In 1981 Thomas Lawson noted in a review of Group Material’s exhibition “The People’s Choice” that “the value of these artifacts lay precisely in their sentimentality, a quality that is absent from most artwork that strives to mean something to a general audience.” A similar thread runs through founding Group Material member Julie Ault’s “Macho Man, Tell It to My Heart” (through February 23). Composed primarily of pieces gifted to Ault, an artist, curator, editor, and writer heavily involved in both the creation and the historicization of New York’s alternative art spaces, the exhibition occupies a slippery cultural space. It’s a sort-of self-portrait of a radically minded collector, and a sort-of survey of the politically driven, collaborative circles Ault has run in since she co-founded Group Material in 1979.
The exhibition sprawls across Artists Space’s two SoHo locations, presenting viewers with a gleefully overwhelming array of work. While the display isn’t deliberately copped from how the works appear in Ault’s own home, there’s a domestic warmth to their salon-style hanging, in which, for instance, a pair of lightbulbs by Félix González-Torres illuminates Robert Kinmont’s 1967 photograph 8 Natural Handstands or Corita Kent’s silkscreens are densely clustered in the Walker Street location. Keeping track of works using the diagrams on the 14-page-long checklist becomes an arduous task, the list unintentionally inspiring acts of viewer subversion: After wandering the gallery, fumbling with the oversize printout in an attempt to maintain a sense of direction, I found stashing the guide and letting myself become unmoored a pleasurable change of pace.
It’s difficult not to view Ault’s collection as pure retrospective of her politically charged work with Group Material and the relationships that formed around it, particularly given the nature of the venue, one of New York’s first alternative spaces. But there’s also little evident concern for historical trajectory in the way works are arranged. In lieu of a curatorial statement or an essay introducing the show’s recurring, and evolving, characters—Andres Serrano, Kent, González-Torres, and Ault herself among them—the show opens with a Liberace documentary. Feminist and queer politics are a concern throughout, but their stories splinter: The canonical activist voice of Nancy Spero’s text-driven 1968 work on paper Kill for Mom, all violent ink scrawls, assumes an unusual texture when it shares a wall with Moyra Davey’s 2003 photograph Spiders, a delicate, unfocused close-up of a glistening spiderweb.
To return to Lawson’s observation, in this show Ault and her co-curators reject a linear narrative in favor of tenderness. This may be a less politically charged stance than it was in 1981, but it still feels like an important move, particularly at a moment when writers and curators are still working through how to historicize the era of Ault’s work and that of the artists she’s collected. Can we only conceive of “alternative”-obsessed countercultural production as a sealed-off historical phenomenon? Ault, like many others, including myself, seems to hope not. As Ault toys with display as she narrativizes the sites and objects of the alternative-space movement, and as she highlights her dual roles as an artist and “collector,” she advocates for a broader, more discursive analysis of visual culture. Illuminating the relationships—aesthetic, personal, political—that continue to evolve out of these networks serves not only to successfully revisit a set of concerns but to reopen them as well.
Click on the slideshow to see images from “Macho Man, Tell It to My Heart: Collected by Julie Ault.”
A version of this article appears in the March 2014 issue of Modern Painters magazine.
