INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL COHEN -

7 February 2013

Being able to interview Michael, who helped foster discussion and curated the show, was incredibly helpful in understanding how the show was realized. Here are a few portions from the interview - truthfully, I had a hard time choosing sections to post since the entire interview intimately narrates not only the workings of the show, but presents thoughtful insights into the future of activist art and the consequences of "institutionalized" work of this nature. Hopefully the thoughts here will help to spark a larger dialogue around the preciosity of art objects, our obsession with the 'authentic original' and why we need to address activism in 2013.


If we could start out with your interest in Gran Fury and how the show came to be…

Sure. I had contacted Marlene McCarty about doing a solo show at the gallery, and I was doing [this] pretty far in advance because I knew it would take a long time to do Marlene’s project; so right when I got hired at 80wse, I contacted her. As we were developing her show, she brought up the idea of, “Well, should any of the Gran Fury work be part of the show?”

Oh, okay.

And so I met with Gran Fury about that, and there were some vague talk about maybe doing a Windows show because we have these two satellite spaces. Basically, their position was they did not want to have any type of Gran Fury retrospective or survey or anything.

I had some awareness of their work, but in many ways, it was blurred by time, and I took it upon myself to really familiarize myself with their work, and did a lot of research. And the more I got to know them, I thought, “Huh, this is really important work that’s never had a survey before,” and I started feeling that it was really a disservice to their ouevre to have it be a small adjunct to Marlene’s show for several reasons; one, I thought it was more interesting as a body of work than to have their projects be a sideline to her show; secondly, there’s not a million Gran Fury pieces, so I felt to some degree that if we showed half of Gran Fury’s work in a Windows show, it’s going to be very hard for them to have a survey exhibition in New York City in the future, if we did that. So then, the next time I met with Gran Fury, as far as I remember it, I came with a proposition of a full show. And they were dead set against it because they were very resistant to the idea of “the institution” – the institutionalization of their work; but, I had had a lot of time to think about why it would be worth doing and eventually was able to win them over to this point of view.

So, you were obviously very good.

You know, I thought of what arguments would be convincing to them and sort of wore them down, in a friendly way, through logic and persistence.  Initially,they were like, “If we have a show at MoMA or some other major art institution, what’s that going to mean for the artwork, which is meant to be produced in an anti-institutional context?” So, what I said to them was, “Okay – first of all, this isn’t an art institution; it’s an adjunct of an educational institution.” I emphasized the educational context, which wouldn’t be possible at most other institutions in the tri-state area, and brought up the idea of doing a workshop where students could learn “The Gran Fury methodology” and work with them. I was like, “You know, none of us are getting any younger. Don’t you think it would be interesting to re-expose a younger generation to your work and maybe work with them so they could learn what you were thinking about, and maybe they could make work utilizing what they learned about your approach?” And in some ways, they were more excited at that possibility than of actually having the retrospective (laughs). But, the show and the workshop went together. And the other thing I said to them was,

"In most other institutions, you and the curator would have a fixed role, but what I picture for this is you turn the mediation of the curation into an artwork, itself, and actually make your own history and contextualize it. I’ll work with you on that, but you’ll have the most say over how your work is historicized, which is going to happen at some point anyway. Why not work with me on that so you have the most voice in that process?"

And that was very exciting to them, as well, on a conceptual level. So those two points were important in our reaching an agreement to do the Gran Fury survey.

I heard that some of the images were adhesive [vinyls]. Why did you choose to use this material instead of another material that could have been re-used?

We did think about that, and that was actually my suggestion. I had a lot of concerns about whether adhesives would hold and whether it would start to bubble, and because we had pretty tight deadlines in terms of installing the show, I was concerned. If we spend a couple thousand dollars on a stick-on and it doesn’t work, what are we going to do? Because  in that case, we may not have the time or the funds to redo the piece, which would be a huge disaster. But their point, which I came around to, was that the pieces had originally been attached to surfaces - they were glued onto the wall in their original format, and a billboard format was not as true to the original process of the piece as sticking it on the wall.

That makes sense.

I felt like if we could do it, I wanted to do it to be as true to the concept of the piece as possible. So we ended up doing endless format tests of different types of paper and attaching it ourselves, versus having a peel-off. We’d leave them up on the wall and see, does it stick? It didn’t. Ultimately, we ended up with the format we did based on the fact that it didn’t fall over and didn’t bubble up too much.

