A 1991 nude self-portrait features Baldiga’s frankly enormous cock, either on its way up to or down from full arousal. This was not a portrayal of someone living with AIDS as a victim or as a defiant political fighter, but instead as something potentially even more radical: a sexual subject, facing the viewer’s gaze head-on, making eye contact.
When he had a Kaposi’s Sarcoma lesion removed from his skin, he encased it in resin and created a fabulous, pink, glittery shrine to display it. His diaries – which have been curated online by Aron Neubert – speak to the lust for life that characterised his entire period of illness and artistic output. “what could be more beautiful than dying from a love of men”, he wrote in 1993. “the main thing is you’re happy about it.” This somehow romantic ideal of physical love and death did not preclude rage at state inaction. “aids conference in berlin”, he once wrote in his diaries. “the people die / the dogs bark.” Always, Baldiga was focused on the physical realities of death and sex, on the body and its fluids, which could bear the virus that was killing him. “the sheet of lost innocence”, he wrote, describing an art project he later realised for a 1992 exhibition. “materials: hospital bedsheet/ sperm/ sweat/ mucus/ urine/ vomit/ poppers/ crisco/ southern comfort.” A photograph taken in 1991 called “after sex” shows his sweaty face and the stains on the sheets on the bed behind and under him, emphasising the physical nature of the act.
As the 1990s wore on, Baldiga’s diaries display more and more fear and tiredness. “gather strength again / and then try / to have fun again. / nothing but a fulfilment of duty”, he wrote in 1992. His photographic practice and the joy he took in it helped keep him going; he photographed until the end and continued, until the end, contrasting shoots that featured his own body, ever thinner and more fragile but always with the same throbbing, intense eyes, and the bodies of friends and lovers who were sometimes ill, sometimes the picture of health. “death is waiting”, he wrote in 1993. “the cells are filled with hiv. tomorrow berta will be photographed.” In the last year of his life, he became more focused on his relationship with a man named Ulf, whom he repeatedly, in his diaries, cursed having met as he was losing power. “Nailed down to the bed and the infusion stand / and the most beautiful and coolest man / that i know at the moment, lies next to me. / must take photos of him again / maybe i should only photograph him.” At least Baldiga was able to derive some sensual pleasure from pain medications and morphine; he would often enjoy the high and ask for more than he strictly needed; although at least once he took too much: “3x dipi 4x dolantine / is toο much honey.”
Baldiga decided to die at the beginning of December 1993. After nine years of living with HIV and four with AIDS, he was thin and gaunt and did not want to suffer any more. He collected a vast array of different pills and, after taking them, was sung to sleep by Ulf, who watched him continue to gasp for breath and hoped he wouldn’t somehow survive. He didn’t, and his death was announced with a postcard bearing a self-portrait Baldiga had chosen for the occasion: a 1992 image of the artist in his home, in a white T-shirt, his cheeks sunken and eyes faintly bulging, a large hoop earring in his left ear, and a red clown nose tied around his face. At the bottom, white text read: “I am dead. Jürgen Baldiga, . December, 1993.” Baldiga went out on his own terms, and those terms were those of the clown, the satirist. This was, after all, as Micha Schulze has written, the man “who accompanied his morphine injection in the hospital with a blowjob, an ice cream sundae, and a joint. Who wanted Liz Taylor perfume to be sprayed at his funeral. Who had his headstone posed as a cover model. And who wore a clown nose in his prepared obituary.”
