Gran Fury

Spawning from ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) in 1988 Gran Fury was an AIDS activist artist collective from New York City consisting of 11 members including: Richard Elovich, Avram Finkelstein, Amy Heard, Tom Kalin, John Lindell, Loring McAlpin, Marlene McCarty, Donald Moffett, Michael Nesline, Mark Simpson and Robert Vazquez. The participation of "visual artists in ACT UP and other collectives was essential to the effectiveness of the campaigns of protest, education and awareness about AIDS.” The collective mutually disbanded in 1995, a year prior to Mark Simpson’s death on November 10, 1996 from AIDS. Gran Fury organized as an autonomous collective, describing themselves as a “...band of individuals united in anger and dedicated to exploiting the power of art to end the AIDS crisis.” The contribution of recycling historical images of homoerotic pleasure contributed to the pictorial landscape of the AIDS activist movement. By recycling the title of the Plymouth sedan used by New York Police Department, Richard Meyer writes “[i]nscribed within the group’s name...” references “...both a subjective experience (rage) and a tool of State power (police squad cars), to both an internal sensation and an external force.” Action, not art, was the aim of the collective. Producing posters and agitprop in alliance with ACT UP to accompany the larger group’s demonstration, Adam Rolston and Douglas Crimp articulate how Gran Fury served as ACT UP’s “unofficial propaganda ministry and guerrilla graphic designers.”

Gran Fury’s appropriation of “...commercial language for political ends became the hallmark of the artists involved.” By re-purposing, reframing and re-circulating images to underscore their political agenda, Gran Fury was able to reach a plurality of identities and communities. AIDS does not discriminate, so there was an urgency to circulate information about this disease to the masses. Gran Fury member Loring McAplin observed the collectives mass-market ambition to “...fight for attention as hard as Coca-Cola fights for attention.” Before social media, the collective's appropriation of mass-media language and use of various materials including: fliers, posters, stickers, T-shirts, billboards, photographs and postcards, simultaneously produced provocative, informative, stylish, political and satirical public projects. By placing “...political information into environments where people are less accustomed to finding it…” articulates member Avram Finkelstein, catches the viewer off guard, revealing a new vocabulary and a new perspective on the AIDS health crisis. In Heywood’s “The Crime of Being Posi+ive,” a person can be charged under the HIV Assault Act regardless of whether or not he or she infected or intended to infect another with HIV. In 1989, nine states had AIDS/HIV criminal laws, but by 2013, 32 states had these types of laws in place. Some legislatures believe that these laws are outdated since there were so many misconceived notions in the 1980s and “there was a general belief that this was potentially an epidemic that was going to spread into the general population, that was sort of a guaranteed death sentence, that was extremely transmissible.” An example of a work that provokes curiosity is their public intervention project where they swapped copies of The New York Times in coin-operated dispensers with their own The New York Crimes which resembled “...The New York Times but was full of information relating to the AIDS crisis.”

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