With 42000 Dead Art Is Not Enough the Kitchen

A new extract from A People's Fine art History of the United States: 250 Years of Activist Art and Artists Working in Social Justice Movements that was published by The New Press. This excerpt looks at ACT Upwards and the blueprint collective Gran Fury that is hands down one of the most of import groups for activist artists to study today and to suit various tactics (especially their structure) to today's struggles. Here is the extract:

Act UP

In early March 1987, more than than three hundred gay and lesbian people gathered in New York City and founded Act Upwardly (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Ability). Human action UP's mandate was specific—"medication into bodies"—free access to antiviral drugs to help those who were infected and more than public awareness to stop the spread of AIDS. Human activity UP embraced direct action every bit the primary fashion to answer to the AIDS crisis, to force the government, pharmaceutical companies, and the media to respond. Each meeting began with members stating in unison that they were "united in anger and committed to direct activity to cease the AIDS crunch." These words were apace backed up in practice.

The first ACT UP/NYC demonstration took identify just two weeks after the founding meeting. On March 24, hundreds gathered at Wall Street to protest the FDA'south slow approval process for drugs and the collusion of government and corporate interests that profited from the manufacture of AZT, the but FDA-canonical AIDS drug, sold by the pharmaceutical company Burroughs Wellcome. AZT was a double negative; it was highly toxic and incredibly expensive. AZT toll patients more than $x,000 a yr, despite the fact that the government had subsidized Burroughs Wellcome to develop it.
During the protest, activists blocked traffic in the streets, an figure of FDA commissioner Frank Young was hung, and seventeen people were arrested. In the aftermath, the demonstration fabricated national news and CBS newsanchor Dan Rather credited ACT Upwards for bringing national attention to the result. Several weeks later, the FDA announced plans to speed up its drug-approval process, and in December, Burroughs Wellcome appear plans to drop the toll of AZT past xx percent. The stunning success of the Wall Street activeness placed ACT UP at the forefront of the AIDS activist motility. In a brusk time, more than than a hundred Human activity Upwardly branches were formed in cities across the Us and abroad, although the NYC branch would remain the nearly visible of the chapters.
Structurally, Human action UP was organized into a series of committees that immune people to engage with the group depending upon their talents and interests. Gregg Bordowitz of Human activity Upwardly/NYC explains:

Human action UP [NYC] was not one monolithic establishment. Information technology was a group of people who met every Monday dark. Many of them were parts of smaller groups, or cells, or analogousness groups inside the larger group. And those affinity groups to some extent had, if not a dissever life, a life outside the group.

Committees included, among others, a steering commission, a analogous committee, and a women'south caucus. A majority conclave was formed in late 1987 because African Americans and Latinos represented the highest pct of AIDS cases in NYC. For many, Deed UP be- came their social circumvolve, dating scene, extended family, and way of life. Members would often go to unlike commission meetings virtually every night of the week.
ACT UP was besides home to numerous art collectives that marked the organisation from the very beginning. Michael Nesline, who was a member of the fine art collective Gran Fury, re- calls how members of the Silence = Death Project beginning introduced themselves to the group:

Avram [Finkelstein] stood up and said, "I'm ane of the people that made those posters [Silence = Death]. Most of us are in the room. We talked about it after last week's ACT Upwards meeting, and we decided that we want you all to know that nosotros made those posters and nosotros want ACT UP to exist able to utilize that poster and that image for whatever purposes ACT UP deems appropriate. So, it's yours."

The image would quickly be put into activity, including during the New York City Gay Pride Parade on June 28, 1987. Act Upward blanketed the march with the logo on T-shirts and signs carried in the parade. Nesline explains:

What the media was impressed past was the uniformity of our presentation. I mean, all of the posters are blackness posters with large pink triangles. It looked really organized. That was not a completely witting strategy at that point. It chop-chop became a conscious strategy, because we realized that information technology worked, for the media.

