Doug ashford / Group material 2001

Group Material was a New York-based art collective that existed from 1979 to 1997. Its amorphous line-up included, at various times, Tim Rollins, Julie Ault, Mundy McLaughlin, Felix Gonzales-Torres, and Karen Ramspacher, among others. Group Material’s work was primarily curatorial: they sought to reassess the idea of the exhibition and to give equal importance to traditional art forms, alternative art practices, and everyday objects like household appliances and advertisements. Their overtly socio-political shows were unmistakable challenges to the curatorial process exercised by museums and galleries. In content and theme, Group Material’s exhibitions were radical reactions to the cultural climate of the day, responding to the repression of artistic free speech during the Reagan era, the rising AIDS crisis, and the ongoing cipher of consumerism.

Doug Ashford was a core member of Group Material, working in the collective from 1982 until 1996. He was a part of Group Material’s most impactful work, such as the AIDS Timelines, a series of exhibitions that managed to relate almost every aspect of popular culture to the AIDS epidemic. Today Doug is a teacher, dividing his time between Vermont College, St. Anne’s School in Brooklyn, and Cooper Union.

Jesse: What were the early Group Material shows like?

Doug: Before I was a member, they had a space on 13th Street between 2nd and 1st Avenues, where they paid the rent collectively. This was from ’80 to ’81. At that point, I was still a student at Cooper Union, and I came to all their openings. What they were doing seemed ideal — artists getting together to organize the distribution of their own work, independent of any larger institution. From the very beginning, they were trying to form a new context for what an exhibition could be. The idea was to make a show that was more than just a collection of art — it could include music or television, and there might even be ancillary events. The exhibitions were meant to be part of a larger social experience, rather than something that only entertained the art world. And the founders of Group Material were emphatic about involving that actual 13th Street neighborhood.

Jesse: How did they go about doing that?

Doug: They did a project called People’s Choice, where they went up and down the block and literally knocked on every door. They asked each household to lend them an object that was valuable. The exhibit was made up of all the things they collected.

Jesse: So people actually gave them personal items?

Doug: People gave incredible things, like their wedding photos. The members of Group Material contributed things too — Tim lent his favorite Sotsass garbage can. It was like alternative anthropology, totally antithetical to the idea of an “expert” entering an area and saying, “What can I bring back to the metropolis to represent these people?”

Jesse: How do you see community-oriented art now?

Doug: A lot of the ideas that we were interested in then are being used now in a reverse manner. Nowadays, community-based art projects are used to increase real estate speculation in a lot of mid-level cities — often in the name of revitalizing a downtown area. Artists will be air-dropped into a neighborhood that’s “culturally deprived” — often not acknowledging the cultural forms that already exist there — to produce a collaboration with so-called disenfranchised people. A lot of this work ends up being nightmarish.

Jesse: How did you go from being a fan to a member of Group Material?

Doug: At the end of that first year, some of the original members were leaving to concentrate on their own careers. So Tim, Julie, and Mundy asked me to join. The first exhibition that I was a part of was called Primer. It was about how cultural studies could influence exhibitions. We turned Artist’s Space, which was on Hudson Street at the time, into a kind of dictionary. We wrote words around the base of the walls, and then created seemingly arbitrary correspondences between the words and a collection of objects.

Jesse: What were some of the words?

Doug: Things like “sport,” or “girl.” And on the wall, there would be a drawing by Margaret Harrison, next to a photograph of Che Guevara, next to a poster of The Clash, then a painting by a neighbor of mine in Brooklyn. The viewer could see the list of words and juxtapositions as something that was clearly manufactured. Then one hopefully might go on to think about exhibitions, and even the organization of culture overall, as things that are manufactured.

Jesse: What year was Primer?

Doug: It was 1983. We’d left the space on 13th Street by then. In 1984 we worked as part of a larger project called Artist’s Call Against U.S. Intervention in Central America, which was a huge national effort led by artists who felt affected by the cultural displacement that was going on in Central America. At that time, New York was full of people who were driven from El Salvador and the rest of Central America. This town was crawling with poets and writers, because to be an intellectual in those countries was to be shot at. Artist’s Call raised thousands of dollars that were sent to local organizations in the Southern Hemisphere.

Jesse: To a much less extreme level, there was artistic repression going on in America then too.

Doug: The idea of a war about cultural values has become so confused today, but it was very clear in the ’80s. It’s no longer understood that someone like Jesse Helms could create a political and economic crisis for people who adhered to a certain description of “self.” Not fitting into compulsory heterosexuality, for instance, or leading a lifestyle that wasn’t rationally productive — those things were considered almost criminal.

Jesse: What was your next big project?

Doug: The 1985 Whitney Biennial. The curator, Lisa Phillips, asked if we were interested in participating. It was quite an interesting and risky thing for her to invite us — Group Material was not a part of that high-art world. We saw the Biennial as not much more than a trade show.

