AIDS Timeline was produced originally in 1989 for the Berkeley Art Museum Matrix Gallery, and produced in new iterated versions for the Wadsworth Athenaeum in 1990 and The Whitney Museum in 1991 for that year’s biennial.
From a text submitted for dOCUMENTA 13, 100 Notes / 100 Thoughts. No. 032. Written by Julie Ault.
“Virtually all the major social inequities that compromise democracy in the United States were reflected in that decade-long history of AIDS. The group’s arrangement of information posited a history of the political and social conditions in which AIDS was not only allowed but encouraged to become a national crisis, and broadcast some evidential responses made in the arms of the crisis. The timeline related the widespread stigmatization of people with AIDS, demonstrating the links between representation and judgment and between representation and allocation of resources. Furthermore, it documented the impact that homophobia, racism, heterosexism, and sexism had on the formation of public policy.
Aesthetic practice and social practice merged in AIDS Timeline. The project involved layers of collaboration in and beyond the group with both individuals and community advocacy organizations. AIDS Timeline proposed models of history writing, curatorial method, artistic practice, and social process, as well as a compound of temporal contexts joined together that reflected the climate of circumstance and perception, the complexity of the period. The exhibition sought at once to contextualize the AIDS crisis and to create a context itself didactic exhibit environment that examined recent events to account for present conditions, with the hope of influencing what was to come.
Agency was our horizon, and history not only that of the 1980s, but history as a continuum extending from earlier than 1979 and going on indefinitely. Chronology as guiding device set a linear horizon and performed an anchoring purpose, acting as a focal point from which viewers’ perspectives could venture. Within such a setup, the horizon is endowed with the double function of systematizing and releasing information. The horizon opened views to what was above and below the timeline. It opened views to the larger set of conditions articulated by the arrangement of information brought into narrative armature, to reveal the far-reaching associations between political and cultural events that render the historical period legible.”
Grace, Claire. Group Material, AIDS Timeline. from The Artist as Curator #4, Mousse Magazine. 1989 _(link)
Other references and exhibitions drawn from Group Material’s AIDS Timeline:
100 Notes / 100 Thoughts. No. 032. (entire wall text of AIDS Timeline 1989, Berkeley) submitted for dOCUMENTA 13 _(link)
Vital Archive, CCS Bard 8 March – 5 April, 2009. An exhibition curated by Sabrina Locks from the NYU archive and other sources _(link)
