Felix Gonzalez-Torres showed “Untitled” (Natural History) for the first time in Every Week There Is Something Different, his May 1991 show at Andrea Rosen’s second floor gallery in SoHo. As the show’s title suggested, the artist changed the configuration and works on display each week. In Week 1, the twelve black and white photos of words carved into the Theodore Roosevelt monument in front of the American Museum of Natural History were in the front gallery, and the thirteenth picture, 21 Club, the bougie former speakeasy with its wrought iron balcony and staircase full of lawn jockeys, was exhibited separately, in the back room. In Week 2, only three of the twelve photos stayed up—Ranchman, Soldier, and Historian—the others, including 21 Club, came down.
After that, Gonzalez-Torres decided that 21 Club should not be exhibited, although it should remain as part of “Untitled” (Natural History). Which is an edition of three, and ed. 3/3 was broken up and sold separately, someone has only 21 Club, and they’re not supposed to show it. This, the moment when I look to see if that orphaned 21 Club has turned up anywhere, is when I realize I’d already written this entire post about “Untitled” (Natural History), including the part I was going to mention next, that Carol Bove defied the artist’s instructions and showed 21 Club in her historical re-creation of Every Week There Is Something Different at the Beyeler in 2011, in 2020, when the AMNH announced they were taking down their racist Teddy Roosevelt statue.
The point of all this now, though, was to look at how Gonzalez-Torres developed a strategy of invisibility; of work existing but not being shown, or seen; of absence; and of absence transfigured into presence.
Felix worked without a studio, and it was a regular thing for him that the first time to see a work realized was in a show. It’s taken me decades to appreciate it, but I think this practice is key to his later reclassification of works previously exhibited, given, and even sold as art as “non-art” or “additional materials.” Public exhibition may have been the impetus for a work’s creation, but it did not automatically guarantee its continuation. And Club 21 is only the most public example of the artist deciding that public display need not be a prerequisite for his work.
In 1991 NYC collector Andrew Ong acquired “Untitled” (1991), a wood letter box to which Gonzalez-Torres directed a stream of photos, correspondence, ephemera, and a.p.s of at least two puzzle works. It is similar in this accumulative way to “Untitled” (1990), a small hanging cabinet in white powdercoated steel the artist filled with newspaper clippings, postcards, and a little alarm clock, which belongs to Andrea Rosen. One difference is that Ong’s box is to not be exhibited publicly. Or as Elena Filipovic put it when she included the box in her 2011 Beyeler show,
Felix Gonzalez-Torres specified that “Untitled” (1990) was intended for private display by its owner. The physical object, which includes a letter box and various papers, photographs, pieces of correspondence, and printed materials, is not intended to be on view in public exhibitions. This work was borrowed so that it could be conceptually included in Venue 2, Installation 1 [i.e., The Beyeler, -g.o]. Its inclusion was not physical but instead communicated via an informational wall label and its presences in the exhibitions checklist.
Last week greg.org hero Michael Seiwert posted photos from his visit to Madrid, including of how Andrew’s “Untitled” is included in Dulce venganza/ Sweet Revenge, the Reina Sofia exhibition of Gonzalez-Torres curated by Alejandro Cesarco and Nancy Spector. Or rather, how it is absent.
There is a full label in a vitrine, and a box-shaped space next to two other accretive works, editions of “Untitled” (Album), 1992, photo albums to be filled by the collectors. The work is included in the extensive exhibition checklist [pdf] as “not on view,” with an explanation of its constraints and absence.
On the previous page is a much-circulated and now seemingly contradictory quote from the artist’s 1993 conversation with Tim Rollins: “Without a public these works are nothing, nothing. I need the public to complete the work. I ask the public to help me, to take responsibility, to become part of my work, to join in.” But in an even more well-known quote from his 1995 conversation with Robert Storr, he said, “When people ask me, ‘Who is your public? I say honestly, without skipping a beat, ‘Ross.’ The public was Ross. The rest of the people just come to the work.” If the public can be one person, it can be one other, and the rest of the people just come to the work when Andrew has them over.
@wareian.com pointed out the even more poetic wall text explaining the conceptual inclusion of “Untitled” in a 2024 exhibition at the FLAG Art Foundation:
But “Untitled” was not the only work in Sweet Revenge but “not on view.” Depending on what your definition of work is. Spector has included 10 años, 10 horas, 10 madres, a nine-and-a-half minute video documenting a 1979 performance, for the first time since 1980, when it was originally exhibited in Puerto Rico in 1980. 10 años, 10 horas, 10 madres has been discussed in the growing scholarship on Gonzalez-Torres’ work, and was added to one version of the text for “Untitled” when that portrait was shown at the National Portrait Gallery. [Spector keeps it in for Madrid.] As one of Gonzalez-Torres’ few Spanish-language works, it’s made an invisible appearance at Museo Jumex. And since it deals directly with the artist’s childhood exile in Madrid, it’s somehow vital to the show. But because it also includes images of the artist himself, the curator explained during the press preview, it needed to be excluded from a show that emphasizes “la sugestión y la invisibilidad.”
Spector did not include Andrew Ong’s “Untitled” in her 1994 Guggenheim show, and 10 años… wasn’t even in the appendix of the 1995 catalogue raisonné. So even if it were just to track changes, there is value in this revisiting of Gonzalez-Torres’ work. I can soon imagine entire conceptual shows of objects, materials, and information which had previously been excluded, finally having a chance to be merely “not on view.”