OF LATE, compelling first-person narratives have detailed ACT UP New York’s inchoate years of the late 1980s—notably Sarah Schulman’s Let The Record Show and Peter Staley’s Never Silent— when AIDS activists battled government, pharmaceutical, and religious malfeasance. Flamboyant street actions caught the attention of the media, and artists enlivened the theatricality of these protests. Artistic affinity groups met weekly to create galvanizing agitprop imagery and video documentation. Gran Fury, DIVA TV, and Testing the Limits were some of the art collectives that emerged. Jack Lowery’s It Was Vulgar & It Was Beautiful examines the legacy of one of these groups, Gran Fury, self-defined as “a band of individuals united in anger and committed to exploit the power of art to end the AIDS crisis.” Their æsthetic appropriated Madison Avenue style advertising, blurring the lines between graphic art and activism, handing out Xeroxed flyers with singular slogans at rallies or pasting posters onto public spaces in late-night, guerilla-style handiwork. Within a few short years, their work was ubiquitous, seen on posters, stickers, pins, T-shirts, billboards, banners, public transportation, and print ads around the world. None of the collective’s work was ever copyrighted and is still in the public domain. Merchandizing these images supported ACT UP efforts. Their compelling iconography caught the attention of the art world with commissions from museums in New York, Los Angeles, Montreal, Berlin, and Venice. Christopher Knight, art critic for The L.A. Times, enthused: “Gran Fury has produced the most substantive and successful political graphic art of the postwar era in the United States.” This recognition was complicated. While sponsorship allowed the group to create larger-scale works, at times language had to be modified, and some members thought it was diluting their political propaganda focus. Outrage demanding public actions seemed muted on gallery walls. As some members began to focus on their own careers, others burned out from the ongoing annihilation of the pandemic, leading to the group’s gradual dissolution. Lowery tells the story of Gran Fury by drawing from interviews and archival material from ten of its members, and by delving into the ACT UP Oral History Archives organized by Jim Hubbard and Sarah Schulman. The group got its unofficial start when a curator at New York City’s New Museum, Bill Olander, asked ACT UP to create a window installation in 1987 that incorporated Silence = Death iconography and images of such homo-hating political figures as Jesse Helms, Jerry Falwell, William F. Buckley, and Ronald Reagan. Well over fifty people worked on this installation, which received enormous media coverage. Filmmaker Tom Kalin spoke about participating: “In makingLet the Record Show, a bunch of crotchety and opinionated people found a way to work together. And it made us all feel less scared.” With the success of this project, the ad hoc group wanted to continue working together and formally chose the name Gran Fury (after the Plymouth car model used by New York Police). The collective was originally open to all and was quite porous. Eventually the group limited membership for efficiency and productivity. Lowery’s incisive book functions as a catalogue raisonné of the collective’s œuvre over the eight years of its existence, including fully realized agitprop images and messaging alongside failed or less successful pieces. The latter are understandable, as graphic material was oftentimes quickly produced for planned street actions, sometimes the night before, and images The Grand Story of Gran Fury JOHNR. KILLACKY IT WAS VULGAR & IT WAS BEAUTIFUL How AIDS Activists Used Art to Fight a Pandemic by Jack Lowery Bold Type Books. 432 pages, $35. John R. Killacky, a longtime contributor to this magazine, is currently serving in the Vermont House of Representatives. BOOKS 34 The G&LR
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