There is a book. I did not know there is a book. I’ve visited the Felix Gonzalez-Torres show at the National Portrait Gallery & Archives of American Art multiple times and have written about it even more, and I did not know there was a book. I fixated on Felix’s “Untitled” text portrait in both its installed versions, and wondered how the Smithsonian’s curators made them, and I picked through the history of this and other text portraits, and wrote a whole-ass blog post about it, and I didn’t know there was a book.
Reader, there is a book, and it is literally about all of that. In Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Final Revenge (A Workbook), co-curators Josh T. Franco and Charlotte Ickes wrote a whole essay on their experience and process of creating the versions of “Untitled” they’ve showed. Along the way, they fill out many key aspects of Felix’s work, from its changing history to its changing present.
It’s a fascinating and decidedly unconventional behind-the-scenes perspective on making the Smithsonian’s show, and particularly on their unusual experience as people “authorized” by the portrait owners to adapt and show them. They wrestle with what to add of their own lives, and their institution’s and country’s, and what to take out; and when to decide something is done. And it documents at least some of the experience of a harrowing moment in our culture’s and nation’s history, one that is already receding fast from view amidst the chaos and fascism of the churning present:
Our collaboration was a saving grace, our own party under “streets full of lights” during some of the darkest, most isolating hours of the COVID-19 pandemic. Play has defined our practice, a magical combination of equal parts thought, trust, research, rigor, and intention. How liberating to grant one another permission to follow our intuitions, however irrational or imprecise, when our jobs and training instruct us otherwise. With this portrait as a guide, we enter history on our own terms. Through this itinerancy, we recognize both ourselves and our time in the many other hands and histories that have touched this portrait over the years, including those of the artist and viewers, together producing an ever-changing constellation. Performance theorist Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson, a fellow Felix traveler we met in Chicago during a research trip, put it this way: “Not the individuality of the ‘I’ or the potentially coercive fascist union of the ‘we,’ but instead the incommensurable communism of being with and being together in the gaps and breaks between ‘I’ and ‘we.’ From time to time, we stitch ourselves loosely together and gather under a name like ‘Felix'”
I thought of Franco and Ickes’ essay often while reading Coco Fusco’s review of the show in the NY Review of Books. Mostly I thought, she doesn’t know there is a book, either. It’s unusual, because Fusco is one of this small cohort of people who have created a version of a Felix portrait. She knows the process. And yet her critiques belie that experience. She takes issue with the inclusion of more Cuban, Caribbean, gay, and historic references, what she terms identity, and of making overcurating connections between Felix’s works and other portraits in the NPG collection. Fusco falls into the all too easy habit, one I know myself, of critiquing a realization of Felix’s work only in terms of what he did, and what he originally intended. It’s been hard to recognize, but it’s what keeps the work important: what Felix wanted was change, to infiltrate the world with his work, and to pull others into the process of making and experiencing it.
To that end, it’s worth noting the full title of the bilingual book—which is free, btw, though so far, I think it’s only available in person in the NPG store, or the MLK Library across the street, where part of the show is installed: it is a workbook. The curators have laid out the steps for making a portrait, a synthesis of Felix’s process and their own, and encourage everyone to try it at home. There’s even a pencil.
It’s an exercise I’ve never felt the urge or the right to undertake, until now: to reflect on my life, my people, the world, and to stitch some more of us loosely together, and to gather under a name like ‘Felix.’