INTERVIEW WITH EDWARD HOLLAND AND JOE MONDELLO -
17 December 2012
After a bit of a hiatus, here are some snippets from my conversation with Edward Holland, former registrar at NYU Steinhardt Gallery, and my friend, Joe. Edward was kind enough to offer his apartment for the afternoon, where we were able to discuss the specifics of preparing the Gran Fury exhibition. Edward offered very unique insight, as he not only worked closely with members of the collective, but also got to experience how the show was received by members of Gran Fury, ACT UP veterans and visitors to the show that were being exposed to the AIDS crisis for the first time.
What was your first exposure to Gran Fury, and did you have
any initial impressions?
I had no idea about them before I started working on the
show at NYU, and as I found out more, then I remembered seeing certain pieces.
I mean, I was young at the time of the AIDS crisis, but I wasn’t unaware. So, I
was 10 years old in 1990, which sounds really young. (To Joe) And you can roll your eyes…
Joe Mondello: No,
I’m glad ‘cause that would mean you would have seen the bus posters.
Exactly. I was old enough to remember seeing these images
and hearing these facts, hearing these stories. Later when I was trying to
think about it, I was really impressed [that] my school at that time was so
actively involved in sex education and AIDS awareness. I mean, we had classes
on it. We talked about it all the time in our current events class. When I
looked back on it, I thought, oh wow. That seems very progressive for a
suburban public school.
Yeah, no kidding.
But initially, I didn’t know who they were until I
started working on the show and really getting involved. I was interested to
know more about this. How are we going to translate this into an exhibition?
That was my first question. The good news is it wasn’t up to me to answer that
(laughs). But the more I read, the more I got involved. It’s a different
generation – I think that that’s another thing about this show that I found to
be really interesting, the stark generation divide between all the different
viewer levels.
Could you describe your initial meetings with Michael and
the collective?
It was a bit intense because I’d never met them. [I was]
still learning about what they did, who they were, but I really had no idea
about them personally. I had no idea how many there are, what they [were] going
to be like. We sat in one of the rooms in the gallery, and it was me, Michael,
Hugh, Tom, Marlene, and John, I think.[i]
And I had met Marlene because we had done a show of hers previously, but I’d
never met the other[s]. It was just head-spinning because once you get them in
a room, even just three of them, and get them talking, they just boom-boom-boom-boom…back
and forth. It’s really hard to get a word in and it’s difficult to keep them on
track because all of a sudden, they’re just riffing off one another and going
somewhere else. So, the first meeting was very intense. It gave me vertigo, but
it was a good meeting. And it was a very good introduction to [what] the
process [would] be [like] because there was a little bit of a mania, a time
crunch and so many moving parts. All the copy that goes into something has to
be vetted by everyone else in Gran Fury. And all the images need to be vetted
by everybody else. There was this weird, idiosyncratic bureaucracy that we had
to deal with within their group, but NYU’s [also] a huge bureaucracy, so we had
to deal with it within our own side, [as well].
So, how much prep time were you given to make those
decisions? How many weeks, how many months –
Well, the show opened the end of January, and Michael had
been working on it for much longer, obviously. I started working on it probably
around the beginning of 2011. So we had about a year to do everything, but you
need at least a year to plan a show like this. When I say we started planning,
we just started thinking about it. We really didn’t ramp everything up until
well on into the spring and the summer of 2011. So, about six months before the
show opened is when we were really starting to kick it into gear. Those first
four or five months were really sort of lining ducks up, reaching out to
people, saying, “Hey, do you have this? Where is this? Do we have access to
this?” Very cursory, preliminary things. And you need lead time for the
printing and everything. Line up the contractors and samples of everything. Once
we were getting really involved, it just sort of took on a life of its own.
[i]
Michael Cohen (curator), Hugh O’Rourke (preparator), Tom Kalin, Marlene
McCarty, John Lindell (Gran Fury members)
***
So, going into the tone of the show, how important it was
for them that you [all] brought in that historical context, [arguing] that
these pieces couldn’t be presented in a vacuum. I think it was so important
that you put it into context, through the didactics and other pop culture
references. Could you speak to that a little bit?
I know that they had a really hard time with that because
so much of their work is so specific. You know, it’s large city, late 80s,
early 90s – and that’s a very particular viewership that they were catering to.
So then to create an institutional survey of this work, but still make it
relevant – they had a really hard time trying to parcel how that [was] to be
done. And their solution was to put up as many relevant visual keys as possible:
attorney general shots and pop culture references and global culture references
and facts and figures and all of those things to condition the viewer to
understand what they were looking at. And that was all them. It took them a
long time to get there, but I thought their solution was very elegant. Having
the little placards with all the text to explain a grouping of images I thought
was a nice touch. I know they fought a lot about that copy because they’re a
collective. Everyone had a different idea as to how this needs to be presented:
“It needs to have more facts.”
“It needs to have more emotion.”
