Gran Fury talks to Douglas Crimp - '80s Then - collective of AIDS activists - Related article: '80S - "Artworks for Teenage Boys" - Interview

DOUGLAS CRIMP: One of your members, Mark Simpson, is no longer with us. Perhaps we can officially dedicate our remarks here to his memory. When did Mark die?

TOM KALIN: Mark died of AIDS on November 10, 1996.

DC: Okay, let's begin with a work that seems appropriately sad. Ten years ago a few of you in Gran Fury made a poster with four questions, the last of which was, "When was the last time you cried?" Was that the final work done under the auspices of the group?

LORING McALP1N: Well, after that we did the flyer Good Luck... Miss You for "Temporarily Possessed" at the New Museum. That was meant as our farewell.

DC: That was 1995. You did the four questions in 93. Do you remember the other three questions?

AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: "Do you resent people with AIDS? Do you trust HIV-negatives? Have you given up hope for a cure?" The conversation leading to that work was largely driven by Mark Simpson. We were grappling with a problem we had at that later stage-- trying to put very complex things into a very concise text. This work was a response to our frustration at being unable to articulate the complexity of the issues. We decided to just go bare bones and say how we felt, which had never been our primary focus.

TK: I remember that Mark always had a yellow legal pad in his house on which he wrote all sorts of things. And those questions were among the things he wrote. They were about feeling alienated as someone living with AIDS and about feeling less well physically. That, and the fact that the visibility of the crisis and the AIDS activist demonstrations had faded away.

AF: Up to this point, the only emotion we had directly articulated was anger. But it's funny that you should even mention this work, Douglas, because, unlike a lot of the other things we did, there was no response at all to that piece.

LM: Well, we were addressing a different audience. It was really directed toward our own community. We were trying to acknowledge something but not judge it, to ask, "What's happening now? Where did our anger go? What are we going to do?"

TK: In my memory, you all went out with buckets of wheat paste, just like we did in 1988 with AIDS: 1 in 61, the first work we did with the name Gran Fury.

DC: How did Gran Fury come into being as a collective?

MICHAEL NESLINE: It happened by degrees. Bill Olander, the curator at the New Museum, came to an ACT UP meeting with a proposal that ACT UP use the museum s window on Broadway for a visual demonstration. At the end of the meeting, everyone who was interested met in the back corner of the Lesbian and Gay Community Center.

DC: The result was Let the Record Show.... This was 1987. How did such a complex work get formulated by such a large group?

TK: I remember there was a kind of bullet-style accumulation of political points compiled from clippings people brought in from the New York Times. The main idea came from demos where we yelled "shame" at public figures who were doing nothing about AIDS. So we decided we'd single out public figures who had made outrageous statements about AIDS, show a photograph of each of them, and cast their words in concrete. And then these AIDS criminals somehow got connected to the Nuremberg trials. It probably went back to the SILENCE = DEATH poster with the pink triangle.

AF: This is the way ACT UP functioned on every level. People would bring news items to the meetings. They would throw out snippets from articles, and whatever resonated became the issue we'd organize around. It was an organic process, and Gran Fury worked that way for a long time.

DONALD MOFFETT: The form developed in the same collaborative way. The issues unfolded, and the form followed.

MARLENE McCARTY: Absolutely. Someone would say, "I know how to make a photo mural." Somebody else would say, "I have access to an LED."

TK: I remember volunteering to make the photo mural of the Nuremberg trials because I knew how to make murals by ironing paper to canvas with glue. I remember Don Ruddy at another meeting cutting rubber letters with an X-Acto blade to cast the sentences in concrete. The process was additive, like a collage. It just turned out to have a coherent appearance, which made it seem much more planned than it really was.

MN: Well, Mark Simpson actually knew what was going on. He described to me what the window was going to look like before it existed.

MM: Each time we gathered to work on the window, a different constellation of people showed up. It wasn't until later that we decided to form a collective.

LM: When we were disassembling the window, there was a discussion about what to do next.

TK: We had a meeting and said, "Let's continue this." The poster

AIDS: 1 in 61 came out of that meeting. It was then that we took the name Gran Fury, which was the Plymouth model of choice for the New York Police Department. But that group was still larger than the one around this table: It included Don Ruddy, who later died of AIDS; Anthony Viti was involved in that discussion, I'm sure Todd Haynes was involved, Mark Harrington.