There’s a lot to consider in Dulce Venganza, Sweet Revenge, Nancy Spector’s exhibition of Felix Gonzalez-Torres at the Reina Sofia in Madrid. But let’s start with one of the most unexpected things first, at least to me: the inclusion of “Untitled” (Portrait of Austrian Airlines), 1993, a commissioned corporate portrait which, uniquely, can be shown as a frieze portrait or a billboard.
Quick, guess which one its subject chose in 1993? 3,000 billboards. Comprising an alphabetical list of the cities and the year Austrian Airlines began flying to them, I’d kind of settled on this work as a co-optation of a recognizably artistic graphic strategy for marketing on one side, and a large check-cashing operation on the other.
Even if that was true, the power of Felix’s work is that whatever it was, it can become something else the next time it’s manifest. When I wrote about the changes made to the text portraits, it was at the moment the Foundation was just publishing transcriptions of various text versions, and I did not notice that “Untitled” (Portrait of Austrian Airlines) had ever been changed.
It has, once barely [added a couple of new routes], and once shockingly. [In In Focus, an all outdoor, text-based show in June 2020, Contemporary Copenhagen exhibited a version of “Untitled” (Portrait of Austrian Airlines) that included the dates the airline said they would resume flights to their various destinations, after shutting down all scheduled flights for four months for the COVID-19 pandemic.]
Which is fascinating, but the point is, it is changed significantly at the Reina Sofia, and in ways that leverage its subject: a corporation in a globalized world. According to El Confidential’s report from the preview of Dulce venganza, Spector—I assume it’s Spector— has added two categories of entries to “Untitled” (Portrait of Austrian Airlines): “‘lugares de asedio de 2026 como Teherán o Caracas’ y el nombre de empresas tecnológicas globales con el año en el que salieron a Bolsa.” “’sites of siege in 2026, such as Teherán or Caracas,’ and the names of global tech companies with the year they went public.”
The complete text is included in the gallery booklet; I have extracted and sorted the additions here:
Beirut 2026 Caracas 2026 Dubai 2026 Gaza 2026 Kyiv 2026 La Habana 2026 Minneapolis 2026 Tehrán 2026 Washington D.C. 2026
Amazon 1997 Anthropic 2021 Apple 1980 Google 2004 Meta 2012/2022 Microsoft 1986 NVIDIA 1999 OpenAI 2015 Palantir 2020
Which is, again, a fascinating jiu jutsu move that resonates all the more for keeping within a certain subject constraint. It works even better when the cities are listed twice, with two dates, as both Austrian Airlines destinations and cities under siege [e.g. “Beirut 1960 Beirut 2026“].
And while I get the inclusion of the network of companies marching us all toward a technofascist consolidation, I do have to point out that Anthropic and OpenAI are not publicly traded; the dates they’re listed with are their founding dates. On the bright [sic] side, they are both pushing and/or filing for IPOs as quickly as possible, so maybe change them to 2026? Also the omission of SpaceX makes me wonder if Spector drives a Tesla.