Macho Man, Tell It To My Heart

Figure 1 Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Untitled (Last Light), string of twenty-four light bulbs, plastic light sockets, extension cord, dimmer switch, 1993; Gift of artist to Julie Ault

Macho Man, Tell It To My Heart: Collected by Julie Ault is the touring public display of Ault’s private contemporary collection with the addition of some borrowed related works. It is currently on display at Artists Space in SoHo until February 23, 2014 and is split between their 38 Green Street and 55 Walker Street locations. The entire personal collection of Julie Ault, who considers herself an accidental art collector, embodies the spirit of the Alternative Art movement in New York and has been collected over the span of more than three decades. [1] The AIDS crisis of the late 1980s, as well as racial and social issues that were pertinent to the Alternative Art movement, anchor the collection as focal points and appear as prevalent themes. The collection features the works of forty-nine different artists including Andres Serrano, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Corita Kent as well as a few select pieces from feminist poststructuralist postmodern artists such as Cindy Sherman, Louise Lawler and Jenny Holzer. As exhibited, Macho Man is comprised of 198 total works, 125 pieces at Green Street and 73 works at 55 Walker Street.

When visitors come off the elevator that leads up to the industrial loft space on Green Street containing the first part of the exhibition, they are immediately thrown into a salon style set up, complete with a cluster of Mac desktop computers to the left, large windows to the right and an inviting maze of artwork due north. Grey text marquees across the top of the white walls with phrases and accompanying dates such as “Ronald Reagan 1984,” “World Wide Web 1990,” “Fall of Saigon 1975” and “Tootsie Pop 1973.” The text comprises Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ Untitled (Portrait of Julie Ault) (1991) (not pictured). In 1991, the artist asked Ault for a list of formative dates and events denoted by a word, name, place or phrase from which he planned to make a portrait of her. Gonzalez-Torres selected and ordered the entries non-chronologically. The portrait is not static and meant to be modified by the owner. Ault’s portrait has had four permutations since the original. “Collectively the versions diagram the mutability of identity and the flux of life,” said Ault on the piece.[2]

There are no labels detailing the works on the walls, instead viewers are given corresponding maps with descriptions of the work. The spread out presentation of works on sparse white walls in the loft space offers a stark contrast to the pictures printed in the accompanying exhibition catalog that capture the pieces as they are displayed or stored in Ault’s homes. In this context, the works are given room to breathe and extracted from their cluttered, lived-in element for public access. Although the works are taken out of their natural habitat, there is still a personal touch and cohesive theme that remains and radiates from the body of work.

The exhibition continues at the Artists Space’s 55 Walker location, where there work is displayed in a central street-level room and the basement. The main room, complete with greenhouse windows, is heavily hung with the works of Corita Kent’s graphic pieces. The basement houses just five works, including a People Magazine from 1987 honoring Liberace after his death titled “Liberace 1919-1987” and a Danh Vo piece titled Death Sentence (2010) (not pictured) that is comprised of sixty-seven hand-written pages of ink on A4 paper with text compiled by Ault.

The collection is notably derived from the body of work and experiences shared in-part by a group of New York-based artists that also influenced the Downtown art scene in the 1980s and 1990s. The cultural climate of this time incubated a specific form of representation that sought to bridge the gap between art and politics.[3] Ault’s former membership in Group Material heavily influences the nature of the collection. Ault, who is also an artist, curator, writer and editor, was a founding member of Group Material in 1979. The New York-based artists’ collaborative was responsible for many exhibitions and group projects, notably the AIDS Timeline (1989), from 1979 until they disbanded in 1996.[4] The group’s works assembled various cultural objects through “review, selection and critical juxtaposition” in a collective process that emphasized “shared learning and shared ideas.” This method of working was less concerned with reflecting and more concerned with projecting out into the community. Similarly, Ault’s collection is not strictly archival, but engages in an active inquiry and discourse about cultural climate of this period.[5] The original thirteen members of Group Material included Ault and Tim Rollins and Felix Gonzalez-Torres in 1987.[6] The collection is heavily focused on Gonzalez-Torres’s work and Ault published a Gonzalez-Torres monograph in 2006 after the artist’s death in 1996. Rollins’ work is also featured in the collection.

Ault first became acquainted with Gonzalez-Torres in 1987 when she left a note for him at his master’s thesis exhibition in the International Center of Photography’s program at NYU. She told him that she was part of the artist’s collaborative Group Collection and that she wanted to get in touch. Gonzalez-Torres and Ault instantly hit it off and there were many shared perspectives between his work and that of Group Material’s. The two friends visited Paris together in 1992 and that visit influenced some of Gonzalez-Torres’ work.[7] One of his pieces featured in the collection, Untitled (Last Light) (1993) Figure 1, takes the form of a string of twenty-four light bulbs, plastic light sockets, an extension cord and a simmer switch. The work was a gift from the artist to Ault in 1993 and Figure 1 depicts the work as it is displayed in her Joshua Tree home. Many other items in the collection are pieces by other artists that Gonzalez-Torres gifted to Ault over the years. One such item is Jim Hodges’ A Diary of Flowers: Black & Blue (1992) (not pictured), which is a series of seventeen ink-drawn flowers on napkins that are affixed to the wall with pins. The work was installed over Ault’s bed for a couple years, but every time she changed her sheets and spread out the covers, the napkins would get blown around and sometimes a couple would fall and have to be re-pinned. Due to the harmful nature of the exercise of bed-making, Ault decided to store the work in an archival box in the closet.[8]

