We were in the neighborhood, and so we went back to see the Felix Gonzalez-Torres exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. Which was the first time we spent time with “Untitled” (1989), a portrait work which appears twice, in two different configurations, in two different spots of the exhibition. [Technically, it’s in three spots: the work is owned by the Art Institute of Chicago, where it’s been on view since December 2023.]
In the show it felt impossible to do more than sense the differences between the two installations. It seemed that, in the absence of a subject named in parentheses, this was a portrait of the artist himself, but the variety of posthumous additions made it non-obvious. So we left with questions: How was this portrait adapted for this dual/triple version? Besides the title, how [else] was it different from the others? If it was indeed a self-portrait, how did this portrait practice come to be?
Helpfully, the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation collects documentation of each version as it is installed. As the first portrait [sic] that was, indeed, a self-portrait, which was in Andrea Rosen’s collection [The AIC got it in 2002], “Untitled” (1989) may be one of the most frequently exhibited; the documentation for [at least] 42 versions runs to 17 pages [pdf].
Some immediate takeaways: the upstairs version is about 2x as long as the downstairs, presumably a function of space. Both feel very site-specified. The downstairs version, lit only by a lightstring, includes not just references to DC [DC Home Rule Act 1973; Black Lives Matter Plaza 2020; Archives of American Art 1954], but to the building’s historical connection to the exhibition [Colt firearm patent 1836] and the room lit only by a light string [Thomas Edison Lightbulb Patent Application 1880], but to the objects in it [Many many lights all over 1993 is how Felix signed his 1993 Christmas card to his friend Julie Ault.]
Upstairs seems much gayer. Important developments of gay life that Felix didn’t live to see [PrEP 2012; Obergefell 2015] are interwoven with references to that “queer ancestor” in the gallery, Walt Whitman. It includes both the public artwork that quotes Whitman’s poem to honor AIDS caregivers [Dupont Circle Metro Station 2007], and the lines that were censored from it [(Many a soldier’s loving arms about this neck have cross’d and rested, / Many a soldier’s kiss dwells on these bearded lips.) 1865], which might be the longest citation in a Felix portrait ever. Also, if you’re still keeping score, Out.com, very gay.
[FWIW, the mention of Hide/Seek 2010, which Kriston Capps noticed and read as a rare moment of institutional mea culpa, was in “Untitled” (Portrait of MoCA), 1994. Was there curatorial discussion over which portrait to include things in? Were owners consulted?]
Which explains the present, but not so much the past.
“Untitled” (1989) was created for a windowed corridor off the lobby of the Brooklyn Museum, and was one element of an installation that included open curtains and a pair of large, potted plants. It only had seven items.
At its second appearance, in a two-person exhibition in 1990 with Donald Moffett at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, “Untitled” had only six items, and a different title Untitled (still life) [not this “Untitled” (still life)] and filled a wall like a mural.
The text/date format of “Untitled” (1989) clearly related to the photostats and billboards. A review of the Vancouver show conflated this “non-chronological spew of dates with names, places, things” with another “Untitled” (1989), the billboard erected over Sheridan Square by the Public Art Fund. And in the press release for Felix’s 1991 show with his artist friend & collaborator, Xavier Hufkens described “Untitled” (Portrait of Michael Jenkins) as “partie d’une série d’oeuvres exécutées régulièrement par Felix Gonzalez-Torres au cours des dernières années (parfois sur des placards publicitaires à New York).”
In her essay for the 1996 catalogue raisonné [pdf], whose title I’ve appropriated for this post, Andrea Rosen talks about Felix’ how Felix’ concept of a portrait already permeated his work, including his focus on fusing public and private, personal and political. Everything was already a reflection of the subjective self, and a self-portrait. He used the 24 parenthetical titles of the lightstrings “to include himself,” she emphasized, not just “particular experiences to be remembered.” Choosing from thousands of snapshots to turn 64 into puzzles turns the series into autobiography, “a selective but complex diary.”
