banner of ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power. ACT UP aims to “end the AIDS crisis” by combining its interventions into public knowledges of “AIDS” with agitations for more equitable and humane responses from medico-governmental authorities to the epidemic. ACT UP is famous for its striking use of slogans and visual devices in its activist work, like the famous “SILENCE = DEATH” device; their propaganda appropriates various mass-cultural elements of late capitalism — advertising slogans, the iconicity of the commodity, etc. — and puts them into play in the post-1968 discourse of New Left social movement activism.

AIDS demo graphics deals, then, with aesthetic productions whose purposes lie beyond the locus of the museum. Crimp and Rolston take great pains to illustrate the museum’s elitist institutionalisations, with which ACT UP can be associated but not made equivalent; while ACT UP’s work is now often hung in galleries, their placards, posters, stickers and fliers are primarily created for the social space of “the streets”. Art-history’s traditional and overwhelmingly anti-social focus on the elite institution of the “work of art” is thus emphasised all the more by ACT UP’s everyday popularity and urgency. Whatever blind or opportunist approach the museum may take towards cultural activism, Crimp and Rolston assert that throughout this, “[t]he aesthetic values of the traditional art world are of little consequence to AIDS activists” (Crimp & Rolston 1990: 15).

Crimp and Rolston make it clear that they intend AIDS demo graphics to be both an umbrella for, and an extension of, the propaganda produced by ACT UP New York. In their introduction, they immediately distance their account from the totalising mappings of a disinterested “study”:

This book is intended as a demonstration, in both senses of the word. It is meant as a direct action, putting the power of representation in the hands of as many people as possible. And it is presented as a do-it-yourself manual, showing how to make propaganda work in the fight against AIDS… We are members of ACT UP New York. We attend its meetings, join the debate, march in demonstrations, and get arrested for acts of civil disobedience… (Crimp & Rolston 1990: 13)

AIDS demo graphics is thus a statement from the inside of its own content. But eager to disclaim the possibility of a universalising counter-authority to the academy, Crimp and Rolston emphasise the particularity of their concerns:

We’re familiar with New York ACT UP’s graphics, the people who make them, the issues they address. The limitation is part of the nature of our demonstration. We don’t claim invention of the style or the techniques. We have no patent on the politics or the designs. There are AIDS activist graphics wherever there are AIDS activists. But ours are the ones we know and can show to others, presented in a context we understand. We want others to keep using our graphics and making their own. (Crimp & Rolston 1990: 13)

But such a localisation nonetheless creates an aura of authority. The knowledge of the grass-roots. Throughout the text, the first person collective pronoun, “we”, blurs the authorial voice with the actions of the activist group. A particular ACT UP demonstration or campaign is recalled in each section, titled with journalistic spatiotemporal coordinates; for example, “Don’t Go to Bed With Cosmo: Hearst Building, New York City, January 19, 1988” (Crimp & Rolston 1990: 38). Each retelling outlines the pressing political issues that informed the event, describing the graphics that those issues prompted, recounting the “live action” of the event, and assessing its outcomes in broad terms. Interspersed throughout the text are one-to-a-page reproductions of relevant ACT UP graphics, and occasional black and white photographs of the graphics being wielded by angry, chanting protestors.

There is a kind of unsurprised causality about it all: the specifics of location, motivation and result are linked dramatically. Each major event follows in chronological order from the inception of the group in 1987, and the narrative selectively highlights the most effective links between graphics and major issues (Crimp & Rolston 1990: 22). This cementing of determination is crystallised in one of ACT UP’s chants at the Stonewall Riot’s 20th anniversary rally: “IF NOT NOW, WHEN? IF NOT HERE, WHERE? IF NOT US, WHO?” (Crimp and Rolston 1990: 104).

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Autobiography. AIDS demo graphics changed my life. I encountered the book in 1991, as I was beginning to invest serious energy in left-wing activism and graphic design. These two things were already connected for me; my first substantial experience in design occurred in the context of leftist media interventions, so finding AIDS demo graphics in the middle of all this was perfect — while it didn’t offer any advice on how to run a propaganda outfit, it did succeed in inspiring me. AIDS demo graphics was addictive. It invited fetishism. It helped me realise that people in the world had cool ways of expressing themselves in protest. AIDS demo graphics also confirmed the importance of visuality in the arena of protest. The benefits of looking “professional”. Of not being a dreary, verbose ideologue. AIDS demo graphics located its images in the middle of issues and events, creating a compelling impression of activity that I tried to recreate in my own work.[2]

