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Group Material
Formed in 1979 in New York, USA.

Jens Hoffmann (JH): What events triggered the idea to make AIDS Timeline (1989)?

Julie Ault (JA): Group Material’s AIDS and Democracy: A Case Study was up at the Dia Art Foundation in January 1988. The curator Larry Rinder asked if we would be interested in restaging it in Berkeley. But we wanted to create a new, different work, so the timeline format came to mind as a way to investigate the conditions and events that constituted a history of AIDS in the United States up to that point.

JH: Was this the first time anyone had ever put together a chronology of the AIDS epidemic?

JA: It’s not important if AIDS Timeline was the first ever, but that the project came about to address what felt absent: a diagram of detail and overview in conjunction. We were struck by the fragmentary and specialized nature of available information about AIDS. That was what motivated us to attempt to put the puzzle pieces together, to compile a history that would render the complex development of the AIDS crisis legible to us and to others.

Doug Ashford (DA): As the last exhibition in the Democracy project, AIDS and Democracy was designed to embody the collapse of practical traditions in American democracy, which allowed AIDS to develop into the social crisis it became. But also to embody the responses to this failure in democracy, the ways that art and activism could remind us of the capacities there are in risk, resistance, and reimagination. We arranged the gallery to evoke a progression of responses to loss, from helplessness to recognition, transformation, and agency.

JA: The exhibition elicited mixed responses. It was critiqued by some for being too poetic, not hard-hitting or activist enough. I think this indirectly fueled our analytical, didactic approach to making AIDS Timeline.

JH: What is very interesting to me about the work of Group Material is not only the strongly political subject matter, but also the idea of an aesthetic practice that is both artistic and curatorial, and which also incorporates education and direct social activism.

DA: We often depended on larger collaborations to imply non-consensus and difference in the values of a par- ticular moment. We would include objects that questioned the propositions of the exhibitions, definitions of authorship, and the formal histories these realities might imply. These objects could be made by artists or not; they could be found or made; they could show different scales of investment in the field  of art or in the field of social effect.  The resulting ensemble was then physically designed to position the viewer at an apex of juxtaposition and comparison. Our forms of exhibition and public practice reflected the need to invent a dynamic situation, a designed moment of reflection that could include discussion and present dissent. The Timelines showed the vibrancy that aesthetic effect could have on political imagination, demonstrating how memory and emotion can unmake official history. Art overcomes “reasonable response” and replaces it with the rupture of identifiable but impossible proposals.