But the images and slogans were not aimed just at the media and spectators. Cultural critic and Human action UP/NYC fellow member Douglas Crimp argues that the primary audience for the graphics was people within the movement:

AIDS activist graphics verbalize AIDS politics to and for all of us in the movement. They advise slogans (SILENCE = DEATH becomes "We'll never be silent once again"), target opponents (the New York Times, President Reagan, Cardinal O'Connor), define positions ("All people with AIDS are innocent'), suggest actions ("Boycott Burroughs Wellcome") . . . In the end when the final production is wheatpasted around the city, carried on protest placards, and worn on T-shirts, our politics, and our cohesion around those politics, exist- come visible to us, and to those who will potentially join us.

1 of the about prolific of all the Human activity Up art collectives, and the one responsible for much of the protest ephemera, was Gran Fury.
This Is to Enrage Y'all

"We wanted to point out that the idea of the isolated cultural producer, the lonely artist in the studio, was i that at a time of crisis for usa did not quite work, did not reverberate the necessities or the possibilities of what collective activity could do." – Gran Fury

Gran Fury, a ten-to-twelve-person activist art collective within Human action Up/NYC, was formed in Jan 1988 and created myriad projects, including posters, stickers, flyers, bill- boards, bus ads, fine art installations, fake newspapers, and other forms of artistic resistance. Gran Fury specialized in assuming graphics and unproblematic slogans—images were produced for actions, frequently the nighttime earlier, and images were constantly re- purposed.

The Government Has Blood on Its Hands followed this rubric. The poster was initially created for an ACT UP demonstration on July 28, 1988, against the New York City Department of Health (Md) and NYC health commissioner Stephen Joseph. Joseph had enraged activists by stating that only 50,000 NYC residents had AIDS (instead of the more accurate number of 200,000) to justify the urban center'southward minimal commitment to intendance services. The affiche itself featured a blood-reddish handprint with text that read YOU'VE GOT BLOOD ON YOUR Easily STEPHEN JOSEPH. THE CUTS IN AIDS NUMBERS IS A LETHAL Lie. An alternate version of the poster was aimed at Mayor Ed Koch for his failure to seriously address the AIDS crisis. It read NYC AIDS Care DOESN'T EXIST, which was a bitter reality. Mayor Koch had provided a beggarly $25,000 in funding for AIDS research and patient intendance in 1983, compared to the $1 million that Mayor Dianne Feinstein had committed in San Francisco, a effigy that was still also low. To address the failure of politicians in NYC, Gran Fury wheat-pasted the affiche in the streets and "crews of Human action Up members went about with buckets of red paint, into which they dipped their latex-glove-covered hands to imprint bloody palm prints all over the urban center."

Other actions were just as confrontational. During the second Wall Street action on March 24, 1988, Gran Fury photocopied thousands of $10, $20, $50, and $100 bills onto green paper and scattered them all over the streets, causing traffic to come up to a standstill. There were 111 Deed Up activists arrested while passersby and Wall Street brokers were invited to collect the fake bills; messages on the dorsum of the bills read, amongst other things, White Heterosexual Men Tin can't Get AIDS . . . Don't Bank On It" and "Fuck Your Profiteering: People Are Dying While Yous Play Business." Gran Fury member Loring McAlpin reflected on the simplicity of the technique: "If yous're angry enough and accept a Xerox machine and v or six friends who feel the aforementioned way, yous'd be surprised how far y'all tin go with that."

Some Gran Fury actions took more than time and resources to create. Human action UP/NYC consistently held the New York Times responsible for its abysmal reporting on the AIDS epidemic, consistently underestimating the scale of the crunch. The June 29, 1989, editorial "Why Brand AIDS Worse Than It Is?" became the final harbinger. It argued that the virus was leveling off and was bars to "special risk groups," maxim in non-so-coded language that direct readers could relax while gay men and intravenous drug users died. In response, ACT UP demonstrated in front of New York Times editor Arthur "Dial" Sulzberger's Fifth Avenue home in late July. Body outlines were painted all over the streets, fact sheets were handed out throughout the neighborhood, and a large demonstration took place. The Times never felt compelled to cover it.

