Group Material and the 1980s: A Materialist Postmodernism

• Main Author: Grace, Claire Robbin
• Other Authors: Lambert-Beatty, Carrie
• Language: en_US
• Published: Harvard University 2014
• Subjects: Art history; American studies; Art and activism; Art collectives; Contemporary art; New York; Postwar art
• Online Access: http://dissertations.umi.com/gsas.harvard:11662; http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:12274556

Group Material's seventeen-year collaboration began in New York in 1979 through the artists' shared interests in collective, politicized practices and their immersion in a localized network of countercultural activities. While GM's cadre of participants shifted over time (from the dozen who launched its first year to a smaller core comprising Doug Ashford, Julie Ault, Mundy McLaughlin, Félix González-Torres, and Tim Rollins), its practice developed a consistent aesthetic vocabulary in dialogue with major figures of 1980s art and with an eye to 1960s conceptualism and the Soviet avant-garde. GM threw open the class coordinates of art's public and introduced a distinct set of responses to the central problematics of 1980s art: the debates over representation, appropriation, painting, public space, and activism. === History of Art and Architecture