ooga booga | online shop | back to books | ordering info | view cart

Julie Ault
Show and Tell: A Chronicle of Group Material
In 1980, the artist collaborative Group Material opened a storefront at East 13th Street on New York's Lower East Side, from which they launched a program of socially engaged exhibitions and events. Group Material's original members—which include Julie Ault, Patrick Brennan, Tim Rollins, Beth Jaker, Mundy McLaughlin, and Marybeth Nelson —came from backgrounds in feminism, Marxist theory, design and popular culture, and curated exhibits reflecting this eclecticism, such as It's a Gender Show and The People's Choice—a collection of everyday objects (wedding photos, dolls, even a cigarette-pack collage) gathered from people living on their block. Subsequently deciding not to maintain a space, from 1982 on, the group organized projects in existing alternative and mainstream art institutions and utilized distribution forms such as billboards, newspapers, and public transit advertising.

Group Material's projects radically overhauled curatorial thought, setting art alongsid e artifacts, documentary material and storebought objects, within exhibitions that were oriented around topical social concerns. Projects included Primer (for Raymond Williams), Artists Space, 1982, Subculture, IRT Subway Trains, 1982, Americana, 1985 Whitney Biennial, Inserts, Sunday New York Times, 1987, Democracy, Dia Art Foundation, 1988, and AIDS Timeline, Berkeley University Art Museum, 1989.

Show & Tell is the first monograph on Group Material. In keeping with the methods and principles used by the collaborative, the book charts the group's activities, drawing heavily from Group Material’s archive, including original documents, photographs, drawings, correspondence, artifacts, anecdotal information and texts. It includes essays by three long-term members.

Julie Ault is an artist and writer who often assumes curatorial and editorial roles as forms of artistic practice. Ault is one of the cofounders of the artists collaborative Group Material (1979–1996), which explored the relationships between art, activism, and politics.

Flexicover, 8.5" x 11", 272 pgs., 180 color, 50 b&w, 2010, United Kingdom.

SOLD OUT!