When Acting Up Meant Arting Up

via NYTimes
By Martha Schwendener

The American art world has never gotten over its first love, Europe. And so, when the Occupy movement heated up last year, many art types reached instinctively for European theory and precedents. But in recent decades examples of direct action and a sustained movement made of small affinity groups have flourished in New York. An exhibition devoted to one such group, Gran Fury, is on view at New York University. 

Gran Fury existed as a collective with a core of around 10 members from the end of 1989 until the mid-’90s. It grew out of Act Up (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), which formed in 1987. The group’s name is also suitably local, taken from the Plymouth Gran Fury, which was used as a squad car by the New York City police in the 1980s. 

The political climate of that period informs the entire show. This was an era before “cozy prime-time homosexuals,” as the group says in its catalog introduction. Ronald Reagan, elected in 1980, did not mention AIDS publicly until 1987, and Gran Fury’s work often took aim at conservative politicians and religious leaders who opposed gay rights. To grasp the cheerful assurance with which one could be homophobic in the ’80s, just gaze upon a Gran Fury poster with a photograph of a smiling girl wearing a T-shirt that says, “Thank God for AIDS.” 

New York as an aesthetic landscape is also important. The catalog notes that downtown Manhattan in the ’80s was “plastered with graffiti, posters and stickers: a vital, free-for-all public forum,” and Gran Fury’s output fits in with that. They were artists using the language of advertising, and there are almost no “original” works here, save a couple of billboard panels like “The Pope and the Penis,” which was exhibited in the 1990 Venice Biennale. The display also includes photographs showing what happens when agitprop is circulated in the public realm: There’s playful graffiti, but also angry defacement.

Some of Gran Fury’s successes included “Kissing Doesn’t Kill” (1990), a series of posters displayed on buses and television service announcements that defied contemporary claims that AIDS could be spread by kissing. “Read My Lips” appropriated George H. W. Bush’s famous line from the 1988 Republican National Convention, turning it into a homoerotic provocation. A subway poster featuring a businessman’s handshake questioned the slow response to AIDS by the government and drug companies: “Is this medical apartheid?” 

Didactic displays track media coverage and identify celebrity victims and saints: Rock Hudson and Liberace, who died from the disease; Magic Johnson, an early public figure to disclose his H.I.V.-positive status; Elizabeth Taylor, a vocal AIDS activist; and Diana, Princess of Wales, the first major celebrity to be photographed shaking the hand of an H.I.V.-infected patient. 

Fake American currency is strewn over the floors of the gallery, paying homage to an action in which Gran Fury members threw garbage bags of fake money printed with messages onto the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange. A wall of F.B.I. and C.I.A. documents obtained from the government tracks AIDS activism from the government’s perspective, describing ACT UP activists chaining themselves to pews in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, setting off colored smoke bombs at the National Institutes of Health and protesting a curfew in Tompkins Square Park. 

The exhibition offers a flurry of images in which the haircuts and clothes are dated but the sentiments are not. For anyone following the Occupy movement, the overlap is uncanny. A wall text with the words “We Demand!” dovetails with recent discussions about protest and purpose. Similarly, race, class and gender quickly became an issue in both movements. In the catalog, members describe how ACT UP was initially composed of middle-class white gay men who “weren’t accustomed to being victimized by society in this new and deadly way.” Gran Fury subsequently tailored its output to include campaigns like “Women Don’t Get AIDS” from 1991 (the punch line: “they only die from it”) and materials addressing the devastation of AIDS among minorities. 

An errata card inserted into the catalog makes the connection even more explicit. It says that the introduction was written in May 2011 — not October 2011, as printed. Hence, the text, which ponders the lack of activism in the current moment, was written “before the Occupy Wall Street movement,” adding, “What a difference a few months can make.” 

The exhibition also raises important points about activism and art itself, however. A poster installed over the desk at the entrance, originally printed in The Village Voice in 1988, says: “Art Is Not Enough. Seize Power Through Direct Action.” But what was art in the ’80s? Preliminary histories focused on media like painting, which was buoyed by a growing art market. That “vital, free-for-all” urban landscape, though, provided an impetus for a different kind of art that had a powerful impact, well beyond the market. 

And here, perhaps, is a lesson for contemporary activists. Corporate capitalism has sparked a movement that spilled into the streets and squares of cities around the world. But we’re still waiting to see how art will respond.

Gran Fury: Read My Lips” runs through March 17 at 80WSE, New York University, 80 Washington Square East, Greenwich Village; (212) 998-5747, steinhardt.nyu.edu/80wse.

Top Image: Gran Fury: Read My Lips "Welcome to America," left, a billboard sponsored by the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1989, is in this show about the art collective Gran Fury, at New York University's 80WSE gallery. (The Keith Haring sign is not related.)