The dismantling of the progressive economic and cultural changes of the 1960s began in earnest in the 1980s, and Group Material's overall project was imagined in this period of attempted historical erasure.'¹ So opens Doug Ashford's text in the recent publication Show and Tell: A Chronicle of Group Material (2010). It is an apt beginning to remembering how embattled the Left was in the 1980s, and to thinking retrospectively through the impact and importance of the trenchant and timely work of Group Material, the New York based collective active from 1979 to 1996.

Like all good art practices, Group Material's seems utterly contemporary. It can be discussed in any number of ways: as a collective rather than individual practice, as activists and 'brand hackers', as a clever employment of postmodernist theory and of their innovations as artists working curatorially. The group's projects foreshadowed the 'social turn' in recent art, as well as 'relational', 'context' or 'participatory' practices, and especially the production of critically oriented installations in museum exhibitions and biennials. But Group Material seems curiously absent from recent discussions about contemporary art, perhaps occluded by its most famous member, Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Show and Tell, edited by Julie Ault, a long-time member of Group Material, provides a good occasion to address many of these issues. The book itself is many things - a resource on the group's history, a study of archiving and a manual for how (or how not) to organise a collective art practice.² (Reading about the first year of Group Material tells you two things: don't try to work with too many people, and don't get bogged