A couple of weeks ago artist Tom Burr sp0ke at Dia about his and Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ work. Now that conversation is online.
Burr was in a 1989 group show with Gonzalez-Torres, Michael Jenkins and John Lindell at Paula Allen Gallery (no relation). One piece Burr showed, Jones Beach State Park, was from a series of bulletin boards outfitted with the texts, flyers, and notices from a specific public place.
Gonzalez-Torres showed two magazine rack sculptures with an endlessly replenished supply of handouts, which, based on the Foundation’s images, turned out to be a paragraph clipped from the front page of the NY Times on November 26, 1989, the weekend before the show opened. Between that and the bulletin board, it sounds like the show had a real community center vibe, or what Dia curator Jordan Carter called, an “aesthetics of administration.”
A few years later in his catalogue raisonné, Gonzalez-Torres adminstered a dropkick to one of his magazine racks. The one mounted on the wall, “Untitled” (White Legal), remained a work, while the freestanding rack, then known as just “White Legal,” was demoted to “non-work.”
None of this is in the talk, btw; it’s just me nerding out. And it’s my way of resisting the urge to just type out the entire conversation about Burr’s Deep Purple, whose form is a 2/3-scale reference to Tilted Arc. Choice stuff.