But underneath, a question remained: what exactly was I trying to do? Or, what models of sociality and social change are enacted by ACT UP’s approach to signification? It took a few years for the book’s initial impression to wear off, and for me to take inspiration from it in a more reflexive manner; my response moved from attempting to simply “reincarnate” ACT UP’s feel, towards engaging with its workings. From 1994 to 1995, I worked on proposals for “information practices” that could be enacted within my own leftist organisation. These practices included

1. setting up Internet hypertext systems, putatively for “fact-oriented” communication and archival purposes;
2. incorporating journalistic techniques of documentation and investigation into everyday activist work;
3. reviving the “teach-in” as a prioritised point of political action; and
4. writing short books, much like AIDS demo graphics, that would document the course of particular political projects.

Although this appears to be a “return to scholasticism”, much of its appeal was deliberately superficial. I was more interested in how the fetishistic pretense of informationality always has strategic social value that can be put into play; the existence of archives, written communication and more deliberate pedagogical spaces would serve to focus collective energies and sensitivities; and an attraction to journalistic processes would structurally foster an engaged approach (that could avoid the totalisations of both timidity and bluffing assuredness) to the complex, unfolding spaces of politics.

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Crisis. Almost a decade after its inception, ACT UP is in decline: its worldwide membership, activity and profile are low, bitter factional splits are commonplace, and “the vibe” no longer exists. It this context, it is fitting to consider the critiques of ACT UP made by a visual artist and one-time ACT UP associate, Matthew Jones. In his silence = death exhibition (1991), Jones suggests that ACT UP’s declarative sloganeering enacts a kind of metaphysical absolutism, against which he posits the impossibility of a declarative politics. In one installation, stark slogans are fixed above blank canvasses, opaque window frames and other markable surfaces that have been evacuated of content, or made into furniture. Slogans are given wayward permutations (“discourse = defense”; “defense = disease”; “disease = discourse”), or brought face to face with the reactionary implications of their “logical conclusions” (“homosexuality = aids”). Jones challenges the crystallisation of ACT UP’s bold identifications and authoritative orderings in its “SILENCE = DEATH” slogan by begging a pertinent question: what kind of revolutionary actor is cemented by the compulsory enunciation of reactive anger? In another image, a generically heroic ACT UP activist, brandishing a U.S. flag and surrounded by assorted AIDS activist propaganda, leaps from his hospital bed to realise the fictional duty of making America great again. Lying prominently on the floor, among the propaganda materials, is a copy of AIDS demo graphics. The whole glorious scene, like socialist realism, is obviously unreal, but the caption, which appears as a museum plaque for a diorama, provides a pathetic kind of reassurance: “ACTUAL PHOTO”.

In I FEEL LIKE CHICKEN TONIGHT (1994), Jones parodies Adam Rolston’s I am out therefore I am (1989), which was an ACT UP sticker and t-shirt. Jones replaces Rolston’s text with a slogan for a brand of bottled chicken sauce: “I FEEL LIKE CHICKEN TONIGHT”. Several theses can be drawn from such a strategy:

1. appropriating the slick, emphatic feel of advertising simply rearticulates its simplistic inanity;
2. Rolston’s naturalising declaration of an oppositional social identity demonstrates a dependency on particular kinds of market-approved subjectification, and it thus becomes an inane advertising slogan; [3]
3. the exclusion involved in naturalising a gay identity returns as the forbidden spectre of man-boy sex (in whose discourse a “chicken” is slang for a young boy);[4]
4. all of this makes ACT UP’s aim of politicising people via “public art” largely impossible.[5]

For Jones, ACT UP’s decline would be unsurprising; it would be rendered obsolete once it had fully literalised those of its logics that always resembled the dominant social order’s.

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If Jones overstates his case, it is because he fails to appreciate the negotiations that occur within material situations. His effective collapsing of the field of semiosis leads him to a kind of idealist faith: that social meanings are consistently realised functions of philosophical propositions, and are always played out to their logical conclusions. But ACT UP slogans cannot be reduced to literal expressions of metaphysics; their declarations of resistant particularity or their iconic mappings of desperate situations are necessary but always contingent interventions, not items of faith. This also applies generally to ACT UP’s technique of appropriation. As Crimp argues, semiotic interventions are effects in themselves, and cannot be seen in terms of idealist fundamentalisms:

