counter-time group material’s chronicle of us intervention in central and south america

8/12/2019 Counter-Time Group Materials Chronicle of US Intervention in Central and South America

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Counter-Time: Group Materials Chronicle of US Intervention in Central and South AmericaAuthor(s): Claire Grace

Source: Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context, and Enquiry, Issue 26 (Spring 2011), pp. 27-37Published by: The University of Chicago Presson behalf of Central Saint Martins College of Art andDesign, University of the Arts LondonStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/659293.

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Te fact is that spatial form is the

perceptual basis of our notion of time,

that we literally cannot tell time

without the mediation of space. W.J.. Mitchell 1

History is, in effect, a science of complex

analogies, a science of double vision []History in this sense is a special method

of studying the present with the aid of

the facts of the past.

Boris Eikhenbaum 2

For some in the early s, time seemedto circle back on itself. Shadows of theVietnam War loomed large as the ReaganDoctrine, at the time still emergent,galvanised late-Cold War CIA and militaryoperations in South and Central America,in particular in El Salvador against the

FDR and the FMLN, and in Nicaraguaagainst the Sandinista Liberation Front. 3Images of state-sponsored atrocitiesappeared regularly in Te New York mes,magnifying the long-running history ofUnited States military action elsewheresouth of the border. As the crisis mounted,activists across the Americas respondedin kind. In New York, political exiles andlocal sympathisers formed a network ofdiverse organisations, both small and large,including CISPES (Committee in Solidaritywith the People of El Salvador), CasaNicaragua, aller Latinoamericano,INALSE (Institute of El Salvadorian Artsand Letters in Exile) and others, including,in the summer of , Artists Call AgainstUS Intervention in Latin America.4Activebetween and , Artists Callbroadcast a message of solidarity through-

out the art world in a national campaignof exhibitions and other events organisedin hundreds of alternative and establishedcultural institutions across the country.5InNew York alone, more than seven hundredartists participated, including manywell-known figures.6One of the mostremarkable contributions, meline: TeChronicle of US Intervention in Central

Artists: Group Material |27

Counter-Tme:Group MaterialsChronicle of USIntervention in Centraland South America Claire Grace

In this examination of Group Material'sTimeline, Claire Grace considers theambivalent relationship to time andhistoricisation embedded within theiruse of a graphic, linear timeline with

which to represent history.

1 W.J.T. Mitchell, Spatial Form in Literature: Toward a General Theory, in W.J.T. Mitchell (ed.),The Language of Images, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980, p.274.

2 Boris Eikhenbaum, Literary Environment (Leningrad 1929), in Ladislav Matejka and KrystnyaPomorska (ed.), Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views, Ann Arbor: Universityof Michigan, 1978, p.56. Cited in Leah Dickerman, The Fact and the Photograph, October, vol.118,Fall 2006, p.152.

3 The first letter Artists Call (see below) sent out to Fellow Artists in the summer of 1983 opened:Were starting down the Vietnam road again. After the 60s, we felt a sense of defeat, but in factwe helped deflect the full might of this country from landing on the Vietnamese. Now we haveto hold back the fist in Central America. Letter reproduced in Doug Ashford, Aesthetic Insurgency:Artists Call Against US Intervention in Central America (19821985), in System Error:War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning(exh. cat.), Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2007, p.104. The FDR(Revolutionary Democratic Front) formed in 1980 as a grouping of social democratic parties andpolitical organisations. The FMLN (The Farabundo Mart National Liberation Front) formed in 1980as a coalition of l eft-wing revolutionary guerrilla organisations (and has since become one of twomajor political parties in El Salvador).

4 See D. Ashford, Aesthetic Insurgency, op. cit., pp.11119. Email from Julie Ault, 20 November 2010.5 Organised by an ad-hoc coalition of artists, activists and other cultural practitioners, Artists Call

raised tens of thousands in donations for the National University of El Salvador, the SandinistaAssociation of Cultural Workers and a coalition of Salvadoran labour organisations. Exhibitions,performances and other events took place beginning in January 1984. As Jamey Gambrell put itat the time, fund raising was almost a secondary activity the expression of art-world oppositionto official US policy in [Central America] was, above all, intended to draw greater public attentionto the unofficial" war being fought there. Artists Call was [] about artists participating in theformation of political consciousness [ Many] organizers had participated in artist protests againstthe Vietnam War J. Gambrell, Art Against Intervention, Art in America, May 1984, pp.9 and 15.

6 Participants included Louise Bourgeois, Jimmy Durham, Leon Golub, Hans Haacke, Joyce Kozloff,Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Sol LeWitt, Ana Mendieta, Claes Oldenburg, Yvonne Rainer, RobertRauschenberg, Carolee Schneemann, Mark di Suvero and many others.