Everyone has a different stake in it, and what they ended up
with was their answer. I can’t find any faults in it because everything made
sense, and so much of it, at a certain point, was ad hoc. For [example, in] The
Pope and Penis room, that inverted cross [was something] they had decided
to do at midnight on the Friday before the show opened. They were working, [and]
they didn’t know how the arrangement would go.
“Oh, what about an inverted cross?”
“Oh, ha ha.”
And it worked, it stuck.
Avram has a wonderful collection of original ACT UP flyers
and posters and all the stuff that when
you would go to ACT UP meetings – there would be a long folding table that
would be just piled high with stacks of different flyers about events and protests
and things, and you would pass it on your way in and way out. And originally,
they were thinking they would set up a table like that in the gallery to sort
of give you an idea as to this is what it was like – to have all this
information and have it handy, have it out. At a certain point, that idea got
scratched, and I can’t tell you why, but then the idea was, “It’s so important
to have that, let’s put it on the wall.” And it became an idea to paste one
wall with nothing but these handouts so people understand what [they] were up
to, what was so important visually with these sort of Xeroxed handbills. There
were a lot more takeaways originally. They wanted to have a lot of pieces for
you to take with you when you left.
They had The New
York Crimes…
There was New York
Crimes, there was Four Questions.
There were postcards and other posters. There was the kiss-in poster[i],
the lesbian couple for Kissing Doesn’t Kill
as a postcard, and the Wall Street money.
So, about five. I think at a certain point, maybe aesthetically, they didn’t
want to have a folding table in the middle of one of the rooms.
I’m trying to remember. Were the stickers…
Oh, the stickers. So six [takeaways].
Yeah. The stickers were on the windowsill in the first
gallery as you walk in, correct?
You would walk in and on that windowsill were the kiss-in
poster, the additional copies of New York
Crimes, the postcards, and that’s it. And then in Gallery Four, there was
the tableau of Four Questions. And
then in Gallery 5, at the time, because the gallery’s different now, there was
a clear acrylic placard coming off the wall and there was a stack of stickers
on there.
So going to the construction of the galleries… I don’t
know the numbers of the galleries, but the fact that [the space]was split into
four – and how incredibly inconvenient that was…
It was really inconvenient, and curatorially, it made for
challenges, but when you rise to meet those challenges, it makes for a great
installation. And I think one of their solutions was to paint walls different
colors in different rooms. Thinking back on it now, in Gallery 5, where the Men Use Condoms or Beat It stickers
were, they painted one facing wall a very distinct purple and adjacent to it
was Women Don’t Get AIDS, which is
predominantly purple and having that color interplay all of a sudden created a
completely separate space. That room really felt as if it was a completely
different room than anything else because of the purple. And on the purple wall
were the Control pieces[ii]
blown up very large. So that room felt completely different than the rooms next
to it, even though they were the same size. That was a decision they had made,
and they had done their research, really thought about everything: all the
different colors, where the colors were going to go. All these decisions that
they labored over, and I’m sure they fought over, were so dead on. As I said
before, the show was top-notch.
[i] Read My Lips (male version), 1988
[ii] “Control.”
Artforum, October 1989
***
What was the most rewarding part of this experience for you?
I’m going to get all misty-eyed. It was when people who
were in New York at that time, dealing with these things, came through the show
and immediately had a reaction. I mean, the opening was unbelievable – this
bizarre ACT UP class reunion, people coming out of the woodwork and talking
with one another. There was a definitive…not sadness, but heaviness about the
atmosphere. But it was still celebratory.
“I’m so glad we’re all here. I’m so glad this work is here. I wish
so-and-so could have seen it.” And I think having people have a reaction like
that is very rare, and it was amazing to me to watch that happen over and over.
One [reaction] that really was awesome was when Tom Kalin saw Riot for the first time. That was
awesome because he loved Mark, they were roommates, and he couldn’t get over
that this piece still existed – that it was still on the wall. It was these
little moments that I thought were so fantastic.
I work in an art gallery, and I deal with art; but it
changed the role of the gallery for a little bit, so it was no longer
presenting art. It was presenting something more, and that interaction was
happening every day… I mean, so many people saw that show and everyone came
through and said, “Thank you. What a great show. Where’s this going to go next?
What can I do?” It was just so much for so many people. That was the most
rewarding part. Very rarely do you get to work on something like that. I had no
relation to Gran Fury; I had no practical relationship with them outside of
this show. It was their show, but peripherally, I got to be included. Give me a
break, what a great experience! Hopefully they were pleased. When you talk to
them, you’ll find out. I hope so.
I’m sure.
I wonder what will happen. Hopefully, they’ll travel the
show and go somewhere else. And I would love to see it there and see what
happens.
Thanks to Edward for being so gracious with his time and sharing his experiences.
*Images via HyperAllergic, DailyServing, Blogspot
**Original photos courtesy of Joe Mondello