ACT UP in its heyday worked because it was able to deal with the media, because it was able to create images, and slogans, and forms of knowledge — it was able to make meaning differently from the way the media had been making meaning about AIDS prior to that moment. And the discourses have managed to have shifted very, very, very greatly for a period of time, because of that. (Crimp & Hoh 1995)

By seeing earnest literalism everywhere, Jones earnestly reveals himself to be the master literalist. But he must not be overinterpreted; radical action is not impossible for Jones; confronted with the dilemma of “ACT UP or DO NOTHING” (Jones 1991), his participation in ACT UP was instead haunted by what he saw to be certain overwhelming tendencies of the organisation. And in the shadow of essentialist feminisms, “revolutionary” nationalisms, etc., it must be admitted that ACT UP’s hyper-iconicity may increase its tendency to literalise the terms of its negotiations,[6] and thus realise a kind of commodifying identity politics. Sloganeering can indeed be dangerous.[7] Perhaps Jones represents the emergent self-awareness of this tendency, which is horrified because all it can see is its own nose. We can thus appropriate his critique within a more materialist framework, just as one would use a canary in a mineshaft: as a colourful symptom that pre-empts our own.

Jones’ challenge is particularly pertinent to AIDS demo graphics, because “history” occupies an overcoded place in the canon of left-wing authoritarianism — witness Stalinism’s underwriting by a teleological conception of Progress that was given sacred representation in the machinations of the State. We must therefore interrogate Crimp and Rolston’s tendency to short-circuit historical processes in their presentation of “concrete” activities, and prise open the cracks that have been filled by ACT UP’s overly symbolic logic in order to locate practical problems. Like the chasm of indeterminacies that lies between “SILENCE” and “DEATH”, what lies between an “issue” and its supposed incarnation in a placard? Crimp and Rolston’s aim of providing a “how-to guide” to propaganda production is frustrated by their notable failure to deal with most of the processes that lead up to the display of the finished products. Of course, the problem is not a quantitative lack of “empirical rigour”, but a qualitative question of political style.[8] Crimp and Rolston’s fetishism of the protest-product obscures the relationality of propaganda production, and thus the need to offer any actualisable strategies of expressive action.

This problem is part of a general avoidance of social semiotics, and even extends to simple questions of “reception”. Crimp and Rolston’s declarations eclipse the need to assess the social effects of ACT UP propaganda, and close off crucial considerations of what ACT UP activists were actually trying to achieve by making visual interventions in the first place. The collapse of these questions into an edifice of bullet-listed “issues” signals the collapse of the contingent political space in which “issues” are initially formulated, echoing anarchism’s abandonment (in its ultraleftist mission to spur spontaneous, “concrete” worker control) of what Marxism identifies as the tasks of the political. The narrative of AIDS demo graphics tends to replace qualities of action with pure spectacle. (“ACTUAL PHOTO”!) Indeed, it is licit to wonder whether the unparalleled hyperconsumability of ACT UP’s appearance in AIDS demo graphics — as simultaneous appropriations of “commercials” and “news” — overpowers the manifest radicality of the whole project.[9]

Of course, one could answer these charges with the objection that AIDS demo graphics is not an academic work, and that everything is a matter of generic suitability. After all, Crimp himself believes that “my arguments [in AIDS demo graphics] don’t come from the experience of an art critic but from the experience of a member of ACT UP who was sort of participating around that work” (Crimp & Hoh 1995). But the defensive use of such a distinction is fundamentally flawed. Besides presenting a particular kind of accessibility as the only alternative to academic language, such disavowals belie the unavoidable spectre that haunts AIDS demo graphics: that of the museum itself. Crimp and Rolston’s presentation of ACT UP graphics creates a particular, sanctifying aura that exceeds their status as mass-produced tools; it is the aura of “the work”. Each piece of propaganda is accorded a space to be reproduced flat on a single page, without ambience, with a framing of white space and all the norms of art-historical labelling in the opposite margin: the name of the work, the artist or design group, the medium and its dimensions. Such a structuring is not simply a matter of course; it is striking. There is an exaggerated feeling of “exhibition”.