Group Material,Timeline: A Chronicleof US Interventionin Central andLatin America,1984. For ArtistsCall Against USIntervention inCentral America',P.S.1 Contemporary

Art Center, NewYork. Photograph:Dorothy Zeidman.Courtesy the artistsand Four CornersBooks



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and Latin America, was made by GroupMaterial, a collective of young New Yorkartists that formed in and whosemembers included two key figures inArtists Call (Doug Ashford and Julie Ault).7

melineexemplifies Group Materialsinstallation practice in a number of keyrespects, not least in its status as a tempo-rary, one time only project specific to bothits time (a two-month period in the winterof ) and its place (P.S.1 ContemporaryArt Center in Queens, New York).8Consistent with the ephemeral natureof many of Group Materials projects,melinealso exemplifies the collectivescuratorial approach to installation art.Filling a room at P.S.1, a loose, salon-stylehanging chequered all four walls with amultitude of cultural artefacts, all presentedon equal footing: newspaper clippings;press photographs; a scarf and bannerfrom the FMLN and the SandinistaLiberation Front; and artworks madein response to the crisis by close to fortycontemporary artists, including little-known figures and many prominent ones.Contributors included artists as diverseas Ida Applebroog, Conrad Atkinson, SueCoe, Mike Glier, Leon Golub, Michael JohnGonzalez, Louis Laurita, Faith Ringgold,

Nancy Spero, Haim Steinbach, membersof Group Material and numerous others.melinealso displayed original worksby historical figures such as HonorDaumier, na Modotti and Diego Rivera.9A selection of agricultural productsreferenced North-South trade relations:coffee grinds lined the edges of the room;a small heap of fresh bananas emitted apungent scent; ten large tobacco leavesclung to one wall, while on another cotton

sheeting hung in gauzy folds; and sheetsof copper were also displayed. In thecentre of the room stood a massive, brightred sculpture in the shape of a maritimenavigation buoy, which had featured in a

recent protest in Washington, DC againstUS policy in Central America. melines archival impulse10operated much like other Group Materialinstallations: it pooled relevant artefactsto create a chamber for reflection on apressing matter of public concern, in thiscase the impact of US military interventionon political, cultural and economicconditions in South and Central America.But in its representation of chronologicaltime, the project marked an importantshi in Group Materials practice. A redband three-inches wide encircled all fourwalls, hand-painted at intervals withcrisp black frets and four-digit numbersenumerating the years of US interventionsin the region.11Tough the timeline itselfincluded no explanatory text, its datedtrajectory provided a framework in whichthe multifarious collage of images andobjects assembled above and belowcould come together as a richly reflective,if ultimately abstract, historiography.Mapping a temporal axis onto a spatialone, melineintroduced the model offactographic installation later developedby Group Material in what has becomeperhaps their most well known work, AIDSmeline().12Little has been published

on the precursor, or on either worksambivalent relationship to the graphicform they inhabit, the modern timeline.13Tis essay explores that ambivalencein the context of the project, lookingclosely at its implications for historicalrepresentation and spectatorship.

Like Group Materials chronicleof the AIDS crisis, the work isanything but a straightforward timeline.Codified in late-eighteenth-century

England, this powerfully reductiverepresentational device was linkedfrom the start with the idea of teleology.Its linear horizontal form provided whathas recently been described as an intuitive

7 During the making of Timeline, Group Materials members were: Ashford, Ault, Mundy McLaughlinand Tim Rollins. See J. Ault (ed.), Show and Tell: A Chronicle of Group Material, London: Four CornersBooks, 2010, p.59. Other key figures in Artists Calls organisation included Zoe Anglesey, Daniel FloresAscencio of the newly formed INALSE, Coosje van Bruggen, Josely Carvalho, Leon Golub, Kimiko Hahn,Ted Hannon, Jon Hendricks, Thomas Lawson, Lucy Lippard, Thiago de Mello and others. Though notthe subject of this essay, the diversity of Artists Calls organising body was central to the work thatwas accomplished. Email from D. Ashford, 5 November 2010.

8 Group Materials exhibition (22 January18 March 1984) took place long before P.S.1 a converted

school building in Long Island City, Queens officially became affiliated with the Museum of ModernArt in 2000. P.S.1 was then a thriving non-traditional venue for experimental art and site-specificinstallation.

9 A complete list of the artists and cultural artifacts represented in Timeline, as well as a writtendescription of the work and a series of installation photographs all appear in J. Ault (ed.), Show andTell, op. cit., pp.8390 and 258. Information on originals from an email from J. Ault, op. cit.

10 Group Material anticipates the archival impulse coined for a tendency in art production in the 1990sin Hal Foster, An Archival Impulse, October, vol.110, Fall 2004, pp.322.

11 Timelines numbers were hand-painted by Tim Rollins using an overhead projector and Letraset layouttransparencies prepared in advance. Email from J. Ault, op. cit.



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visual analogue for concepts of historicalprogress that were [then] becomingpopular.14In its use by Group Material

just over two centuries later, seeminglyanachronistically within the burgeoningpostmodernism of the s, melinedely adapts this Enlightenment-era form,applying it just enough to mark a pathaway from the anxieties postmodernismharbours for both history and time (theformer regarded as the pen of oppression,and the latter seen as too fugitive to chartor trace).15But even as melinemovestowards temporal and historiographicclarity, it is far from a smooth rehabilitationof the early-modern graphic form itmarshals. rue to its historical moment,melineis also shot through withambivalences of its own. Confronting thecertitudes of the timeline with postmoderndoubt, melineworks these two temporali-ties against one another, and in so doingopens up a very different kind of historicalencounter.