Figure 2 Steven Evans, Macho Man, Tell It To My Heart, vinyl letters and paint on wall, 1989

The exhibition’s title Macho Man, Tell It To My Heart, is the name of one of the works in the collection with the same title by Steven Evans (1989) Figure 2. The work takes the form of vinyl letters and paint on the wall and has been installed over the door to Ault’s bedroom in New York for twenty years. Evans did a disco song title series and gave Ault another work titled No More Tears, but she never installed it. Evans also tailored part of his piece Selections from the Disco (1989) for Group Material’s AIDS Timeline (1989).[9] Selections from the Disco is also displayed along the bottom of the main room in the 55 Walker space. Printed in pink lettering, the work features song titles such as “It’s Raining Men,” “Do You Wanna Funk?” “Funkytown” and “Never Can Say Goodbye.”

Figure 3 Corita Kent, come alive, silkscreen, 1967; Collection of Martin Beck; Acquired from the Corita Art Center, by Julie Ault, 1996; Gift of Julie Ault to Martin Beck, 1997

Ault considers herself an ‘accidental collector’ because the majority of artwork in her collection was given to her as a gifts resulting from numerous personal relationships and conversations with the artists. Some of the pieces in the exhibition that do not belong to Ault, belong to other artists/curators included in the collection and have been gifted to them by Ault. The majority of Ault’s collection pieces are attached to personal anecdotes and a great deal of sentimental value is linked to the art objects. Many of the individual stories of acquisition are detailed in the exhibition catalogue. The one key exception of work that Ault actively acquired is the art of Corita Kent, which piqued Ault’s interest and which she personally sought out.[10] Kent was a former nun who decided to leave her life and position at the Immaculate Heart Community in 1968, where she had lived since 1936 from the age of eighteen.[11] The exhibition at 55 Walker is heavily focused around Kent’s neon silkscreens that embody the chemical colors and thematic elements of Pop art. Ault published a book about Kent’s work titled Come Alive! The Spirited Art of Sister Corita. The piece titled come alive (1967) Figure 3, was a gift that Ault gave to Martin Beck in 1997. Ault met Beck in Parasite, a short-lived artist group active in New York in the late-1990s and a decade later Ault organized a solo exhibition of Beck’s work. Kent’s work features the words “come alive!” in orange neon on a yellow background and the phrase “you can make it” printed backwards and upside-down in blue lettering. The first Kent piece that Ault acquired was o is for god (1968) (not pictured) as a gift from her friend Jim Hodges in 1995. After living with the gift, Ault felt compelled to research the artist and discovered that Kent was a Catholic former nun who appropriated product design to make abstract pop art. Ault was interested in the graphic composition, spirited language and complex content contained in Kent’s work. She showed Kent’s work in an exhibition where she juxtaposed her prints from the 1960s with works made by 1980s AIDS activist, artist and designer Donald Moffett.[12]

Ault met Andres Serrano in 1980 when he was working at a Chinese restaurant in Queens delivering food and she worked at an answering service as a telephone operator. After the second time that Serrano was robbed at gunpoint for the food he was carrying, he quit his job. Serrano studied art at the Brooklyn Museum School and afterwards got involved in photography, mainly taking documentary style images that he shot on the street. In 1981, he started making photographic images that he saw in his head—often asking Ault to pose in the pictures.

Figure 4 Andres Serrano, Piss Christ, cibachrome, silicone, plexiglass, 1987

In 1989, Serrano became the focal point of a controversy that broke out in Congress and in the media after senators Jesse Helms and Alfonse D’Amato questioned the public cultural funding and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) when Serrano received a fellowship the previous year and exhibited Piss Christ (1987) Figure 4, which depicts a crucifix submerged in a class of the artist’s urine. A month later, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. cancelled its upcoming Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition, The Perfect Moment, which featured the explicit homoerotic pictures of Mapplethorpe’s X Portfolio. Mapplethorpe and Serrano were used as examples in the campaign supporting the cessation of governmental funding for “liberal” culture that produced “disastrous effects.” The Culture Wars resulted in the elimination of the category of public funding for individual artists, detrimental cuts in the NEA’s budget and strict limitations on the agency’s support.[13] Serrano’s Black Jesus (1990) Figure 5 was produced during the aftermath of the controversy and the artist gave the work to Ault as a gift. Serrano also produced a series of Klu Klux Klan portraits, including Klansman (Imperial Wizard II) (1990) Figure 6, which was another gift to Ault. For Serrano, upon dealing with the Klanspeople, they became more powerful as symbols than they actually were as human beings. His Klan series was initially exhibitioned along his series of portraits of predominantly African American homeless people.[14]

