Conversation with Julie Ault, Copenhagen, 2003

Julie Ault recounts the history of Group Material, an artist collective formed in 1979 in New York City. The group emerged from a circle of friends and peers, some of whom were attending the School of Visual Arts. Group Material’s original members included Patrick Brennan, Beth Jaker, Mundy McLaughlin, Marybeth Nelson, Tim Rollins, Peter Szypula, and Julie Ault. The group was influenced by the civil rights movement, postcolonial and feminist theory, and a DIY culture prevalent in the punk and new wave music scenes. Disillusioned with biased institutions and the limitations of traditional art making, Group Material became part of a network challenging traditional institutional culture, seeking social change and new ideas about practice, shaped by aesthetic and social context.

Julie Ault recounts: “After having meetings for a while, we decided it would be appropriate to get a space and to have something like a laboratory in order to start doing some things that could be a public interface where we would be exposing our ideas and opening up that internal dialogue of the material process to a larger set of dialogues.” Over time, conflicting interests led to a reduction in members, prompting a shift from fixed venues to public spaces (wall space, advertising space, newspaper inserts). With this shift, Group Material questioned who art was for and where it could be seen, addressing issues of accessibility while resisting hierarchical notions of culture.

In 1987, Group Material (Julie Ault, Doug Ashford, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres) was invited to do a show at the Dia Art Foundation, which had, in their view, until then mostly been concerned with presenting exclusive art in fixed contexts. Ault expresses being perplexed by the invitation, as Group Material worked in temporary formats, through collaboration and social engagement. The show Democracy was developed in four parts: “Democracy and Education,” “Politics and Election,” “Cultural Participation,” and “AIDS and Democracy,” with roundtable discussions and public town meetings. This culminating project led to a deeper involvement with the AIDS crisis and its lack of representation: “Issues of sexism, racism, discrimination, gay, lesbian, etc… economic issues, and class issues are interconnected, and we didn't want to address them as single issues. So something like the AIDS timeline project was a way of also analyzing a larger structure into which all these issues fit.”

Ault reflects on her evolving understanding of feminism, noting that she always considered herself a feminist without engaging deeply in feminist discourse. Karen Ramspacher, a later member of the group who was highly involved in AIDS activism and abortion rights, introduced her to feminist thinkers like bell hooks. Ault underscores that “feminism as a fact” is integral to her work and teaching, and to Group Material’s non-hierarchical principles. “It’s a very ephemeral history in the sense of how Group Material registers now in recent art history in terms of visuals and documentation of projects. But that doesn't really show the dimensionality of what I think the collaboration was really all about and what the goals of it were.”