History LessonsTe bright red band that extended horizon-tally across melines four walls hoveredat a common eye-level about five feet fromthe floor. Its vivid colour referenced the

palette of post-revolutionary Soviet graphicdesign (an important source for GroupMaterials practice generally), and alludedto the blood lost in the struggles in Southand Central America. With these overtones,the crimson timeline not only unified theinstallations kaleidoscopic visual field,but also commanded attention as its redthread its single formal constant andmost prominent feature (complimented bythe giant protest sculpture at the centre ofthe room).16Spanning from to ,the timelines scope connected currentinterventions, naturalised in the US ColdWar media as necessary or even heroic,with interventions in the distant past,whose moral depravity was easily identifi-able in retrospect.17By chronicling thepatterns of a silenced history of oppression,melinefunctioned as a work of counter-memory,18reflecting in this regard theincredulity toward master narratives ofprogress described in Franois Lyotardsgeneration-defining book, Te PostmodernCondition, first published in English theyear of Group Materials installation.19

If melineparticipated in criticalpostmodernism by virtue of its subjectmatter, its red thread cut against thegrain. Abiding by the conventions of the


12 The term factography derives from Soviet Productivist art of the 1920s and 30s, which was, alongwith Constructivism, an important influence for Group Material. Factography refers to thepresentation within the sphere of art of contemporary and historical data relating to social,economic and political issues. See Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, From Faktura to Factography,October,vol.30, Fall 1984, pp.82119. As Buchloh summarises in a later essay on Hans Haacke, factographyextends from the assumption that the new masses of industrial societies would warrant newparticipatory forms of art production that directly related to their daily experiences and thustranscended the traditional class limitations imposed by the esoteric standards of advancedbourgeois visual culture. B.H.D. Buchloh, Hans Haacke: Memory and Instrumental Reason (1988),Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 19551975, Cambridge,MA and London: The MIT Press, 2000, pp.23940. AIDS Timeline, which traces the political rootsof the AIDS crisis and its demographic and cultural impact, was first exhibited in 1989 at theMATRIX art gallery of the University of California, Berkeley, and was reconfigured for the WadsworthAtheneum in 1990 and the Whitney Biennial in 1991.

13 The subject merits volumes. My own work considers these two projects as works of counter-memory

that dtourneboth modern representational devices they occupy, the timeline (as I discuss here)and the archive. I also develop a reading of these projects as embodied spatialisations of memoryreminiscent of classical mnemonic techniques in which narrative is mapped onto imaginedarchitectural spaces (see Frances Yates, The Art of Memory, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966).

14 Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton, Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline, Princeton:Princeton Architectural Press, 2010, p.245. As the authors demonstrate, the art of graphicallyrepresenting chronological time has a long history of its own. Tabular formats developed in thefourth century remained popular through the eighteenth century and beyond, and in the Middle Agesand the Renaissance chronographers experimented with an extraordinarily imaginative repertoireof graphic forms, including elaborate systems of roots and trees and anatomical renderings of Christas well as of dragons and other fantastical creatures. Soon after its emergence in the 1770s, thesingle-axis horizontal timeline almost completely supplanted these earlier models, catching onprecisely because it captured the historical spirit of the moment. Ibid., p.19.

15 See Jean-Franois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge(1979, trans. GeoffBennington and Brian Massumi), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984; David Harvey,The Condition of Postmodernity, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989; and Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism,or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, New Left Review, vol.146, 1984, pp.5392.

16 See Thomas Lawson, Group Material, Timeline, P.S.1, Artforum, vol.22, no.8, May 1984, p.83.17 As just one example, Newsweeks 10 October 1983 cover story vaunts what it calls The CIAs Secret

Warriors, referring by this brassy description to the Special Forces (Green Berets by another name),the elite military division dispatched in many Cold War operations during this period, the ranks ofwhich swelled under President Reagan.

18 The term and concept of counter-memory is drawn from Michel Foucault,Language, Counter-Memory,Practice(ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. D.F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon), Ithaca: Cornell UniversityPress, 1977.

19 J.-F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, op. cit.



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timelines modern form, its single-axis,diachronic extension suggests continuityand definition where postmodernisminsists on multiplicity and fragmentation.However appropriate to Group Materialsenduring pedagogical investments, andto the specific site of display in this particu-lar case (a former classroom in P.S.srepurposed school building), melinesmeasured progression of dates affirmsprecisely the genre of historical andtemporal coherence that the anxiouspressures of postmodernism had alreadyscattered and dissolved. Indeed, in GroupMaterials immediate art historical context,from the s at least through the mid-s, artistic production in the US oensteered clear of historical representation.As Mark Godfrey has argued, in the fewinstances where historical subject mattersurfaces in this period, it tends to place lessemphasis on the history it addresses thanon the limits of historical representation ina world heavily mediated by press photog-raphy and television.20Tere are, of course,a number of crucial exceptions, and it isone of the claims of this essay that GroupMaterials melinehelped chartan emergent, countervailing trend ofhistoricism in post-War and contemporary

avant-garde practice. Among other artistswhose work engaged this historical turnearly on, Atkinson, Golub, Hans Haacke,Martha Rosler and Spero informed Group

