[Various Artists]
Act Up Art Box
New York City, USA: Act Up, 1994
35.56 x 60.96 x 10.16 cm
Edition of 95 (with 10 A.P.s)
From 1988, December 1st has been designated World AIDS Day, an international day dedicated to raising awareness of the AIDS pandemic and to mourn those who have died of the disease.
ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) is an international, grassroots political group that works to improve the lives of people with AIDS through direct action, medical research, treatment and advocacy, and working to change legislation and public policies.
In March of 1994, ACT UP created this boxed collection of artists’ editions to raise funds for their programming. Each of the artists donated their works for the project, which comes housed in a maple, birch, aluminum and chrome box.
The works include untitled pieces by Ross Bleckner, Kiki Smith, Lorna Simpson and Louise Bourgeois, Hibernating Egg: Postoperative State by Mike Kelley, Approaching by Simon Leung and To The Revolution (the cover image), by Nancy Spero. The colophon is signed by each artist, and the Spero and Smith pieces are additionally signed.
In the inside enclosure, Ingrid Schaffner described the edition:
"Filled up and closed shut, this box is no casket of artistic curios, but a toolbox, beautifully equipped with exquisite implements of anger, fine instruments of change."
"We began to think about a box of objects in an edition of one hundred that we would sell for around $1,000 each. We compared notes about artists we knew or who we thought might be sympathetic to our effort and want to participate. I had seen a beautiful, cascading wall of glass wishbones with texts by Lorna Simpson in a group show at Josh Baer Gallery. (Josh is the son of the painter Jo Baer.) Someone else knew about Simon Leung and reached out to him. We all knew about Mike Kelley, who was based in California. We contacted Kiki Smith and Louise Bourgeois and Nancy Spero and Ross Bleckner. These were the artists we invited to participate.
I reached out to Lorna and I remember speaking with her on the phone about how moved I was by her installation at Josh Baer Gallery, and she agreed to participate. She ended up contributing glass wishbones and a short text. I remember speaking to Kiki by phone. She contributed a medallion of stamped glass and a photograph of clay objects that had a visceral, almost anatomical look to them. Simon Leung contributed a remarkable textile, a piece of silk onto which he silkscreened the mark left by people pressing their faces against the peephole in door of Duchamp’s Étant donnés at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Nancy Spero decorated the lids of these boxes. Each lid is a completely unique work of art, the figural renderings and the coloration. Mike Kelley faxed me a drawing of a corked egg, and Hal went out and got it fabricated. Liz Boyle and I went down to Louise Bourgeois’s townhouse in Chelsea, where she lived and worked, and spent the better part of an afternoon sitting with her at the table in her main room as she signed each set of documentation. All of the art boxes contain a foldout that all of the artists signed."
- Peter Antony (below, right)
