DC: Probably very few people understand what it is to make art collaboratively within the compass of an activist movement. They seem to believe that Gran Fury was a group of artists who contributed to AIDS activism or to ACT UP, but in fact it’s the other way around. All of us were members of ACT UP, and that’s why we were able to accomplish what we did. More importantly, it’s why we did what we did in the first place.
LM: We began at an unusual historical moment. AIDS was turning into a huge catastrophe, and there was no adequate public response. So there was a space for some kind of voice to raise questions. None of us had any doubts that we had to be there.
AF: But as soon as we realized we had a voice, we started to mock ourselves. Every so often we would be cackling, “Oh, that’s so Gran Fury.”
LM: We simply realized the extent to which we were using institutional power.
TK: I don’t think we were being ironic. It was just a question of the tensions that arose from having a larger platform and still trying to speak effectively about urgent concerns.
DM: What goes unsaid is that the institutional support was instrumental for us, because from the very beginning, we decided we weren’t going to say, “We can’t do this because there’s no money.” We started out really small with things that we could afford on our own, and then the money started coming in for real, and it facilitated a continuation of our work, so this can’t just be a discussion about the ironies of what we were doing.
TK: I only meant to address this bigger point. The collective proceeded from activist concerns, and the fact that we were in sync with the art world and able to use those resources was great. But at a certain point, we began to have the opportunity to address issues further away from what we knew best. For instance, in Montreal, with the piece for the opening of the new building for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Je me souviens [Never forget, 1992], I remember discussions about what it meant to make a piece in French talking about French-Canadian identity.
LM: We also had a long discussion about whether we should be in the Venice Biennale at all. We had wanted to hang banners in the street, remember? And they said, “No, you can’t do that.” And there was a moment when we wondered whether it was enough for us to just be inside an art institution, but we decided it was a public enough venue to merit doing it.
AF: It was also an opportunity to talk about condom use in the belly of the beast, to confront the Catholic Church on its home territory.
MM: I want to go to bat for Venice. We cannot forget how much press came out of that piece, which was far more public than a billboard would have been. That work got AIDS on the cover of Express.
RV: But we’re being disingenuous when we say that we planned to send a huge photograph of an erection to Venice, intended as a provocation to the Pope, and worried that no one would notice. We knew very well what we were doing.
MN: The director of the Biennale tried to dismiss the controversy by saying, “Oh, the penis. That’s just kitsch.” In the meantime Cicciolina was back there being fucked by Jeff Koons.
TK: It was funny, we made Jeff Koons look just decorative and irrelevant next to something authentic that rippled through the art world—a situation that then got quickly reversed, sadly.
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Read full interview at artforum.com