Materials development to varying degreesas mentors or interlocutors, either forthe collective generally or for individualmembers.21

melineran counter not only to thehistorical scepticism that characterisespost-War art production in the US, but alsoto its almost obsessional uneasiness withtime and its measure, a prevailing anxietyPamela M. Lee describes in Chronophobia().22In nonlinear paradigms ofseriality, recursion and endless duration,the art of this period strips time bare ofhistorical meaning even while compulsive-ly belabouring its passage.23Examplesabound: s Minimalist sculpture, whichquite radically emphasises time as a factorof perceptual understanding, nonethelessscours phenomenological experience cleanof its historical conditions.24Te work ofRobert Smithson fragments and refractstime to such an extent that althoughhistorical practice flickers insistently in awork like Spiral Jetty(), it ultimatelydrains away, spiralling vertiginously out ofour grasp.25Hanne Darbovens temporalsublime,26from onwards, onlyin exceptional cases acknowledges thehistorical content of the days it endlesslytabulates.27Likewise, in the white-on-black

date paintings of On Kawaras odayseries(ongoing), the artists disciplinedregistration of days methodically emptiestime of historical meaning.28

20 See Mark Godfrey, The Artist as Historian, October, vol.120, Spring 2007, pp.14142. See also B.H.D.Buchloh, A Note on Gerhard Richters October 18, 1977, October, vol.48, Spring 1989, pp.88109.

21 Atkinson, Golub, Rosler and Spero were also frequently represented in Group Materials installationsand projects (including Timeline), along with Jenny Holzer, Juan Sanchez, Mike Glier, Hans Haackeand many other consistent contributors. Group Material had other key mentors that should bementioned, among them Margaret Harrison and Lucy Lippard; five members of the original groupalso studied with Joseph Kosuth at the School of Visual Arts (though, with the exception of Rollins,these members had left the group by 1981). Ashford studied with Rosler and Haacke at Cooper Unionfrom 1980 to 1981, and subsequently maintained relationships with both artists. Email from J. Ault,

op. cit.; J. Ault (ed.), Show and Tell, op. cit., pp.7, 49 and 59; and email from D. Ashford, op. cit.22 Pamela M. Lee, Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s, Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press,

2004, p.xii. Lees account of the centrality of time in the art of the 1960s has been enormously helpfulfor this essay. Whether these temporal preoccupations took on specifically phobic dimensions, as sheinsists, is largely beside the point. Certainly, however, what Lee calls the chronophobia of 1960s art(which she attributes primarily to new developments in technology and the rise of the informationage) has roots in the l ate nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with the increasingly simultaneoustemporality afforded by new inventions such as photography, telephone and radio. The modernistavant-garde responded by theorising time as relative and non-sequential (one thinks of Man RaysIndestructable Object, 1923, and other works from Dada and Surrealism; Joyce and Woolf in the sphereof literature; and Bergson, Freud and Einstein in philosophy and science). See Leesa Fanning, Dada andSurrealist Time, in Jan Schall (ed.), Tempus Fugit, Time Flies, Kansas City: Nelson-Atkins Museum ofArt, 2000, p.88.

23 P.M. Lee, Chronophobia, op. cit., p.xxiii.24 Ibid., p.278. Also see H. Foster, The Crux of Minimalism, The Return of the Real, Cambridge, MA and

London: The MIT Press, 1996.25 See Jennifer Roberts, Mirror-Travels: Robert Smithson and History, New Haven: Yale University Press,

2004, pp.5,138 and 139.26 P.M. Lee, Chronophobia, op. cit., p.288.27 Alexander Alberro goes so far as to insist that Darbovens tables of countless sequenced dates have

nothing to do with the world at all. A. Alberro, Time and Conceptual Art, in Jan Schall (ed.), TempusFugit, op. cit., p.151. Darbovens monumental Kulturgeschichte 18801983 (Cultural History 18801983)(198083) stands as an important exception, perhaps more archival in nature than specificallyhistorical. Dating from the same time frame as Group Materials 1984 project, it offers an importantpoint of comparison, particularly since both projects are, as I explore in my current research, poisedbetween the archive and the timeline. See Dan Adler, Hanne Darboven: Cultural History 18801983,London: Afterall Books, 2009.



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Group Material,AIDS Timeline(New York City 1991),1991. Whitney

Museum of AmericanArt, New York.Photograph:Ken Schles. Courtesythe artists and FourCorners Books

Lee struggles to carve a space forhistorical agency within the yawningtemporal extensiveness she describes.29

But as her account itself suggests, theultimate effect of these tireless enumerativesystems is to clear time of any trace ofhistorical narrative or incident.30Wanand still, they cast their spectator adriin a kind of post-historical ennui, a worldin which, it seems, nothing much happensor matters and no action seems capableof making much difference.31

melineforecloses on this coolindifference. Unlike the vacuous

metronomic temporality of Conceptualart, or the clean phenomenological time ofMinimalism, melinepumped its -year

span full of historical affect. Its resonanceas history resulted from Group Materialsdecision to cross their signature approachto three-dimensional collage with agraphic representation of time. In thisregard, however spare the timelinesnumerical typography remainedthroughout (a minimalist, hand-renderedsans serif as reminiscent of Kawarasas of Constructivist graphic design),contextualised by the installations

