One artist that Gran Fury took particular inspiration from was Barbara Kruger. Members included Avram Finkelstein, Marlene McCarty, Tom Kalin, and a young filmmaker named Todd Haynes. The group pursued a striking minimalism, she adds, “to look slick, to appropriate the voice of authority.” The ACT UP affinity group Gran Fury was responsible for some of the most iconic AIDS-related visual artwork of the era. “Knowing that the poster would be wheat-pasted on the street implied a series of responsible considerations to create the maximum impact,” Schulman writes. Silence = Death Project, Silence = Death, 1987. “Art in the Service of Change,” book two in this 700-page work, makes an invaluable contribution to the history of activist art, bringing to life debates around strategies for graphics and actions. With this structure, Schulman replicates the whirlwind of anger, grief, self-education, and political urgency that propelled ACT UP from a group of people who were fed up with the government’s ignorance, to a life-saving organization. Focusing on the early years of ACT UP’s existence, the book is uniquely assembled, combining oral history, cultural analysis, and remembrances of those we’ve lost.
Let the Record Show feels like the peak of her achievement, a standard for how this history should be presented. With filmmaker Jim Hubbard, Schulman is responsible for the ACT UP Oral History Project and United in Anger, a 2012 documentary about the group. The epidemic emptied whole neighborhoods, and the shifting social and economic tides washed away any awareness of the virus for the city’s new inhabitants. Her book Gentrification of the Mind (2012) detailed how AIDS changed the landscape of New York. Schulman has dedicated much of her life to recording ACT UP’s impact.
It is meticulously, thoughtfully, and lovingly compiled.
Sarah Schulman’s Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987–1993 documents one of the most daring and important activist organizations in US history. Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987–1993 by Sarah Schulman, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021 736 pages, $40 hardcover.
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