In Talk Honoring Julie Ault, Cathy Park Hong Calls for Normalizing Culture of Refusal

Cathy Park Hong recently spoke at Triple Canopy's benefit honoring artist Julie Ault, where she used Ault and the political art collective Group Material as models for thinking through artistic resistance in the age of Trump. The talk was published at Hyperallergic this week. "We are artists not just by the objects we make, but by the communities we build, the work we advocate for, and the activism in which we participate," writes Hong.

...Group Material’s emphasis on the series rather than the discrete object, on art-making as inquiry, documentation, and a model for political action, have influenced two decades of artists engaged in social practice. Group Material also arose out of the AIDS crisis, when gay artists had no choice but to be activists, because it was a matter of survival. One of the collective’s most famous works is the “AIDS Timeline,” exhibited at the Berkeley Museum in 1989. Julie, along with the then members of Group Material — the late Félix González-Torres, Doug Ashford, and Karen Ramspacher — used art objects, government documents, and news clippings to trace a chronology of how AIDS became a full-blown crisis because of public neglect and government malfeasance. Another Group Material collaboration that feels especially relevant today is The People’s Choice show (1981), in which they invited immigrant residents of their New York City block to exhibit mementos in their storefront gallery as an outcry against gentrification. In 1987, for Documenta 8, the group constructed a model of Kafka’s Castle with a collection of artworks inside as an offering. They wrote the following:

All artists seek an ideal audience. This audience used to be people—flesh and blood individuals. This is finished. Our art is now made for the Castle…the Castle is a general sweeping power we can no longer exactly locate…. To love the castle is to make oneself in its image. Artists take on attributes of the Castle. Artists are pawns of a higher rank…bestowed with the illusions of freedom…the castle weakens when the artist rejects the role of the rook…this requires artists who, not waiting their turn, ignore the laws of the grid and break the rules of the game.

If this frightening period won’t challenge artists to break out of the castle, I don’t know what will. Many museum curators, art dealers, and gallerists have appeased their collector base and their board members, maintaining the systemic inequity that has egregiously favored white male artists. If we were to look only at statistics of artists represented in solo shows and those who have risen to mega-stardom, we would be forgiven for thinking the New York art world doesn’t reflect this city’s diversity so much as it reflects the constituency of Trump’s America.

Many of us artists, writers, editors, and curators may not be the power players, but we are still the cultural elite, and we have a choice: We can continue making the same work that we know will sell, and selling the same work we know will sell, and buying the same work we know will sell for more later. Or we could choose not to. If art feels futile, start by saying no. Reject the role of the rook. Normalize this culture of refusal, so that when you say no, you know that the next artist will not say yes . . . .

Read it all at Hyperallergic.