Group Material, Democracy, 1988–89
Group Material, Democracy: Education and Democracy, installation view, 77 Wooster Street, New York City, September 14–October 8, 1988. © Group Material. Photo: Ken Schles
By Kirsten Mairead Gill
Doctoral student in the Department of Art History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and Mellon Curatorial Fellow, Dia Art Foundation
Over a period of four months from 1988–89, the artist collective Group Material transformed Dia’s SoHo spaces into an open forum about the problems and possibilities of democracy in the United States. Identifying education, electoral politics, cultural participation, and the HIV/AIDS epidemic as four critical failures of U.S. democracy, the group organized a roundtable discussion, exhibition, and a public town meeting on each topic. A shifting entity since its formation in 1979, Group Material was at the time composed of members Doug Ashford, Julie Ault, and Félix González-Torres. (Tim Rollins, who had recently left the group to pursue his separate art collective K.O.S., remained involved in the project proposal and participated in the program’s town meetings.)
The first installation, Education and Democracy, sought to destabilize the assumption that education is necessarily a force for good in a democratic society, following Thomas Jefferson’s troubling statements about the need for public education to “improve” the minds of citizens— who otherwise, he implies, are not to be trusted—in a society premised on electoral participation.[1] What, in light of these foundational notions, is the real value of educated citizens to U.S. democracy? Lamenting the inadequacy of the education system in the late-1980s, the exhibition and discussions proposed alternative pedagogical models. Politics and Election contended with the emergence of an increasingly spectacular and image-based electoral politics in the 1988 Bush-Dukakis race, in which personal attacks seemed to supersede the real issues at stake in U.S. society. Cultural Participation explored how engagement with culture is reduced to capitalist consumerism to the detriment of more active forms of participation in its creation and critique. The final exhibition, AIDS and Democracy: A Case Study, highlighted then-contemporary democracy’s particular failure to deal with one of the major crises of the 1980s. Creating a space for participants to find solidarity and mobilization along the affective lines of mourning, rage, and fear, the installation sought to empower the public in the struggle for universal healthcare and government accountability.
Group Material, Democracy: AIDS and Democracy; A Case Study, installation view, 77 Wooster Street, New York City, December 17, 1988–January 14, 1989. © Group Material. Photo: Ken Schles
The format of the project was conceived as a specific intervention into the institutional structure of Dia Art Foundation, known for permanent, single-artist installations and site-specific works. With this goal of realizing ambitious, large-scale projects, however, Dia was complicit in canonizing the “heroic,” white male artist. This is particularly evident in the institution’s stewardship of massive earthworks in the western United States. (“To us,” Group Material wrote, “the Dia Art Foundation signified ‘exclusive,’ ‘white,’ ‘esoteric,’ and ‘male.’”[2]) The artist Yvonne Rainer, who brought forth the idea of inviting Group Material to make Democracy with Dia, points to the institution’s entrenched cultural elitism as a factor in her advocacy for art’s role as a “social force.”[3] In her introduction to the book published as the final note of the Democracy project, Democracy: A Project by Group Material (1990), Rainer explores how Group Material reconnected exhibition-making with the social context of its production, expressing a hope—fulfilled, to a degree—that such participatory, artist- and activist-curated exhibitions would set a precedent for Dia’s future.
Contra Dia’s traditional framework, Democracy evolved through a fast-paced cycle of temporary installations, radically decentering the single-artist model. The ephemeral displays responded to pressing issues with matching urgency. Similarly, the works on view‚ like the concerns addressed, were heterogeneous: works by major artists and lesser-known figures appeared alongside commodities, pop cultural artifacts, and activist and educational materials. The meanings formed in these unexpected, associative constellations of objects depended on a process of appropriation and recontextualization. Seized from their everyday contexts, an object—whether a chalkboard drawing by Joseph Beuys or a bag of chips from the supermarket—is imbued with new associations based on its position within the installation. Group Material’s curatorial method also fundamentally called into question the notion of exhibition-making as the display of objects and the creation of object-relations, instead proposing a model of curatorial knowledge production premised on the conditions of display and the creation of scenarios activated by the historically contingent spectator.
In Politics and Election, for example, a La-Z-Boy recliner was placed in front of a color TV tuned to major network coverage of the ongoing presidential race between Michael Dukakis and George H. W. Bush. There, the viewer enters a specific political-historical context, and is implicated in the “soft power” of the recliner, which symbolized the trappings of middle-class, consumerist domestic viewership. Recliner and TV were subsequently repurposed—and returned to their original commodity form—for Cultural Participation, in which visitors could buy raffle tickets from museum guards that granted them the chance to win the La-Z-Boy, the “name-brand color television,” or a “self-basting turkey.”
Group Material, Democracy: Cultural Participation, installation view, 77 Wooster Street, New York City, November 19–December 10, 1988. © Group Material. Photo: Ken Schles
With Democracy, Group Material effectively bookended the Reagan years. The collective had ushered in the epoch with The Salon of Election ’80, an exhibition and “evening of ridicule, suspense, fear, and hopelessness” on the night Reagan was elected. Eight years after that night of anticipation and dread, Democracy provided a critical analysis of the calamities cultivated during the president’s two terms. However, it would be a mistake to imagine that the faltering democracy diagnosed by Group Material was exclusively linked to a presidency, or even a singular political moment. Rather, the project highlights the fundamental fact of crisis as a constant in a capitalist society.
This is perhaps why, revisiting Democracy over thirty years later, one is struck by how uncannily the project resonates with the current moment: a looming election, a criminally mismanaged pandemic, a devastating presidency (the current one explicitly modeled on the former)—and we still don’t have universal healthcare! Reflecting on the Democracy project now, there is a dizzying and accumulated sense of déjà vu. In the publication that culminated the project, which collects transcripts of all of the roundtables and town meetings, there is a particular moment of fury for the reader when Félix González-Torres notes in the forum on the HIV/AIDS crisis that ours is “the only so-called civilized nation that doesn’t have a national healthcare program.”[4] Although Group Material’s exhibitions, as Ault later wrote, “spoke from and to particular contexts during specific times,”[5] the nature of our historical rut means that the collective’s work is as relevant as ever. Group Material’s collaborative curatorial model, which took democracy as a working method, suggests ways that we might conceive of democracy as a process built and sustained from the ground up, rather than as a system imposed by governing bodies. This model opens up the potential for reimagining the infrastructures and institutions of our everyday lives.
[1] Jefferson continues: “In every government on earth is some trace of human weakness, some germ of corruption and degeneracy, which cunning will discover, and wickedness insensibly open, cultivate and improve. Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are its only safe depositories. And to render even them safe, their minds must be improved to a certain degree.”
[2] Group Material, “On Democracy,” in Democracy: A Project by Group Material, ed. Brian Wallis (Seattle: Bay Press, 1990), p. 1.
[3] Rainer was also behind the following project at Dia by Martha Rosler, If you lived here . . . (1989). See Rainer’s preface to the book published as the culmination of Democracy: “Preface: The Work of Art in the (Imagined) Age of Unalienated Exhibition,” in Democracy: A Project by Group Material, ed. Brian Wallis (Seattle: Bay Press, 1990), xvii-xix.
[4] Félix González-Torres, quoted in “AIDS and Democracy: A Case Study,” roundtable discussion reprinted in Democracy: A Project by Group Material, p. 250.
[5] Julie Ault, “Case Reopened: Group Material,” in Show and Tell: A Chronicle of Group Material (London: Four Corners Books, 2010), p. 212.