Text frieze portraits as a distinct concept and series emerged in 1991, out of the puzzles. Rosen explained how the first portrait subjects, Lorrin and Dean Wong, had originally wanted to commission Felix to make puzzles of some of their family snapshots. The text portrait was Felix’s counter-proposal. From seven entries, he thought twelve was enough. But the baseline grew, and change and expansion was the central tenet. [note: the Wongs’ portrait actually ended up with seventeen entries. It’s been exhibited twice, with no changes except to update that the Silver Anniversary 1991 they were looking anticipating had happened, in 1992. The other earliest portraits, of friend/collaborators Julie Ault and Michael Jenkins, started with seven.]
In 1993 Felix submitted an artist biography to A.R.T. Press in the form of an extended, but apparently unofficial, version of “Portrait” (1989). Portraits became the only type of commission he’d accept, yet he did almost half of them as gifts for friends:
Even though the concepts are so clear, it was very difficult for Felix to make these pieces. It took him months and sometimes as long as a year to reach a final version. I think it was not so much about his struggle to figure out what to add to the piece, but rather that he was overwhelmed with the magnitude of someone or a couple’s life. He also found it hard to reflect on the long and complex lives the owners had as they were reminders of his own ebbing life span.
…
Felix’ own portrait changed and took many forms over the time from its inception in 1989 to the last version [sic] made in November of 1995, to be installed at the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporaneo, in Santiago de Compostela, one of the traveling venues of his Guggenheim retrospective exhibition. I am sure he knew it would be the last he would choose.
Written soon after his death, much of Rosen’s elegaic essay dwells on Felix’s thoughts about life and the posthumous existence of his work. In the 30 years since, the change and engagement and agency Felix embedded in his work has indeed kept it in front of people, and above them. There have been at least 37 versions of Felix’s portrait since the “last” one. I expect there will be many more to come.
[NEXT MORNING UPDATE:]
OK, I made the rookie error of taking Andrea Rosen’s 1996 essay as the prevailing interpretation of the Felix portraits situation, and it is different. I think it’s because it was so close in time, and her reflections are those of a close friend, a dealer, an executor, and above all, a portrait subject.
But I just ran through the histories of the fourteen extant Felix portraits, and there is no one approach to them. Some change barely, or not at all. The earliest ones besides the Wongs—Michael Jenkins and Julie Ault, both close friends and collaborators of Felix—started very short, like Felix’s own. Many have been exhibited only rarely after their original commission/appearance. Some like Ault’s get exhibited more because she’s been actively curating it. Even some longer ones, like Ingvild Goetz’s, may appear elsewhere but don’t change, and appear in the context of their private collection.
Rosen’s own has gone through some deliberate updates, but it’s not been loaned or shown at anywhere near the rate I’d imagined. It’d make sense that she’d be the most intentional in her engagement with her portrait as a tool for marking a life, but also that she might keep it more personal than public. [This is based on her essay, but also its subsequent history.]
Rosen speculated what it’d mean for MoMA to own Elaine Dannheiser’s portrait, and whether they’d change it. The answer is, they show it occasionally, and change it almost not at all. Now I’m picturing conservators weighing in on the draft text before it’s put up.
Except for MOCA, which goes kind of hog wild, stuffing their portrait with donor names with a fervor that’d make the development office proud, institutions seem to privilege the artist’s original version of their portrait. And it’s rare for someone to borrow them. Interestingly [not really], though “Untitled” (Portrait of Austrian Airlines), 1993, is specifically authorized to be shown as either a text frieze or a billboard, there are only photos of the latter. It is an alphabetical list of world cities with [presumably] the date Austrian Air started flying there, and I only hope Felix got a fat bag, and it helped him be productive and comfortable. It truly seems like the most non-work of all his works.
Anyway, in conclusion, Felix Gonzalez-Torres portraits are a land of contrasts. At least at the moment. And though “Untitled” (1989) started out differently, it has been the most prominent and visible work in the series, and the one that most embodies the principles of change that Felix wanted.
Read Andrea Rosen’s “Untitled” (The Neverending Portrait) [pdf] [felixgonzalez-torresfoundation.org]