To further address the lackluster reporting, Gran Fury printed thousands of copies of their own version of a imitation newspaper called the New York Crimes that included stories by Human action Upwardly members and graphics past Gran Fury. The four-page paper mimicked the await of the Times and was placed in paper boxes during a belatedly-night activeness.

Activists fanned out throughout the metropolis at four in the morning, opened Times newspaper boxes, and wrapped each paper with the new-and-improved front-folio department. Included in the Crimes was a full-page graphic of a laboratory scene with a quote past Patrick Gage of the Hoffman-La Roche pharmaceutical company: "I one thousand thousand [people with AIDS] isn't a market place that's exciting. Sure it's growing, but it'south not asthma." Below the egregious quote, on the lesser of the prototype, Gran Fury only added the commentary: "THIS IS TO ENRAGE You."

As a small collective, Gran Fury members would meet at the terminate of Human action Up meetings on Monday nights and discuss projection ideas. Anyone in ACT Upward/NYC was welcome to take part. Past their second year, the grouping be- came closed. A good working nucleus had been formed and information technology became too difficult to work with noncommitted people who would come and become. By their second year, Gran Fury began meeting once a week at someone'due south flat or studio. Here, they would debate ideas for images and actions, alter them, reject them, choose projects to take to the larger ACT UP meetings for discussions, and sometimes choose to do projects autonomously on their own terms. None of the artists in Gran Fury were paid, zip was copyrighted, projects were credited to the commonage'due south name, and nothing was sold on the art market. Everything that Gran Fury created was for the AIDS movement.

Gran Fury's drift toward more autonomous projects grew out of the frustration of seeing their finished ideas debated and overanalyzed past 3 hundred–plus people at the Monday-dark meetings. Michael Nesline reflects:

[Gran Fury] didn't want to have to listen to Act Up's—why is information technology blue? Why shouldn't it exist green? We don't want to have to listen to a conversation for 45 minutes about which is better, blue or green. We've already had that give-and-take, and we've decided information technology's blue, and we're not going to have the discussion over again. And, we don't really need to justify it, likewise. If yous don't like it, you don't like information technology. So, tell you what—we'll just practise what we're going to do, and if Deed UP is doing something, and nosotros feel like piggy-backing onto that, we'll piggy back onto that. And, if we feel similar doing something on our own, we'll do information technology on our own.

The poster With 42,000 Expressionless, Art Is Non Enough, Take Commonage Directly Action to End the AIDS Crisis represented work aimed at an art audience. The text-based prototype served every bit an advertisement for the NYC functioning fine art infinite The Kitchen and communicated the need for both fine art and directly action to confront the AIDS crisis.

Gran Fury conspicuously understood the dire demand for art and cultural activism, but they every bit understood the limitations of the medium. Art was not plenty if information technology was isolated inside the art globe and under- stood primarily as a commercial object to exhibit and sell. Gran Fury knew that they could do good from the contemporary art earth. As Gran Fury evolved, they began to tap into artist grants to fund their projects and museum shows to gain more exposure for the event. Nesline viewed this equally a win-win situation:

Here'due south this lilliputian Cinderella group [Gran Fury] that makes art that tin can't be sold, because information technology doesn't exist, and they'll give us money so that we can produce our art projects, which are deportment, and the art world tin can feel actually good about themselves, because they've now contributed to the AIDS crisis—to ending the AIDS crisis—and we can feel actually adept that we've taken their money. So, we've used them, and nosotros're not going to give them annihilation in return, considering there's non going to be whatever fine art product at the end of information technology that can exist re-sold and could accumulate in value. So, our status as Cinderella was preserved.

In short, Gran Fury navigated both the activist and the contemporary fine art world. Their message was aimed at all.
http://peoplesarthistoryus.org/
http://justseeds.org/nicolas_lampert/03pahbook.html
More on Human action Upward:
Gran Fury images at NYPL Digital Gallery
ACT Up Oral History Project
How to Survive A Plague – documentary Moving-picture show

isaacsustoespen.blogspot.com

Source: https://justseeds.org/a-peoples-art-history-of-the-united-states-excerpt-act-up-and-gran-fury/

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