Let’s go into that - that the pieces were meant to be more temporal. And you just said that they’re not the real pieces, so I want to talk a little bit more about that.

I meant the original. They’re real.

Sorry, that’s what I meant.

They’re not the same as the original really was, I should more accurately say.

So, you feel the nature of the piece has changed, now that it has been digitized? Do you see a difference in the essence of the piece? 

Not necessarily the message, but because it was made a certain way originally and then it was re-created, most of the time from a high-res scan.


Can you speak to that? How you feel about the nature of that changing?

Yeah. I think Gran Fury wasn’t ever excited about having a set of originals that would be archived or presented in a museum as the original piece, and generally, they didn’t have any of the originals in the show, as you must know from interviewing everybody.  I think to them, in a Walter Benjamin “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”  kind of sense, it was more interesting  to present works that were not the originals and generally not have originals that could be some sort of valuable masterpiece as part of the group’s work. Conceptually, I think it [made] much more sense to have a piece that said, “I’m a reproduction and made specifically for this new context using a lot of ideas from the original piece”, but also saying, “I’m addressing my re-contextualization”, in terms of addressing their audience in their work and their antipathy toward commodification.

What do you think the physical role of the Gran Fury poster is going to be in the future? And second, what you do foresee activist art looking like?

I’m not sure. I think it’s going physically into new directions, because in terms of the future of what you’re calling original Gran Fury works, there is a plan to do high-res digital scans of all of their work and put them online as freeware. I think one of the most important contributions of this exhibition, in the future, won’t be the show, itself, but that we got those guys together to either scan originals or make versions that could be turned into them because those scans that we made are actually the basis for this free library of their work that’s going to happen at some point.

Conversely, my understanding is that several major institutions like MoMA are talking about buying whatever part of the archive the public library doesn’t have, so there may be ephemera or originals that do end up becoming part of the institution.

As far as the future of activism, it’s not my main area of expertise.

I wasn’t looking for an “official” answer coming from an area that you’re enmeshed in; just your thoughts after working with this and seeing the chemistry they had and talking about art from the 80s. I think the message is still pertinent, which is sad, but true when you’re looking at these AIDS statistics and the topic in general, that AIDS still exists. And unfortunately, some of the stereotypes and falsities are still coming around. Maybe not so much in New York City, but certainly elsewhere.

It’s kind of a complex question that you’re bringing up. I think the educational panels we had, in a way, were as important as the show, itself. Again, the dialogue was so important. One of the more interesting ones…we had a panel where AIDS activists from the present and also back from the 80s, healthcare activists and couple of members of Gran Fury got together at the Gay and Lesbian Center and we had a panel on the past and future of healthcare activism and what role art could have to that. An important aspect of that panel was to address your question.  However, in the end the panelists didn’t resolve the question – everybody felt like a lot of advances had been made in healthcare that’s available to people suffering from AIDS and that the healthcare activism in the Gran Fury posters, making people aware of them, did have a major impact on that issue. But then, what also came up was that there’s become a type of class thing where the number of more educated and often more white people who could be at risk of getting infected is shrinking; but with minority groups and the lower class, which I wasn’t aware of, the numbers [are] increasing or going back to older infection rates. This is also a problem in certain third world countries. There was a feeling that there was a role for art in making people aware of this. And a lot of the students weren’t aware of these dynamics, so I think what a lot of the young artists and the people who came to the show learned was:

A: I think they haven’t been as aware of the original crisis, and 

B: Maybe some awareness was raised that it’d be interesting for artists to explore the continued fight over bringing equity to lowering infection rates. And getting art involved with women’s reproductive rights, which is another pressing issue.

So, when the students were working with Gran Fury, they got involved in making posters addressing both those issues.  I don’t know if numerous people are working with those issues, but I certainly think both reproductive rights and rising infection rates might be interesting for artists to get involved on an activist related level: making graphic designs or giveaways or online projects that could raise awareness of those issues.

So, you think the poster is still a viable, effective medium in 2013?

Yeah.

Thanks to Michael Cohen for helping make this project possible and for his insight. 

*Images that do not depict the interview via: itcctiVirginiaedu, Vimeo