Group Material and the 1980s
Subtitle: A Materialist Postmodernism
Contributors: Lambert-Beatty, Carrie; Buchloh, Benjamin H.D.; Gough, Maria
Published: 2014
Language: eng
Description: 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.
Notes: Keywords: Art and activism, Art collectives, Contemporary art, New York, Postwar art.

Thesis Ph.D. Harvard University 2014