Julie Ault’s “afterlife”

The organizations that transformed the human immunodeficiency virus from an economy of death into an expanded freedom in how we receive, understand, and practice sexuality did not always set out to do so. Often their goals were more traditional, even cliché: the securing of funding, the recognition of the obvious, or, in the case of Group Material, to restage a perennial opposition between the instrumental representations of commercial circulation and the imminent iconoclasm of direct democracy. It was AIDS that constellated these archetypical collectivities into a revolutionary sequence capable of unwinding the deep and dangerous institutions of heteronormativity. “Greetings Prophet!” Tony Kushner has the angel address a young man dying, alone in his bed, of AIDS-related illnesses, in the climactic scene of the first part of Angels in America (1993). And sure enough, the last three decades have seen the good news spread far and wide, even if it is in the nature of such victories to resist recognizing themselves as such.

Julie Ault, the longest serving and only continuous member of Group Material, grasps this contradiction beautifully in “afterlife,” currently on view at Galerie Buchholz in New York. How can we memorialize prophets like David Wojnarowicz and Martin Wong without re-inscribing a kind of ultra-phallic monumentality or channeling the very patriarchy which placed their deaths outside the scope of public mourning in the first place? This question of the appropriate material form for this particular historical memory grants Ault’s practice as a curating artist a new kind of power: what is expected from a radical collectivity is entirely groundbreaking under the aegis of a “solo show.” The irony of Group Material’s method was always that for all their procedural radicalism the results often looked remarkably similar: eclectic presentations of various media orbiting around a central theme while loudly announcing their own refusal of authorial singularity, lest the commodity-demon sneak in the back door when nobody was looking. (It did anyway, it always does. There will still be commodities after the revolution, it’s just that labor-power won’t be sold like one.) The same is true here, but with the seemingly conservative addition of Ault in the position of the artist/author. The effect, however, is to recover the radicalism of the method in a new and exciting way. Would that all gallery artists possessed the freedom of assembly that the Group Material archive grants Julie Ault! “afterlife” is a subjective approach to the objective history of a revolution in subjectivity. This feels right.

The first work we encounter is Martin Wong’s FDNY (1988), one of a number of works he painted about his beloved firemen. Lots of people love firemen, of course, and New Yorkers in particular, but when Wong painted two of them kissing in Big Heat (1988) he dramatized both the distance and the similarity between the public’s love of fireman and his own. If we all like kissing, and we all like firemen, what’s wrong with two fireman kissing? It’s the kind of playfully powerful juxtaposition that would come to be associated with another Group Material member, Félix González-Torres. FDNY depicts a kind of trampoline that the department used to catch people jumping from a burning building. A life-saving instrument deployed as a public service, the trampoline is the perfect antithesis of the public response to the burning building called HIV, a response that arrived too slow to save any of the 500,000 Americans who would die of AIDS-related illnesses by 2005.

Diagonally opposite of Wong, literally and figuratively, is Wojnarowicz’s Untitled (Time/Money) from the “Ant Series” also from 1988, a photograph of ants crawling in the dirt around some coins and a watch face. Like so much of Wojnarowicz’s work, it’s a timeless image that nevertheless manages to capture the righteous anger of the generation that produced it. Ault’s decision to alternate work by Wong and Wojnarowicz with archival artifacts of both—fire gear given to Wong by friends, Wojnarowicz’s calendar and his gift-shop Wunderkammer “Magic Box”—summons the competing historical and aesthetic injunctions of the exhibition format, actively crossing and re-crossing the boundary between memorial and intervention.

Ault is well aware of her own ambiguous position in this process, which she captures nicely by hanging a section from a Janet Malcom essay about the poet Ted Hughes1 on the wall, which concerns Hughes’ revisions to an introduction he wrote to a book of Sylvia Plath’s, his late wife. In the early version, Hughes uses the first person in relaying his decision to burn Plath’s final notebooks; in the latter, the decision becomes “her husband’s” as though it was somehow other than his own. At some point in the intervening years Hughes stopped being the subject of history and instead became its curator—charged not with shaping history but preserving it—or rather, with shaping it by preserving it.

Ault clearly feels herself to be navigating a similar competition between implication and responsibility, which she accompanies by including a number of small works by the poet laureate of material memory, Danh Vo. The most successful is Snowfall, Northern Sierras, 1847 (2014) a picture of the notches cut into a tree by the Donner expedition to record the height of the snowfall which trapped them, leading some members of the party to resort to cannibalism to survive. We only learn that this is what we are looking at, however, by Ault’s further inclusion of Stumps cut by Donner Party in 1846, Summit Valley, a stereograph of the original image by Alfred A. Hart from 1868. The cannibalism involved in the construction of history is not always immediately evident, Ault avers; and it can seem almost peaceful from a distance, like snow falling on mountains.