28 Kawara lines each paintings storage box with a page from that days newspaper. Not meantfor exhibition purposes, this practice redundantly corroborates each paintings time and place,but accords little historical meaning to reported events. See P.M. Lee, Chronophobia, op. cit., p.293.Other examples include: Christine Kozlovs 271 Blank Sheets of Paper Corresponding to 271 Days ofConcepts Rejected(1968); Douglas Hueblers Duration Piece(1969); Eva Hesses Metronomic IrregularityII(1966); Dennis Oppenheims Time Pocket(1968); and any number of others. Even in the workof Hans Haacke, where history and chronology often play an important role, registering the passageof time does not necessarily grant it historical meaning. In Haackes News(196970), five teletypemachines print reams of information transmitted live from commercial wire services. Even whilethe printed scrolls disrupt the ostensible neutrality of the white cube and insist on the gallerysinscription within politics and history, the endlessly accumulating surfeit of information remainsillegible as news. The few instances of linear, chronological progressions in the art of the periodtend not to address historical time but rather to evoke a more personal commentary: Sophie CallesThe Shadow(1981), Eleanor Antins Carving: A Traditional Sculpture(1972) or Vito Acconcis FollowingPiece(1969). Though not acknowledged by Group Material as a source for their work, it should be

mentioned that Judy Chicagos Dinner Party(197479) not only stands as an important exampleof historicism in late-twentieth-century art in the US (the works monumental banquet table,place settings, tiled floor and other elements represent 1,038 women in history), but also includesa wall-mounted historical timeline in the form of seven Heritage Panels, photo-and-text collagesthat document the lives of 999 women dating from prehistory to the twentieth century.

29 P.M. Lee, Chronophobia, op. cit., p.278.30 See ibid., p.307.31 At least in Smithsons case, this temporal sensibility provided a kind of cosmic endorsement for

his own aversion to activism, political or otherwise. J. Roberts, Mirror-Travels, op. cit., p.9. Moreimportant than the careers and activist credentials of any one of these artists is the kind ofspectatorship their work presupposes.



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layered accumulation of display objects,the four-digit numbers registered notmerely as abstract symbols of time, but alsoas moments of history. Likewise, howeverrichly associative the installations culturalartefacts might have been on their own,only in the context of the timelinesnumbered extension do they come aliveas historically articulate objects. ConsiderRichard Princes re-photograph of aMarlboro ad, mounted in meline above

the year . One of many works fromPrinces Cowboy series (), theimage shows a cowboy from behind as hereaches towards a horses bridle, perhapsabout to mount, or else breaking theanimal to follow his commands. In thecontext of the installation, the visualmetaphor for conquest suggested byPrinces work directs attention to themutually reinforcing roots of North

American myths of masculinity andexpansionist foreign policy. But it is GroupMaterials wall-mounted timeline thatmakes these connections register asspecifically historical: is the year theMonroe Doctrine was first introduced,solidifying the USs expansionist position inthe Western hemisphere and providing therhetorical arsenal cited on numerous futureoccasions to legitimise US interventions inthe Americas.

melines commitment to historyreflects Group Materials immersion inefforts to support the struggle for self-determination in Central America. By ,they had formed relationships with exiledartists and intellectuals from that region,and had plugged into the activities ofCISPES, Casa Nicaragua, the aller

Latinoamericano and other organisationsthat together occupied the first floor of West st Street, where, joining theseorganisations, Group Material rented anoffice space beginning in the autumn of.32It was there at the aller Latino-americano that Group Material presentedLuchar!(Struggle!, ) the previousspring. An important precursor formeline(as well as for Artists Call),Luchar!assembled a range of works madein response to the crisis in Central America,including many by artists later included inmeline.33Not unlike meline, Luchar!vividly addressed the realities of torture,state violence and human rights abusesin the region.34Te project includedno timeline or chronology, however,and remained focused on present-tenseconditions rather than their deeperhistorical roots. Te year-and-a-halftransition between Luchar!and melineopened the door to historical time, a shifor which Group Materials involvement inArtists Call and the organisations of Westst Street was perhaps central. CISPESmade the cumulative, historical depth ofcurrent events explicit by producing a flyerchronicling the dates of US interventionsbetween and a chronology

that contributed to Group Materialsmove towards the marked historicismof meline, which included the flyeras a scaled-up Photostat mounted onthe entrance wall immediately to the rightof the title.35

Many other points of referenceinformed Group Materials turn towardsmelines chronographic ethos. oonumerous to detail fully here, it shouldbe stressed that the collectives historical

sensibility extended perhaps less fromprecedents in the realm of visual art thanfrom popular culture. In this regard,CISPESs flyer joined the many graphiccharts and timelines printed regularly inNewsweek, memagazine and othersimilar publications. Te exhibition designof Charles and Ray Eames also played a

Unlike the vacuous metronomictemporality of Conceptual art,or the clean phenomenologicaltime of Minimalism, Tmelinepumped its -year span full

of historical affect.

32 Or in North American English, the second floor.33 Luchar!included projects by Bolivar Arellano, Golub, Lawson, Lippard, OSPAAL (Organisation of

Solidarity of the People of Asia, Africa and Latin America), Susan Meiselas, Rosler, Christy Rupp,

Anton van Dalen, members of Group Material and about forty others. J. Ault (ed.), Show and Tell, op. cit.,p.258. The link between Luchar!and Artists Call is described in D. Ashford, Aesthetic Insurgency,op. cit., pp.11416.

34 As described in Show and Tell, A work by Anne Pitrone a life-size piata that depicts a figure inthe strappado torture position generates some controversy. Its symbolically powerful presenceis disturbingly evocative of l ived reality to some staff members of and visitors to the organisationson the same floor. J. Ault (ed.), Show and Tell, op. cit.pp.7475.

35 Conversation with D. Ashford, 10 September 2010; and conversation with J. Ault, , 20 November 2010.CISPESs timeline is reproduced in J. Ault (ed.), Show and Tell, op. cit., p.90.