Jesse: So how did you approach it?

Doug: We thought about how strange it is to have a museum devoted to a national cultural identity, as the Whitney is. I mean, a museum of American art seems like a pretty bizarre proposal. So we decided to turn a room in the lobby into a battleground for American cultural values. We collected works by people we knew, art world people, and we also gathered works from people who had never been seriously shown in an American museum before, like Leroy Nieman. He’s the guy who did paintings of the athletes on network TV during the ’76 Olympics. The camera would just cut to him painting once in a while throughout the games. It was amazing!

Jesse: What did the room actually look like?

Doug: The idea was to turn the whole space into a representation of the everyday cultural choices that people make. We put a variety of shelf-lining papers on the walls. One section was fake wood paneling, and another section was a pattern of blue and white rectangles. Then we filled the room with appliances — right in the middle was a washer and dryer set. We wanted to imply that curators make choices between, say, an Eric Fischl or a Phillip Taaffe painting in the same way that we all make decisions about whether to buy a yellow stove or a white stove. Those everyday aesthetic decisions are part of a larger cultural matrix, and thinking about consumption differently is as important as thinking about production differently.

Jesse: The scale of that show sounds a little overwhelming.

Doug: We wanted to do something that would provide an overall experience. We’d have a painting, a piece of photojournalism, and an object from a department store — and the value of each would be something that the viewers had to work out for themselves.

Jesse: Felix Gonzales-Torres was a member of Group Material. How did he get involved?

Doug: Felix was living in New York, so we sort of knew him from around. He joined in 1988, right after he got out of graduate school.

Jesse: What were some of the projects after Felix joined?

Doug: The AIDS Timelines stand out. We did one at the University of California at Berkeley, one in Hartford, Connecticut, and another at the 1991 Whitney Biennial. A timeline is the most logical way of displaying history, but we interrupted that rational progression with artworks and cultural artifacts. We layered different understandings of history upon each other, so the viewers could then compare their own memories to the Timeline. We did a year-and-a-half of research in preparation for that project, but not just about things that were explicitly related to AIDS. We also looked for phenomena that we felt related indirectly. So on the wall next to the first cover of Time that addressed the AIDS crisis, you’d find a blurb about the invention of New Coke, which happened at roughly the same time.

Jesse: I remember the New Coke scandal. There was a big movement to bring back the old Coke.

Doug: Someone could say, “New Coke has nothing to do with the onset of the AIDS crisis.” But I think that the seemingly ephemeral cultural events that surround our experiences are often the ones that condition them the most.

Jesse: How did you connect New Coke and the AIDS crisis?

Doug: It was a way of saying, “Look what collective action has become.” The spontaneous changes that groups of people can sponsor are reduced either to the marketplace or to the idea of charity. If the largest grass roots campaign of the 1980s was to bring back Coke Classic, what does that mean about collective action on a larger level?

Jesse: It’s pretty scary. What else was displayed in that exhibition?

Doug: There was a quote describing how much money the Reagan Administration was spending on the B-2 Bomber in relation to how much money it was giving to the Center for Disease Control to combat the AIDS virus. The entire exhibition was an indictment of the medical-industrial complex, the government, and the media. Those institutions turned what would have been an “epidemic” into a “crisis.”

Jesse: Was it hard for people to situate Group Material since you straddled the line between activism and art?

Doug: People often mistake Group Material as having been a purely political practice. You could look at something like AIDS Timeline and say, “That was a response to the government’s involvement in thousands of deaths.” And that’s true. But on the other hand, it was also an artistic project. When someone saw AIDS Timeline, I would hope that they experienced the same feeling that they might have in front of a painting. Unfortunately, today’s understanding of Group Material is that it was all very instrumentalized.

Jesse: People remember Group Material for its political agendas.

Doug: But for us, as artists, social forms and aesthetic forms were interdependent.

Jesse: What’s your take on how the New York art world has changed since the ’80s?

Doug: These days, art has more of a dependence on either political functions — “this work has to create a certain kind of message that people can understand” — or on the market. The younger artists I’m in contact with seem stymied by that situation.

Jesse: Have you noticed a change in the art audience?

Doug: I think that the way people relate to exhibitions has changed dramatically. People go to museums now expecting a certain level of entertainment, and that’s a fundamental shift from the past. In the modernist tradition, the museum was a kind of ideal spiritual space, supposedly totally neutral in terms of ideology.

Jesse: And Group Material saw that as a space where social discourse could take place.

Doug: Yes, but all the way back to Courbet there’s been an understanding that putting a painting in a space creates a kind of social moment. The idea of a museum being able to affect the way that people think about themselves has always been discussed. It just wasn’t put into practice.

Jesse: Right.

Doug: That idea wasn’t necessarily fodder for artistic production in other times, but it was for Group Material. I mean, do we have to defer responsibility to institutions? Why can’t we be our own connoisseurs?