Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

210 Alan W. Moore
and exhibited it in the 1991 Whitney Biennial. 39 This project, executed as
gallery installations and in published form, is probably their best-known work.
The chronological installations included art, documentary texts, activist
videos, and culls from popular media. Each ensemble was intended to agitate
and spur activism. The artworks included many by HIV-positive artists.
Poignantly, Group Material member Felix Gonzalez-Torres died of the disease
in 1999.
In addition to impassioned and inventive activism, the epidemic
called up an extraordinary work of popular collective mourning—the AIDS
quilt project. Inspired by the sight of a sea of placards carried by memorial
marchers in San Francisco in 1985, the quilt is simply a collation of commemorative
fabric pieces made to remember those who died. The quilt is
spread in public places around the country, an exhibition practice that started
with the National Mall in Washington, D.C., in 1987. Eventually some
44,000 individual remembrances have become part of the largest community
art project in the world.
An incident developed through the 1980s in the realm of institutional
public art commissions that had important consequences for the
practice of public art. A controversy arose over Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc, a
permanent commission for a site in lower Manhattan installed in 1981. After
public protests led to protracted hearings, the work was removed in 1989.
The art community defended Serra for the violation of his rights. Still, the
affair induced reXection. 40 Many came to believe that autonomous avantgarde
art would not work well in many public contexts.
A “new public art” came into its own as went work with methods
rooted in conceptual and performance art by feminists and political
artists received institutional support. Among these, artists like Meirle Laderman
Ukeles and Suzanne Lacy consciously staged the collective as a subject.
This kind of work had been named “social sculpture” by Joseph Beuys during
his U.S. lecture tours (although it could be argued that he made little
of it). Suzanne Lacy began working as a feminist activist doing dramatic
tableaux for demonstrations. She continued working very deliberately within
the realm of the social. 41 Her 1987 work Crystal Quilt was a kind of mass
public conversation in Minneapolis between hundreds of pairs of elderly
women seated tête-à-tête at tables in a plaza.
Collaborations between artists and speciWc communities also include
a project begun in the Heidelberg section of Detroit in 1986. Tyree
Guyton and his grandfather began to paint polka dots on the sidewalks of
this African-American community distressed by abandonment. They afWxed
toys and household goods to empty houses and signposts. Guyton was joined
by others, and his enterprise of decoration became a collective creation. In