Given that some of Douglas Crimp’s most powerful academic work deals with the museum’s abstracting, idealising and homogenising mission, the prominent trace of the art institution in AIDS demo graphics is noteworthy. If the Jonesian “equivalence” of activist art and the museum is ridiculously idealistic, we must grasp the situation by first acknowledging that Crimp and Rolston’s auratising presentation of graphics, within the text’s short-circuiting narrative structure, can indeed produce a kind of essentialising historicism by replacing painterly authoriality with an authoritative activist subjectivity. But examining the other effects of this mode of presentation can demonstrate why AIDS demo graphics is so productive in the first place. In On the Museum’s Ruins (1993), Crimp — writing consciously as an art-historian — performs a Foucauldian archaeology of the museum’s historical project, charting its arbitrary attempts to universalise discontinuous elements into a homogenous stream of artistic development. He then attempts to open up the incongruities that briefly surface when photography enters the institution.

When photography is allowed entrance to the museum as an art among others, the museum’s epistemological coherence collapses. The “world outside” is allowed in, and art’s autonomy is revealed as a fiction, a construction of the museum. (Crimp 1993: 14)

Meanwhile, Crimp and Rolston invoke the museum by focusing on an extra-museum practice — propaganda — that nonetheless has the capacity to “enter the museum”, literally and through the book’s allusive structure.[10] So in AIDS demo graphics, Crimp and Rolston have reproduced the moment of photography’s “museumisation” by creating an “inappropriate/d archive”, whose functions are indeterminate enough for interesting things to happen. AIDS demo graphics is a “failed museum”; its totalisations cannot operate with full efficiency. This “inappropriate” moment allows “appropriation” to happen; the fetishisation of the “works” is never completed, thus serving as a useful focus for the affectual process of seeing, rather than a straight literalisation of museum-logic. In other words, the corrupted aura of the activist “work”, which causes mobility because it has partially decomposed into lubricating slime, serves to excite me, and inspired my formulation of “informatic practices”: the putative systematisation of activist work can provide spaces for techniques of engagement to occur.

Transgressing its own totalising potential, this strategy mirrors the way that ACT UP propaganda works best: as a visual focus for the energies of the movement, channelling actualisable desire. Reducing ACT UP’s appropriation of advertising to a doomed attempt to find an impossible public language of communication, Jones moralises that ACT UP can only preach to the converted. But Crimp and Rolston are not troubled that “[the graphics’] primary audience is the movement itself” (Crimp & Rolston 1990: 20). When it works, the propaganda process sidesteps commodity fetishism and even the facts of its “message”, and becomes useful.

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In AIDS demo graphics, we can discern the precise moment that strategy can begin to escape the embrace or rejection of the concrete. Perhaps it is now too late for ACT UP. In any case, useful “art-historical” approaches must create more of these moments, and for this we must return to the crack…

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Crimp, Douglas (1993) On the Museum’s Ruins, Cambridge: MIT Press

Crimp, Douglas & Eugene Hoh (1995) “Fighting a Cultural War: an interview with Douglas Crimp”, unpublished version [see National AIDS Bulletin 9(4)]

Crimp, Douglas & Adam Rolston (1990) AIDS demo graphics, Seattle: Bay Press

Jones, Matthew (1991) “ACT UP or DO NOTHING?”, Agenda 16

Phillips, David (1992) “Rhetorical Silence”, Eyeline 19

Spivak, Gayatri (1988) “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, in Lawrence Grossberg & Cary Nelson (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, Chicago: University of Illinois Press

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[1] This need — for a critical methodology to deal with what always persists in the absence or presence of literal theorising — makes it clear that all other (art-historical) texts share a basic, if not so obvious, need for such interrogation. Explication and assessment have never been adequate. This may be obvious in the case of “literature”, but techniques of reading must also be applied to “theory”.

[2] It was no coincidence that in the following year, I joined SICH (Student Initiatives in Community Health), a group committed to a radically social understanding of health issues, especially the AIDS epidemic. And when SICH was shut down by the Federal Government for producing “treasonable and offensive” material, I found myself in the streets with ACTUP-style placards, condemning the Government’s repressive approach to sex and health, and encouraging people to DANCE PROUD / FUCK SAFE / MAKE REVOLUTION.

[3] In a disturbingly earnest return to the Cartesian cogito (which is “stolen back”, as it were, from Barbara Kruger’s I shop therefore I am), Rolston unproblematically cements and privileges a very particular activist and gay identity. It also proudly accepts a dependence of action and identity on “mandatory” processes of subjectification enacted by the mainstream “gay community” as an acceptable market under the flexibilities of late capitalism. Indeed, the only irony expressed in Rolston’s image is the “subversive” replacement of the universal subject with a (universal) gay (activist) subject. Kruger’s anxiety about the dependent universalisation of consumer subjectivity conveniently disappears.