Figure 5 Andres Serrano, Klansman (Imperial Wizard II), cibachome, silicone, plexiglass; Gift of the artist to Julie Ault, 1990

Since the Ault collection is an ‘accidental collection’ and because of the nature of how the works were acquired, it is a bit obscure and offers a snapshot of a very specific time period and movement as seen through a specific lens within contemporary art. Of her collection, Ault said, “…I do not actively engage in collecting so much as I am committed to formative exchanges and the communities they build. The artworks are cornerstones for exchanges. Dialogue is how I think and work.”[15] The collection has a very organic feel and documents both the personal relationships that built the collection and a certain ethos surrounding Ault’s engagement with the Alternative Art movement in New York. The diversity of the collection demonstrates the way that gifting and the exchange of artworks yields intellectual and emotional affinities.[16]

Figure 6 Andres Serrano, Black Jesus, cibachrome, silicone, plexiglass; Gift of the artist to Julie Ault, 1990

Ault did not have conscious archiving in mind when she began the collection, but rather she was tracing relationships and work contexts. She lives with the works to experience their extent in her environment and their interconnectedness produces a social commentary.[17] Serrano’s Klu Klux Klan and religious-themed pieces, the controversy circling his works, and other socially, patriotically and racially themed works in the collection give it an American pseudodocumentary feel. Danh Vo’s Chachug Nareekarn (2011) (not pictured) cements this idea, taking the form of a golf leaf on cardboard American flag. It offers a borderline tacky, not entirely accurate portrait of very specific pockets of American culture.

The exhibition also has an accompanying film series curated by Jason Simon with Julie Ault selected and extended from the Ault collection. Macho Man Tell It To My Heart was on public display at the Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Basel, Switzerland and the Culturgest in Lisbon, Portugal earlier in 2013. A collection catalogue, which was published for the touring exhibition offers pictures of selected works in Ault’s private homes that she shares with Martin Beck in New York City and Joshua Tree, California.

Macho Man was conceived with the aim of being able to see all of the works together and grasp how they related to each other outside of their domestic context, which was not possible in a small residence.[18] After the collection finishes its tour, it will make its way back onto the walls of Ault’s homes and into the storage boxes in her closets and under beds—where amongst other personal items such as clothing, books and films, pots and pans, it is meant to be lived with. The nature of the collection, much like Gonzalez-Torres’s Untitled (Portrait of Julie Ault), is mutable and will continue to grow and change, as it has, echoing the ebbs and flows of Ault’s personal relationships, partnerships, collaborations and conversations. “The collection is not certain,” said Ault. “It extends along the lines of exchanges that are in flux and growing…Tell It To My Heart activates this buildup of art anew as we investigate how to engage and unfurl ‘the collection’ in the present tense.”[19]

[1] Ault, Julie, Martin Beck, Nikola Dietrich, Heinz Peter Knes, Ramus Rohling, Jason Simon, Scott Cameron Weaver, Danh Vo and Amy Zion, eds. Macho Man, Tell It To My Heart. Verlag, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2013.
[2] Ibid.
[3] “Macho Man Tell It To My Heart: Collected by Julie Ault.” Artists Space Exhibitions. Accessed December 17, 2013, http://artistsspace.org/exhibitions/machoman
[4] Ault, Julie, Martin Beck, Nikola Dietrich, Heinz Peter Knes, Ramus Rohling, Jason Simon, Scott Cameron Weaver, Danh Vo and Amy Zion, eds. Macho Man, Tell It To My Heart. Verlag, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2013.
[5] “Macho Man Tell It To My Heart: Collected by Julie Ault.” Artists Space Exhibitions.
Accessed December 17, 2013, http://artistsspace.org/exhibitions/machoman
[6] Ault, Julie, Martin Beck, Nikola Dietrich, Heinz Peter Knes, Ramus Rohling, Jason Simon, Scott Cameron Weaver, Danh Vo and Amy Zion, eds. Macho Man, Tell It To My Heart. Verlag, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2013.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid.
^[10]Ibid.
[11]Ault, Julie. Come Alive! The Spirited Art of Sister Corita. London: Four Corners Books, 2006.
[12] Ault, Julie, Martin Beck, Nikola Dietrich, Heinz Peter Knes, Ramus Rohling, Jason Simon, Scott Cameron Weaver, Danh Vo and Amy Zion, eds. Macho Man, Tell It To My Heart. Verlag, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2013.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Ibid.
[16] “Macho Man Tell It To My Heart: Collected by Julie Ault.” Artists Space Exhibitions. Accessed December 17, 2013, http://artistsspace.org/exhibitions/machoman
[17] Ault, Julie, Martin Beck, Nikola Dietrich, Heinz Peter Knes, Ramus Rohling, Jason Simon, Scott Cameron Weaver, Danh Vo and Amy Zion, eds. Macho Man, Tell It To My Heart. Verlag, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2013.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Ibid.