Group Material talks to Dan Cameron - '80s Then - Interview

ArtForum, April, 2003

DAN CAMERON: In the late '70s, wasn't there a sense that object making as a form of art production had sort of run its course? Was there a new way of being involved in culture that was somehow summed up for you by the music scene?

JULIE AULT: Well, I wouldn't say object making had run its course. But the definitions of art and being an artist were in question in a very productive and stimulating way. I arrived in New York in 1976 from Maine, and as a teenager got to experience punk, and a bit later rap. The music scene downtown really transformed art culture, and the DIY atmosphere across a number of fields encouraged many of us to create rather than simply consume culture. The East Village, specifically, represented a very exciting mix. It was an example in recent history of how art was not isolated. Also, the larger question of cultural access influenced our desire to develop a collaborative experimental practice. Group Material's original members included Patrick Brennan, Beth Jaker, Mundy McLaughlin, Marybeth Nelson, Tim Rollins, Peter Szypula, and myself. When we had our storefront, from 1980 to 81 on East Thirteenth Street, we were also looking at Fashion Moda, Colab, and PAD/D. Fun Gallery began around the same time on East Elev enth. We were vitalized by what was going on. At the same time, I think we kept our distance a bit because we wanted to stress politics as central to our endeavor.

DC: Tell us a bit about some of the early projects.

JA: At the storefront we organized thematic exhibitions around topical social realities. Our backgrounds and interests ranged from feminist and Marxist theory to design and popular culture, so we put together exhibitions like "It's a Gender Show," "Consumption: Metaphor, Pastime, Necessity," and "The People's Choice (Arroz con Mango)," which was a collection of everyday objects (wedding photos, dolls, even a cigarette-pack collage) gathered from people living on the block. These shows led to the Group's practice of bringing art, artifacts, documentary material, and storebought objects together within exhibitions, to try to displace the boundaries between "high" and "low" culture. For Americana at the 1985 Whitney Biennial, we installed actual loaves of Wonder bread alongside artworks by Peter Nagy and Leon Golub.

DC: Can you talk more about your motivations to create work with social content?

DOUG ASHFORD: A critical history existed before we came along, and many of us were interested in it. The Artists Meeting for Cultural Change, Womanhouse in LA, the Guerilla Art Action Group, and the work of artists like Conrad Atkinson and Hans Haacke were models. The 60s and '70s, in which we all grew up, were, as times of both tremendous social upheaval and aesthetic innovation, a major stepping-off point. I remember as a kid every night we would watch on the news the number of American casualties mount in Vietnam. The corrupt global-historical position of the US, the degree to which economic policy had created a new class of disenfranchised people, and the degree to which racism was endemic in the culture all provided an obvious ground on which those of us interested in making art had to situate ourselves. JA: When I moved to New York, I didn't have that kind of background, connecting art to what's on the news. Some in the original group were critically conscious. But I was clueless. I really got my educat ion about social and aesthetic practices just by being in New York, and by being part of the Group. DA: We learned from New York, we learned from each other.

JA: The kind of collaboration that characterized Group Material over the years-both internally and in public--was emblematic of democracy. Our collaborative process was a model we wanted to see enacted in the cultural institutions we worked in, as well as across the social landscape. It's extremely important today for artists to see that collaboration is not bound to fail, but is a valuable way of working over time.

DA: The group worked collaboratively internally but also created a context for larger collaborations based on the specificity of site and time. Doing the AIDS Timeline [1989] at the University Art Museum in Berkeley, we directly engaged people and organizations involved in different kinds of cultural practice to help make the work. Many of them-high school kids, public-school teachers, community advocates, AIDS activists--were not publicly understood as artists. In this way, the exhibition turned itself into a work in progress in which the idea of culture, as something that exists in and through dialogue, could be actualized. We were always trying to get the museum to represent a larger, more diverse vision of culture, asking "Who makes it, where is it, how does it get constituted?"

DC: How did the collaborative process work within Group Material itself?

DA: We tried to have everybody do everything. Just because someone had written before, he or she was not assigned to specialize in press releases. We wrote press releases together. We hung shows together. We did talks and presentations together. And the struggle and generosity of learning from one another in friendship, which was in essence the process of the group, reflected a larger idea of inclusion, of democratic space. But let's remember that democracy is complex, and inclusion alone is not always adequate.