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36 First mounted in 1961 at the California Museum of Science and Industry,Mathematicawassubsequently installed semi-permanently in Chicago, Boston and New York. The World of Franklinand Jeffersonwas organised in collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and travelledto various venues in Europe before opening in New York in 1976. Group Material encountered theseexhibitions primarily through their published documentation. Email from J. Ault, op. cit.

37 Combining diverse cultural and historical material, Atkinsons work and the Eameses exhibitions

paralleled and contributed to the archival, anti-hierarchical inclusiveness of Group Materialsinstallations. T. Rollins, Art as Social Action: An Interview with Conrad Atkinson,Art in America,vol.68, February 1980, pp.11923. Ault also names Constructivism as a point of reference forGroup Materials historicism. Email from J. Ault, op. cit.I am grateful to Dennis Tenenboym forpointing out that post-revolutionary Soviet graphic design not infrequently incorporates temporallyarranged presentations of data, such as graphs and tables.

38 B.H.D. Buchloh, Hans Haacke: Memory and Instrumental Reason,op. cit., pp.22228.39 Yve-Alain Bois, D. Crimp, Rosalind Krauss and H. Haacke, A Conversation with Hans Haacke,

October, vol.30, Fall 1984, p.37.40 In an unpublished portion of an interview with Group Material that appeared in Parachutemagazine

in 1989, Jim Drobnik prompts Ault, Ashford and Felix Gonzalez-Torres to reflect on the relationshipbetween their practice and Haackes Manet-PROJEKT. Their responses convey quite differentperspectives, though on the whole their comments draw a distinction between the muckrakingspecificity of Haackes work and Group Materials more interrogative and expansive approach.Even while retaining this more inquiry-based, inclusive approach, however, the forensic historicismof a work like AIDS Timelinenonetheless resembles the real-time analysis for which Haackeswork is known, in particular in projects such as Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings,

a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971(1971). This connection has been pointed out in DavidDeicher, Polarity Rules: Looking at Whitney Annuals and Biennials, 19682000, in J. Ault (ed.),Alternative Art New York 19651985: A Cultural Politics Book for the Social Text Collective, Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 2002, pp.24445. See also J. Drobnik, Interview with Group Material,21 June 1989, Group Material Archive, Box 7, Interview Transcripts 1, The Fales Library & SpecialCollections, New York University; and J. Drobnick, Dialectical Group Materialism, Parachute, no.56,OctoberDecember 1989, p.29.

41 D. Rosenberg and A. Grafton, Cartographies of Time, op. cit., pp.122 and 241.

role; Mathematica: A World of Numbers and Beyond() and Te World ofFranklin and Jefferson() bothincluded wall-mounted timelines, forinstance.36Te installations of BritishConceptual artist Conrad Atkinson madea strong impression as well. Atkinsonsfirst exhibition at Ronald Feldman FineArts in New York, MaterialSix Works(), included wall-mounted displayschronicling various politically-significanthistories, including the struggle in North-ern Ireland and the nexus of industrialpollution and public health.37

One further precedent should bementioned here, if only as a heuristic pointof comparison: Hans Haackes Manet-PROJEK(). In this works tensequential panels, Haacke charts theprovenance of douard Manets painting Une Botte dasperges(A Bunchof Asparagus), which had just enteredthe permanent collection of the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne. Conceivedfor (and ultimately censored by) thismuseum, Haackes work exposes theNazi-era career of the paintings previousowner, Deutsche Bank chairman HermannJosef Abs, who had been a prominentfigure in the economic establishment of the

Tird Reich. A timeline of sorts, Manet-PROJEKdeploys historical chronologyto expose the political contradictions ofcultural patronage.38As Haacke pointedout in a interview, inverting the arthistorians custom to trace the provenance

of a work, provenance serves here not toauthenticate the object but rather to exposeits underside.39

Te forensic historicism of Haackeswork and certainly its prehistory in Sovietproductivism share points in common(as well as many differences) with GroupMaterials practice, including projectssuch as melineand AIDS meline.If less concretely factographic thanManet-PROJEK, and broader in its socialand political ramifications, melinecouldbe said to extend in part from a similarlyhistoricising, chronographic impulse.Significantly, too, each work explodes theexpectations of the traditional historicalform it inhabits.40

Historical Polysemymelinesubjects linear historiographyto a series of displacements that initiatethe viewer into a mode of spectatorshipquite different from the one the timelinecustomarily invites. If expanding thetimeline at an architectural scale is nowsomewhat common (in museum displays,for instance), it is rare in the larger historyof the form, whose power as a synopticmedium more oen exploits the disembod-ied, at a glance scale of the printed page.41

Pulling this totalising view apart, melinerecasts the two-dimensional medium in athree-dimensional volume, opening it out tocreate a chronographic space. Rather thanproviding a birds eye view, it implicates thespectator as a subject embodied within



