Show & Tell: A Chronicle of Group Material - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0956192815 ISBN 13: 9780956192813

Publisher: Four Corners Books, 2010

Synopsis

In 1979, the artist collective Group Material opened a storefront at East 13th Street on New York's Lower East Side, from which they launched exhibitions―45 in all―that radically overhauled curatorial thought, setting art alongside artifacts, documentary material and storebought objects, within exhibitions that were oriented around topical social concerns. Group Material's original members―Julie Ault, Patrick Brennan, Beth Jaker, Mundy McLaughlin, Marybeth Nelson, Tim Rollins and Peter Szypula―came from backgrounds in feminism, Marxist theory, design and popular culture, and curated classic exhibits reflecting this eclecticism, such as It's a Gender Show, AIDS Timeline and The People's Choice―a collection of everyday objects (wedding photos, dolls, even a cigarette-pack collage) gathered from people living on their block. Show & Tell is the first monograph on Group Material, and charts the group's activities, with essays by original members, plus original documents, photographs, drawings, correspondence and interviews.

About this title

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

"Here, in the heart of the up 'n' coming East Village, artists five years younger than the Colab crowd have opened a space that offers advice about lowering your rent--in Spanish. People from the block donated all the furniture; local children wander in, giggling at the walls. At the opening last month, 400 people gobbled fish fritters cooked by the woman upstairs. It was so successful, as art events go, that Group Material has already earned the enmity of New Wave artists far and wide. 'Real cute,' smirked one. 'Well read,' snarls another.
The members of Group Material return the compliment. 'We don't identify ourselves as New Wave artists,' says Beth Jaker. 'It seems to be a very reflective art,' her colleague Tim Rollins adds, 'a camp critique, the middle class making fun of itself. It's like the warning Walter Benjamin gave about the danger of aestheticizing politics. We're less interested in reflecting than projecting out onto the community.'" Excerpt from "Enter the Anti-Space," Richard Goldstein's November 5, 1980 review in The Village Voice, reproduced in Show & Tell: A Chronicle of Group Material.

Edition details

• Publisher: Four Corners Books
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0956192815
• ISBN 13: 9780956192813
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272
• Editor: Ault Julie