**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.
