Book Review: ‘It Was Vulgar & It Was Beautiful,’ by Jack Lowery – The New York Times
His book focuses on the Gran Fury art collective, an offshoot of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), which itself had been founded out of frustration with existing organizations that were not sufficiently radicalized against a fast-moving, lethal disease decimating an entire generation of gay men. The logistics behind demonstrations — the phone trees and accounting and pizzas — would not seem to be the most scintillating material, but Lowery painstakingly reconstructs conversations and negotiations that compel a reader to feel the era’s anguish and urgency. Much of the collective’s work now hangs in major museums.
Gran Fury was named for a model of Plymouth car then used by the New York City Police Department. The phrase somehow “insinuated a kind of fabulous outrage,” Lowery writes, and sounded gothic, like a Tennessee Williams play. “Our fury was grand,” Donald Moffett, a graphic designer and one of the nine surviving core members of Gran Fury, told the author. Lowery interviewed them all and drew from an unfinished memoir by the tenth, Mark Simpson, who died in 1996.
Like the artist Barbara Kruger, who taught one member of the group and whose typeface they swiped for their “Read My Lips” series, Gran Fury reappropriated the well-oiled and sometimes absurd patois of American advertising and branding. This was social media before the internet. Far from crumbling in a sad heap at the base of a wall, the group was solidifying, mobilizing and furiously fighting.
All white but for one member, Robert Vazquez-Pacheco, the creators of Gran Fury confronted the elite on its own turf: repurposing foamcore sales signs from Barneys for percussive protest; shutting down the stock exchange using fake Bear Stearns badges and currency (“people are dying while you play business”); and stuffing New York Times vending boxes with pointed spoofs called The New York Crimes. “Bloody” paint handprints began to show up on pavements and windows, trailing elected officials who, the demonstrators argued, were effectively guilty of murder.
Lowery is young — this project started as his master’s thesis at Columbia — but writes like an old soul, scholarly and indignant at how AIDS was for so many years minimized and marginalized. Occasionally he permits himself an exclamation point of delight or mild sarcasm. (“Most innocuous indeed!” he writes of a banner reading “All People with AIDS Are Innocent,” a rebuttal of the idea that the disease stemmed from immoral behavior. “Gran Fury even won a prize!” he writes about the awarded “Kissing Doesn’t Kill” poster, which featured an array of diverse couples mid-smooch; many at the time mistook it for a Benetton ad.)