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

ArtForum, April, 2003

MM: But in fact the final resting place is not the museum, it's the Public Library.

DC: I meant the museum metaphorically. But yes, let's be clear that the Gran Fury Collection Is in the public domain and available in the Manuscripts and Archives Division of the New York Public Library.

DM: That legacy is an educational resource for another generation. After all, we didn't come our of nowhere. We dragged the history of this kind of art into the '80s and the early '90s. And it will be reinvented again.

Douglas Crimp is Fanny Knapp Allen Professor of Art History at the University of Rochester in New York. (See Contributors.)

RELATED ARTICLE: '80S AGAIN

ROB PRUITT

The subject of "Artworks for Teenage Boys," my late-'80s collaboration with Jack Early, was American male adolescence and our culture's fascination with it. We were a gay couple, and I thought people would pick up on the incongruity of the authors and the subject. That didn't happen. But the piece was sensational, and there was a line around the block at the opening. Of course, the end of the decade was so sped up, it couldn't hold; we were all looking for something new-but also waiting for a collapse. We were the artists the art world deserved. The project burned hot, but its inevitable endgame result was a fiery crash of morality and recession--just like the '80s.

AS TOLD TO MEGHAN DAILEY