Research Spotlight: Paul Jones
As a scholar of the nineteenth-century literature of the United States working on a project on the writer Edgar Allan Poe, I never expected that I'd find myself in the archives of a contemporary art gallery in Vancouver. But as I was researching for my book Poe, Queerness, and the End of Time, a project that reread many of Poe's most famous stories through the lens of queerness, I discovered that one of those stories, "The Masque of the Red Death," became a touchstone for writers, visual artists, and performers during the AIDS crisis, starting in the 1980s and continuing into the 21st century. As I accumulated a list of dozens of texts that used Poe's "Masque" to engage in the debates waged around that pandemic and the way its victims and survivors were viewed and treated, I happened upon the grunt gallery's online archive for Masque of the Red Death, its 1991 performance piece and art installation based on Poe's story produced in collaboration with the Public Dreams Society.
For so many performance productions of “Masque” that I'd found announcements for in newspapers from the 1980s and 1990s, the only record I might find is a few sentences of vague description. But here in the grunt gallery web archive, there were photographs and videos, publicity material and newspaper reviews. This was already much more information than I had about other "Masque" projects. When I reached out via email to Glenn Alteen, then program director for grunt, who also served as the curator of Masque in 1991, he informed me that there was an even more substantial archive of photographs, videos, press clippings, and planning notes, among other documents, in its physical archive. That abundance of material was worth making the trip from Ohio to Vancouver. At the gallery, Glenn was incredibly generous in taking time to answer my questions, to jog his memory about an almost thirty-year old project, and to set the stage for understanding the moment of the project's creation and performance.
As I uncovered this phase of the afterlife of Poe's story during this tragic period of history, grunt's Masque of the Red Death stood apart from many of the "Masque"-oriented projects that I had turned up in that it really was the product of a communal effort, rather than the work of a single artist. This large group of artists, actors, singers, dancers, and technicians used Poe's fatalistic story to acknowledge, memorialize, and process the devastating losses from AIDS in Vancouver’s arts community in the late 1980s and early 1990s. As Glenn Alteen conveyed to me, this community was looking for "somewhere to put its grief" at that time. As a scholar of literature, it is so moving to me to see that this community found that "somewhere" in Poe's story, a use that the author himself could never have imagined. I am grateful that this archive gave me a chance to experience a communal grieving process that might otherwise be lost to time.
Paul Christian Jones
Professor of English
Ohio University, Athens, Ohio, USA
"The Cultural and Political Work of Poe's 'The Masque of the Red Death' During the AIDS Era" was published in The Edgar Allan Poe Review, vol. 21, no. 2 in 2020.
Poe, Queerness and the End of Time was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2022 and was awarded the The Patrick F. Quinn Award for outstanding monographs on Poe in 2022.
For so many performance productions of “Masque” that I'd found announcements for in newspapers from the 1980s and 1990s, the only record I might find is a few sentences of vague description. But here in the grunt gallery web archive, there were photographs and videos, publicity material and newspaper reviews. This was already much more information than I had about other "Masque" projects. When I reached out via email to Glenn Alteen, then program director for grunt, who also served as the curator of Masque in 1991, he informed me that there was an even more substantial archive of photographs, videos, press clippings, and planning notes, among other documents, in its physical archive. That abundance of material was worth making the trip from Ohio to Vancouver. At the gallery, Glenn was incredibly generous in taking time to answer my questions, to jog his memory about an almost thirty-year old project, and to set the stage for understanding the moment of the project's creation and performance.
As I uncovered this phase of the afterlife of Poe's story during this tragic period of history, grunt's Masque of the Red Death stood apart from many of the "Masque"-oriented projects that I had turned up in that it really was the product of a communal effort, rather than the work of a single artist. This large group of artists, actors, singers, dancers, and technicians used Poe's fatalistic story to acknowledge, memorialize, and process the devastating losses from AIDS in Vancouver’s arts community in the late 1980s and early 1990s. As Glenn Alteen conveyed to me, this community was looking for "somewhere to put its grief" at that time. As a scholar of literature, it is so moving to me to see that this community found that "somewhere" in Poe's story, a use that the author himself could never have imagined. I am grateful that this archive gave me a chance to experience a communal grieving process that might otherwise be lost to time.
Paul Christian Jones
Professor of English
Ohio University, Athens, Ohio, USA
"The Cultural and Political Work of Poe's 'The Masque of the Red Death' During the AIDS Era" was published in The Edgar Allan Poe Review, vol. 21, no. 2 in 2020.
Poe, Queerness and the End of Time was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2022 and was awarded the The Patrick F. Quinn Award for outstanding monographs on Poe in 2022.
