Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Donald Moffett like their art directly linked to the real world. Both are members of local collectives: Gonzalez-Torres belongs to Group Material and Moffett to Gran Fury, whose Let the Record Show, the groundbreaking art assault on the Reagan administration's AIDS policy, occupied the New Museum's Broadway window in late 1987.

This time it's Gonzalez-Torres who's taken to the streets. His billboard on Sheridan Square commemorates next month's 20th anniversary of the Stonewall rebellion only a few hundred yards from where a bevy of drag queens Just Said No to police harassment and triggered gay liberation. Two lines of white text along the bottom of the black billboard read: "People With AIDS Coalition 1985 Harvey Milk 1977 March on Washington 1987 Stonewall Rebellion 1969."

This activist reading of gay history contrasts symbols of state oppression with milestones of community achievement, bracketed by Oscar Wilde's decision to stand trial in London for sodomy and the 1987 gay and lesbian march on Washington. Even events as dispiriting as the Supreme Court's 1986 antisodomy decision catalyzed responses like the 1987 march, among the largest civil rights demonstrations ever.

Gonzalez-Torres calls his Public Art Fund-sponsored work "a monument for a community that has been historically invisible." The work's strength and accessibility derive not only from its thoughtful text but also from its economical design. The words on the 18-by-40-foot billboard are too small to be read while motoring down Seventh Avenue. You need to invest a little time to experience it but probably less than is demanded by the average Renaissance painting. With its fragmentary, nonchronological text and expanse of blank space, Gonzalez-Torres' billboard invites viewers to project images or additional events onto it--in effect to write their own histories.

You may recall the monument to gay liberation created by sculptor George Segal and intended for a site in Christopher Park. A bronze, figurative work depicting a gay and a lesbian couple, its installation was recommended by Community Board 2 in 1980 but stalled by Parks Department inertia. Its traditional format and "we're all just folks here in the Village" message make it already seem an object of wistful nostalgia. Gonzalez-Torres' hit-and-run, media-advertising approach is just what we need right now. Its content-rich, dematerialized form (not so different from the humble materials of the NAMES Project Quilt) yields more complex responses than heavy-metal statues are likely to. Its regrettable impermanence is essential to its billboard nature.

Socially engaged art seems to be everywhere these days--except in the current, arid Whitney Biennial. It's difficult to stroll around Soho without encountering Keith Haring's wonderful agitprop posters for ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), the Guerrilla Girls' savvy indictment of the art world for being less responsive to women than are bus companies (49.2 percent of bus drivers are women vs. only 16 percent of artists represented by 33 major galleries), or the Dia foundation's spring-long series of exhibitions on the theme of homelessness. Such work may seem shocking to viewers attuned primarily to decorative paintings, but the time-honored tradition of picturing incendiary contemporary events is as old as the French Revolution. Consider the virtuoso output of David, Goya, or Picasso--whose Guernica of 1937 may be only slightly more famous than his remark that "art is not for decorating living rooms; it is an instrument of war."

Like gay liberation, Gonzalez-Torres' media-derived brand of postmodernism is rooted in developments of about 20 years ago. Its seeds were planted by language-oriented conceptual artists of the late '60s who explored ideas of what constitutes proper artistic subject matter and form, and it blossomed in the hands of a recent wave of feminist artists like Jenny Holzer, Richard Prince, and Barbara Kruger. They took the work-image amalgams of advertising, media, and entertainment techniques and subverted them by questioning what was being sold and who was doing the selling. Call Donald Moffett a third-generation feminist upstart; I've been describing him to friends as a gay Barbara Kruger.

His first solo show, "Homo Art: I Love It When You Call Me Names," consists of "cibatransparencies," or light boxes that are sophisticated cousins of the illuminated ads on bus shelters. Moffett's imagery is appropriated from porno tapes he photographs off the video screen. We see heads thrown back in ecstasy, a female breast with nipple erect, a penis being rubbed--all in grainy video detail. The fragmentary body parts and a lurid palette of brilliant electronic blues and reds lend a sense of media-age abstraction to this overheated imagery.

On top of these images Moffett has superimposed texts of various length that speak about desire in the age of AIDS. He takes the feminist view that the personal is political as his point of departure. His poetic voice ranges from the yearning romanticism of "touch me so you teach me," superimposed on a highly abstracted image of a hand and a (male) nipple, to a more clearly homoerotic image of a torso and hand coupled with a manifesto that reads "touch my homo-senses/melt my homo fears/ allay my homo sorrow/fortify my homo rage." The variety of type-faces Moffett deploys attests to his experience as a graphic designer. (Barbara Kruger worked in CondÈ Nast's art department.) The resemblance of some of the actors he's photographed to Calvin Klein models can be attributed to the homoerotic sensibility of the Zeitgeist.

What's most impressive about these gorgeous and gutsy objects is their emotional range. Like photojournalistic images, the texts are the keys to their meanings. Despite a clinker or two, Moffett's halting lyricism and raunchy imagery make for a potent blend and a wry reflection of human, psychic complexity. The injunction that "I am the judge and jury here," printed over an abstracted image of intercourse, aroused my ire about governmental invasions of privacy. A moment later, I melted at the sight of a diptych of identical heads ý la John Giorno in Andy Warhol's Blowjob, with a text that reads "safe journey/to some safe place." Will sex ever seem uncomplicated again?

Despite the images of mostly gay sex, Moffett's work by no means excludes its nongay audience--the current sex-phobic climate is everyone's problem. His antihomophobic anger is brilliantly manifested in an image of a man and his shadowy sex partner linked pictorially with the demand to "check out the violence of your opinion." Taking responsibility for one's actions and feelings--once known as citizenship--is the point of this body of work. It's not sex that equals death, Moffett observes, it's silence.