Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Art Demonstration: Group Material and the 1980s

Art Demonstration: Group Material and the 1980s

Grace, Claire

Paperback

Series: October Books

Art HistoryGeneral ArtPerformance Art

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 0262543524
ISBN13: 9780262543521
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: May 24 2022
Pages: 432
Weight: 2.10
Height: 0.94 Width: 6.93 Depth: 8.98
Language: English
A study of Group Material, the influential but underexamined New York-based artist collective, investigating a series of key works.

Key predecessor of contemporary art's most radical activist gestures, the 1980s collective Group Material seized upon the temporary exhibition as a prime mode of intervention. Projects sited on walls, subways, and billboards targeted some of the most sensitive political conflicts of the era, from U.S. military interventions in Latin America to the AIDS crisis. In Art Demonstration, Claire Grace examines Group Material's New York-based collaboration across a decade that saw a wave of renewed interest in art as a domain of political mobilization. As Grace argues here, Group Material's art was never just a means to an end; looking itself held urgency.

Grace distinguishes between two types of Group Material projects: room-scale interiors featuring distinctive wall treatments, soundtracks, and boundary-crossing arrangements of objects, and works in spaces usually reserved for advertising. Grace analyzes the group's practice in both categories, examining such well-known projects as AIDS Timeline (1989) and Democracy (1988-1989) and lesser-known works including Subculture (1983) and The Castle (1987). Grace shows that the politics running through Group Material's practice ultimately resides in the artists' particular recourse to the exhibition form. With that bearing, Group Material's work insisted on the material in the face of postmodern theory's privileging of the discursive, and redistributed authorship within protean and pivotally diverse collective structures, testing in so doing the ever fragile contours of democratic participation as art became a commodity for speculative investment.

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