After Silence by Avram Finkelstein

Author:Avram Finkelstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520295148
Publisher: University of California Press

If you are researching Gran Fury, its work-product generally hangs together in an agreed-upon chronology, but there are still discrepancies within it. I believe that is owing in part to the fact that before we closed as a collective, the subgroups in Gran Fury often worked independently, and although the larger collective still met and worked collaboratively on projects, it also functioned as a kind of rotating, collaborative agitprop workshop within ACT UP where individuals could develop ongoing partnerships. Perhaps as a result of those loose confederations these works were not always officially signed as Gran Fury’s, even though the collective ultimately claimed them, such as the three bloody hand posters. Others are only sometimes claimed, or were signed by the collective but disowned, or signed for a particular iteration and attributed to individuals at other times. Although one could certainly argue our best work was ahead of us, the period while we were still an open committee was extremely prolific, and many of the collaborations that came out of it became fodder for other projects during the following years. The local bloody hand posters were later nationalized for the FDA action, and several ACT NOW posters became the basis for other Gran Fury projects or individual collaborations, like All People With AIDS Are Innocent, which was included in the Group Material Democracy project, Art Against AIDS On The Road, and became a street banner for a project at Henry Street Settlement, and Men Use Condoms or Beat It, which had multiple lives—as the rejoinder in the ACT NOW poster, a sticker funded by GMHC, a proposed shopping bag for Patricia Fields, and half of our installation at the Venice Biennale. And Read My Lips became the foundation for our first public art commission in America, Kissing Doesn’t Kill.

Several members of Gran Fury already knew Ann Philbin when she approached the collective about producing a work for a series of national public transportation advertisements she was helping assemble for the American Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR), Art Against AIDS On The Road. The project was organized through Livet Reichard, an arts funding adjunct set up by amfAR, which was a hybrid of the earliest community research initiative in New York, the AIDS Medical Foundation, and Elizabeth Taylor’s LA-based National AIDS Research Foundation. AmfAR was considered somewhat problematic within the activist community for being more focused on its celebrity fund-raising machinery than on the research projects it was granting to, but the organization was nonetheless still funding needed studies and many ACT UP members worked there at some point in various capacities. Regardless, Philbin’s proposal seemed the perfect opportunity to speak about AIDS in a broader way than we’d previously attempted, on the streets of multiple American cities. After serious discussion, we decided the pros far outweighed any cons, and there was no substantive dissent. This project would become our first American public art commission, and one that also helped solidify a set of aesthetic strategies we had begun to explore.

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