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the imagination just as far, since manyobjects, rather than cued to an isolatedyear, resonate meaningfully at any numberof points along the timelines four-wallextension. As apposite as Princes Marlboroad re-photograph is for , its aestheticof Manifest Destiny also reflects thenumerous subsequent years in whichUS government officials cited the MonroeDoctrine as a rationale for intervention(including several years listed on thetimeline, such as , which referencesthe coup dtat in Guatemala that year,organised and sponsored by the CIA).Likewise, hanging above the year ,a poster from Barbara Krugers seriesYou make history when you do business() precisely describes a much largerhistorical context of economicallymotivated military intervention. In naModottis photograph Hands Resting onool(), which hangs between and , a labourers hands pack theclosely cropped frame, simultaneouslyconceding to work while issuing a silentrefusal. Te photograph conveys volumesabout the exploitation of labour duringmelines entire historical span. As these examples suggest, restless attheir given location on the timeline, most

objects echo just as meaningfully acrossall four walls. Teir eloquence across timesignals the continuity of oppression inthe past and present.45By the same token,no single artwork or cultural artefact tellsthe full story of any one year; instead eachintervention appears as an overdeterminedcomplex whose narrative disperses acrossa heterogeneous constellation of objects.Ultimately, then, the timelines two-dimensional trajectory serves not as a

historical absolute but as a structuringdevice that encourages viewers to diagram

a virtual, three-dimensional web ofconnections across both space and time.46Te installation thereby rethinks thetimeline less as a representational formthan as an interrogative one, designed asmuch as anything to provoke the viewershistorical imagination. melinefurther disrupts the conven-tions of linear historiography by presentingthree different competing timelines. Eachchronicles the same general subject matter,without coinciding. Multiplied three ways,the works rival timelines thus cast doubton the narrative authority of the work asa whole. At P.S., Group Materials red andblack wall-mounted chronology vied forattention with the timeline provided byCISPES, which describes interventionsbetween and , each with a singleline of text, and which Group Materialmounted in a scaled-up version on me-lines entrance wall.47Te third chronologyconsists of a series of black-and-whiteposters designed by New York artist BillAllen. Group Material elected to displayAllens posters as part of melineaerhaving featured them one year earlier inSubculture(), an exhibition projectorganised by Group Material in New YorkCity subways.48Allens posters each follow

an identical diptych format. Te right sidereproduces a grainy photograph of asoldier confronting another man. On thele side, in simple typeface against a starkwhite background, the name of a country inSouth or Central America or the Caribbeanfloats above the year of a US invasion inthat country. If Allens spare and repetitiveimage-text aesthetic takes the timelineto the brink of Conceptual arts temporalblankness, its ultimate emphasis is, as

one contemporary reviewer put it, theharrowing repetition of the oppression it

44 Heartfields image illustrates the cover of a 1933 edition of the German leftist magazine, AIZ(Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung, or Workers' Pictorial Newspaper). Group Material describes thisconnection in its proposal for Timeline, op. cit.

45 Thus, as Thomas Lawson put it in a review at the time, Those seeking exact correspondences betweendates and display items would have been disappointed, for the evidence was put to different use.A point-by-point demonstration would simply have been another accretion of power, anotherconstruction of influence. T. Lawson, Group Material, Timeline, P.S.1, op. cit., p.83.

46 This point is indebted to a discussion about AIDS Timelinebetween Ault and Richard Meyer followingAults presentation at A Museum of Ideas Contemporary Conversations (2), 27 March 2010,University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

47 Conversation with J. Ault, op. cit.CISPESs chronology also appeared in a catalogue P.S.1 publishedon all the exhibitions on view at the time. In addition to CISPESs chronology, the section dedicated

to Timelinealso includes an updated version of Group Materials initial proposal for Timeline, as wellas a floor-plan sketch by Rollins. P.S.1 Museum; Institute for Art and Urban Resources, Winter:January 22 March 18, 1984(exh. cat.), New York: Institute for Art and Urban Resources, 1984.

48 Allens posters were designed for Group Materials 1983 project Subculture, in which the collectiveinvited one hundred artists to exhibit in 1,400 rented advertising spaces on New York City trains.Falling between Luchar!and Timeline, Allens chronology (along with CISPESs timeline and theother reference points cited above) contributed to Group Materials shift toward the historicisingemphasis of the 1984 project. Allens posters also hung on the walls of Group Materials office onWest 21st Street. Conversation with D. Ashford, op. cit.; and email from D. Ashford, op. cit.



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chronicles.49Moreover, in the context ofmelinethe posters formed a dotted linenear the ceiling, contributing to the largerworks historical polysemy, where threerival chronologies coexist, highlighting bytheir differences the problem of historicalrepresentation itself.50

If melines three chronologiesrepresent history in different terms, theyalso represent different historical content.Te crimson timeline lists only a smallselection of dates enumerated in CISPESsversion. Te latter begins in , while theformer begins more than forty yearsearlier. Many of the dates in Allens timelinefail to appear in either of the other two(which is only partly explained by Allensinclusion of interventions in the Caribbean,a region they exclude). On one wall, Allenstimeline lingers at the turn of the century,counting off the years , and, while below it Group Materials redline rushes ahead to . On anotherwall, Allens timeline roughly aligns withthe temporal frame below, with bothmarking years between and , buteven here the two timelines are syncopated.Only in a handful of instances do theirdates coincide.

