Cultural Participation by Group Material Between the ontology and the history of the participatory art event

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Notes

¹ Thanks to Doug Ashford, Julie Ault and Karen Ramspacher for speaking with me about Democracy; to Jeanne Dreskin at Dia for access to the archives; and thanks to Niels Niessen for his comments on this essay. For an excellent overview of Group Material's projects, see member Julie Ault's recent edited volume (2010). This research was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

² In their introduction to the project book, Group Material stress this contested state of political participation as the context for their project: ‘Ideally, democracy is a system in which political power rests with the people: all citizens actively participate in the process of self-representation and self-governing, an ongoing discussion in which a multitude of diverse voices converge. But in 1987, after almost two terms of the Reagan presidency and with another election year at hand, it was clear that the state of American democracy was in no way ideal. Access to political power was obstructed in complex ways, participation in politics had degenerated into passive and symbolic involvement, and the current of “official” politics precluded a diversity of viewpoints’ (Wallis 1990: 1).

³ Roberta Smith (1988) insightfully points out this artifactual quality of the objects in Group Material's shows.

⁴ ACT UP, formed in 1987, conducted weekly activist meetings in New York during this period. These meetings provided the basis for direct actions in protest of the lack of government action that effectively created the AIDS crisis. For a history of ACT UP New York's actions, see the Capsule History section of their website.

⁵ Ramspacher would become an official member of Group Material by the end of the project.