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

DC: Was It intentional that Group Material's membership be open? The numbers never seemed to be precisely fixed.

JA: That might have been a common perception, but in the group it was much more fixed. It was open in the sense that who composed the group changed over time. But of course we were not so interested in promoting individual members or naming ourselves very precisely. In 1985 with, again, Americana at the Whitney, we established that the Group was not necessarily made up of everyone who came in for a project or participated in an exhibition. We identified the core collaborative that conceived and organized the projects: me, Doug, Mundy McLaughlin, and Tim Rollins. Thereafter, we listed who composed

CAMERON/GROUP MATERIAL

Group Material at the time and then credited whoever else was involved on an organizational and conceptual level.

DC: Group Material has really retained enormous vitality as a model. Every collaborative group today is Informed about what you did in some way or feels they should study and incorporate it.

JA: One of the reasons Group Material is a reference point is because it means different things to different people. That ambiguity is worth cultivating. We have nor historicized ourselves or permitted our work to be historicized in one neat package. This way art students, or whoever, hear something about Group Material, start looking into it, yet never get a full picture. There are a lot of entry points into Group Material's practice, which is directly related to that fluidity in the group's process. When Group Material addresses its history, former members of the group who are interested should make it a project using the analytical and representational methods that we used originally.

DA: Contemporary critical writing often designs too limited a trajectory for non-gallery art practices. Group Material was always interested in trying to complicate definitions of both activism and art. It's really good if whoever hears about our work is inspired to redefine their practices according to their own ideas and intentions. The formal weight of political desire, its fluidity, is part of artistic process.

Dan Cameron is senior curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, and is organizing the 8th International Istanbul Biennial.

'80s AGAIN

DOUG AITKEN

I think the most important aspect of the '80s was opposing them. The mainstream level of culture just left so much to be desired that the more interesting art was somehow in opposition to it, but not overtly political. I feel fortunate to have been in New York in 1990, to see the collapse of the high-end, commercial-gallery infrastructure and the surfacing of nomadic sites and experimental shows. I think most of my friends who were making art at that time felt a sense of incredible freedom. We were in our early twenties, and we weren't interested in artistic refinement and packaging at all. Suddenly there was this huge void where people could just surface doing the things that they did.