With three different temporal frames

of reference potentially visible at once the crimson timeline at eye level, the Allentimeline up above and the CISPES timelineon the entrance wall Group Materialsmelineoffers anything but a definitiveaccount of history. melineis in thisregard as much about exposing thefallibility of historical representation andthe impossibility of narrative closure asit is about presenting a fixed and didacticaccount of the past. Diachronic as a

chronicle, it is also synchronous as aspatialised and multiple form. Definitive asa timeline, the works juxtaposition ofconflicting chronologies shows each one as,in part, a construction. Beyond the installations representationof time, its existence in time is just aselusive. If the timeline as a form lays claimto the permanence of narrative authority,

Group Materials melinedefies the modelonce again. Specific to its time and place,when the installation closed in March the objects it had gathered dispersedforever. From the vantage point of thepresent, to experience the installation asit once was is impossible. One has to relyinstead on the few existing installationshots and the memories of those whowitnessed the work firsthand. Even duringthe course of the exhibition, melineemphasised its ephemeral constitution.Bananas ripened, tobacco leaves brownedand coffee grinds lost their scent. If thesematerial transformations chart a temporaltrajectory, their deterioration and ultimatedisintegration suggest decay rather thanteleology or linear progress. Counter toconventions of the timeline as a form (aswell as to conventions of the art object),the work made itself just as elusive as thehistorical representation it offered. As this essay has argued, melineoccupied the form its title names only byinverting many of its conventions. Inexploding the expectations of the formaldevice it inhabits, the work substitutes adifferent kind of historical encounter forthe one the timeline might otherwise invite.In so doing, it not only succeeds in bringing

an occluded history to light but alsoencourages its viewers to think criticallyand historically about the present, andabout the role of narrative form in allhistorical representations. Rather than thefluid and singular voice of the conventionaltimeline, here the historical recordfragments and divides, multiplying acrossan intricate circuitry of temporal registersand visual forms. Neither able to settle onany one object, nor fully trust any narrative

voice, the viewer must rely on his or herown historical imagination to make senseof the past.51As a work of historicalrepresentation, therefore, melinecastsdoubt on the possibility of any singleauthoritative account.

But if melineraises the sceptre of thepost-historical, it does so only to prove thisnotion wrong. Tough the work refuses

49 J. Gambrell, Art Against Intervention, op. cit., p.15.50 By including these three different chronologies, Group Material may not have specifically intended

for Timelineto represent such divergent accounts of the past. However, they were certainly veryfamiliar with both Allens and CISPESs chronologies prior to executing the wall-mounted timeline.As mentioned above, they invited Allen to exhibit the black-and-white posters as part of Timelineafter they had been included in Group Materials project Subculture. Similarly, working in theenvironment of West 21st Street they had certainly read CISPESs chronology, if not discussed itat meetings. This suggests some degree of intentionality around the historical multi-vocality thatultimately results.

51 The descriptions in this paragraph draw closely on Godfreys fascinating and pertinent discussionof the work of Matthew Buckingham. M. Godfrey, The Artist as Historian, op. cit., p.149.



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the authority of linear historiography, itremains recognisable as a timeline nonethe-less. By combining this form with strategies

of abstraction (the lack of explanatorytexts and the loose cognitively challengingconnections between dates and objects)and multiplicity (the profusion of objectsand narrative voices), melineexhortsits viewers (as well as its makers) to act ashistorians themselves. Refusing postmod-ernisms pessimism towards historicallabour and representation, the work insistson the necessity of both tasks, not justfor artistic practice but also as modes of

spectatorship.52History is only part of melineslesson, however, for its centre of gravityis an object of political agency, a massivebright red sculpture that had been bran-dished a few weeks before the exhibitionopened at a public protest in the nationscapital. Created by Bill Allen, Ann Messnerand Barbara Westermann, the sculpturetakes the form of a giant maritime naviga-tion buoy. At the demonstration, its bell

rang a repeated toll of warning, markingtime not metronomically but accordingto the jostling movements of protestors

holding it alo by the beams at its base.In meline, though silenced and stilledby the exhibition context, the buoysearlier life was referenced in a photographdocumenting the Washington demonstra-tion, prominently mounted on the crimsontimeline as the very final image of ,the installations culminating moment,when history slips into the present. Techromatic bond between the sculptureand Group Materials timeline establishes

a connection between historical analysisand public dissent in the present tense.Te red at the centre also marks time alongthe walls, underscoring collective protestas a force as constant as the chronicleof oppression itself. In turn, the lessonsof history that unfold along the wallsultimately converge at the focal point ofcollective action, interpellating melinesviewers not only as historians but also aspotential activists.

52 See B.H.D. Buchloh, A Note on Gerhard Richters October 18, 1977, op. cit. M. Godfreys The Artistas Historian, op. cit.makes the case that history, relatively absent from Anglo-American post-Warart, has recently become a primary concern in artistic practice. Notable examples relevant for GroupMaterials work include: Roslers installation Fascination with the (game of the) exploding (historical)hollow leg(1985); Richters series October 18, 1977(1988); Mary Kellys Mea Culpa(1999); and,more recently, Chto delat?s timeline projects (200810) and the Potos Principle exhibitionat the Museo Nacional Centro de Reina Sofa in Madrid and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin,curated by Alice Creischer, Max Jorge Hinderer and Andreas Siekmann. My current project undertakesa more thoroughgoing comparison with works such as these.

Group Material,Timeline: A Chronicleof US Interventionin Central and

Latin America,1984. For ArtistsCall Against USIntervention inCentral America',P.S.1 ContemporaryArt Center, NewYork. Photograph:Dorothy Zeidman.Courtesy the artistsand Four CornersBooks

counter-time group material’s chronicle of us intervention in central and south america

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