[4] This recalls the mainstream gay and lesbian lobby’s desperate attempts to distance itself from “paedophilia”, whose construction is a canonical part of homophobic discourse. Jones’ observation is particularly pertinent at a time when a Royal Commission about police corruption can use “paedophilia” as the central link of a wildly arbitrary signifying chain that invokes the most intensely reactionary anxieties of contemporary Western civilisation.

[5] This dilemma is knowingly performed by Jones’ use of “chicken”, which (although relatively subversive in comparison to Rolston’s reactive reversal of the ontology of the closet) still remains spectacularly obscure in its moment of “advertising” its marginal sexuality. Its desire can also only be for a commodity.

[6] Because I am a designer, I find that typography provides a superficial but telling arena in which this loss of strategy can be performed. The most common font used in ACT UP placards and posters is Futura Condensed Extrabold. It is also used for the headings and the titling for AIDS demo graphics. A Bauhaus font designed to evoke geometric certainty and maximum solidity, Futura Condensed Extrabold has widely been considered perfect for typesetting stark, absolutist slogans, and was an advertising design cliche of the 1980s (even leading to the formation of a mock-serious League for the Elimination of Futura Condensed Extrabold; appropriately, one of the few effective visual identities that still uses Futura Condensed Extrabold is ABSOLUT VODKA). For ACT UP in the late 1980s, the popularity and readability of this weight of Futura made it noticeable, but this was not “natural”; all of these functions, especially readability, are fairly arbitrary. Indeed: like all signification, every time a font is used (or designed), a strategic and contextual appropriation occurs, whether it is acknowledged or not. But even in this time of fast-and-loose typography, the staying-power of modernist design discourse makes it easy to essentialise a font’s aesthetic function, and I get the impression that ACT UP’s almost exclusive use of Futura Condensed Extrabold — just as it was losing popular favour — increasingly lost its contextuality, leading to the creation of a corporate visual identity, and enacting a fundamentalist relation to its message: an ABSOLUTist font for an ABSOLUTist slogan.

[7] The dangers that lie in the declarative politics of identity are perhaps better handled by another visual artist, Glenn Ligon, who uses strategies similar to those of Jones, but towards a more ambivalent (and less sarcastic) effect. In his New Work (1996) exhibition, Ligon manipulates media photographs of the Nation of Islam’s Million Man March, degrading the quality of the images through repeated reproductions, so that the slogans on the banners disappear. The difference is the feeling of a situated dilemma.

[8] Indeed, positivistic solutions to such historiographical problems serve to utterly whitewash the politics of the situation. For instance, it is ironic that in “the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics”, the soviets themselves were marginalised; but a call for the Stalinism to “correct” itself would have missed the point, because such marginalisation was a qualitative part of a regime, and not a simple “absence” that could have been easily rectified. So to truly work for the reinstatement of soviet democracy, of “how-to” information in AIDS demo graphics, or of “historical truth”, one must become a revolutionary, not a reformist. To paraphrase Marx: previous historical concerns with “the truth” have only succeeded in refining positivism; the point, however, is to smash it.

[9] This is not a moral problem; while the existence of all kinds of resistance in commercial popular culture is undeniable and vital, the crystallisation of a programmatic political statement in a language that exists precisely to sell commodities does open up some easily-enacted problems, which may not be insurmountable (depending on the quality of their context, which is always arguable), but which are definitely dangerous. For instance, Jones sees ACT UP Melbourne as “lazily aping the U.S. counterpart” because its off-the-shelf image creates eager market for more of the same (Jones 1991: 3); meanwhile, the interchangeability of ACT UP’s visuality with that of the fashionably transgressive and apolitically provocative United Colours of Benetton begs many questions — witness their recent joint project to cover the Eiffel Tower in a giant condom, which is particularly ironic, given Crimp and Rolston’s differentiation of ACT UP from Benetton [Crimp & Rolston 1990: 18-19]. Again, the material situation has changed: late capitalism can incorporate transgression.

[10] The presence of activist art in museums cannot be reduced to mere co-option. This extends beyond the invaluable genesis of ACT UP’s Gran Fury propaganda group in the creation of an exhibition piece. If ACT UP propaganda existed solely on the streets, a condescending (or de facto liberal) logic of “appropriateness” could easily ghettoise any approach to popular culture, therefore leaving “the arts” intact and free from interrogation. We must keep in mind, though, that such a crossover into the art museum cannot be regarded in any way as a kind of “heroic transgression” or daring (— how daring is it to hang in a gallery?); it is merely a useful indicator.