Weird thing happened while processing Nicolas Ghesquière’s Louis Vuitton Cruise 2027 collection show at the Frick: I read the comments. If fashion week shows are still nominally for the industry, cruise/resort collection shows are for content and client service: spectacles presented in destinations to generate views and to reward high-value retail customers.
And so it was that LVMH’s YouTube livestream got almost 5 million views in two days. But not because it was advertised on a wraparound billboard at the Holland Tunnel. Like 90% of the first 200 comments were praising Felix, and thanking the True Prince of Vuitton for inviting them.
And because LVMH were speedrunning models through a museum in cringe Haring merchandise, I had one mononymical Felix in my mind—the art Felix—and didn’t even consider the KPop Felix—who didn’t even walk in the show, he just attended, and was barely visible for like five seconds, but who apparently sent a fifth of his 32 million Instagram followers to watch the show.
study for a worse idea, s/o @octavio-world. sorry to drag you into this, getty images’ arturo holmes
And for a moment, instead of a bodega bag-shaped silk tunic with Keith Haring’s dramatically self-elegiac Unfinished Painting on it, I envisioned a bodega bag-shaped silk tunic with Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) on it, maybe executed in a pile of shimmering Swarovski crystal candy pieces. In case you thought luxury spectacles in the capital of capital couldn’t get any more descrative. Click here to pre-order.
“Untitled” (Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein’s Grave, Paris), 1992, ed. 1/4+1AP plus some other prints now considered non-work, but which are conceptually very fecund, this one sold at Christie’s in 2005
One of the great surprises in the exhibition catalogue for Felix Gonzalez-Torres (Always To Return)—which I brought up to curators Charlotte Ickes and Josh T. Franco in our conversation yesterday—is the essay by Joshua Chambers-Letson about Felix’s 1992 photo of flowers, “Untitled” (Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein’s Grave, Paris). Chambers-Letson discusses the work as portraiture, and in the context it’s traditionally been seen in, of “queer death, queer grief, and queer love.” But then pivoting to the work as an affirmation of queer life, he proceeds to expand on Stein and Toklas’ relationship as a complicated but revolutionary and rather boldly open example of queer companionship in a hostile world.
Chambers-Letson traces the contours of Stein & Toklas’ relationship IRL and in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Its queerness stands as “the open secret at the heart of the book” in which Stein places Toklas “among the ‘wives of genius.'”
gah, a EUR40m auction and Christie’s cannot photograph these to scale? One is around 59 x 35 inches, and one is 60 x 36, but it’s not the ones it looks like.
West Flanders furniture dealer Roger Vanthournout and his wife Josette collected art for over six decades. Did they see Michael Jenkins and Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ show at Xavier Hufkens in Brussels in 1991? Is that what got them interested in Jenkins’ work, leading them to buy two large works on paper at Galerie Hans Mayer in Dusseldorf in 1992? Roger died in 2005, and Josette died last year, so we can’t ask them.
But we can sure look at Jenkins’ work in unexpectedly fascinating relation to Gonzalez-Torres’s. These two works, Counting (L) and Thirteen Lights (R), are flashe and pencil on paper. They also appear to be collage, not trompe l’oeil; so the drawings on paper that look taped on are taped on. And the drawings are of thirteen light bulbs on a string.
Felix made a stack with Jenkins in 1990. His portrait of Jenkins was in 1991. Both artists made works with bondage gear, and Felix made the go-go dancing platform—with 13 lights along each edge—in 1991. Then 1992 was full of light strings, with either 24 or 42 bulbs. The motif cannot be a coincidence. Whether there was a conversation about or between these two artist-friends’ works, there was certainly a shared context. Unlike Felix’s work, though, Jenkins’ has almost never been seen or shown or discussed beyond the moment of its making, during the AIDS crisis and queer resistance.
The most extensive text on Jenkins’ practice, I think, is his Summer 1992 Bomb interview with Bill Arning. He doesn’t mention anything directly related to these works, except for yellow, a color used for its nautical references to quarantine and disease. [I just read a quote from Victor Klemperer, too, about the horror of being forced to wear the six-pointed star in Germany; he mentioned yellow’s historic association with the plague and fear of Jews.]
Felix and the Vanthournouts are gone, but maybe it’s time to ask Jenkins.
[next morning update] It’s a mixture of gratitude to Michael Seiwert for posting the Artforum review of Jenkins’ 1991 show at Jay Gorney, and sadness at my having not thought about Artforum when writing this post. On the bright side, Contemporary Art Library recently posted an archive of Gorney’s shows, including Jenkins. Incredible. Two things pertain to the drawings at hand: Jenkins was in portrait mode. All the drawings in 1991 were this 60×36 human/door/window scale. The counting is in NYC, too, in one drawing, but the counting is different, continuous, where the drawing above seems to record multiple counts. There’s the trace of human experience without an indication what’s being tallied or why.
Michael Jenkins, Tower with Crazee Windows, 1991, paint on wood, board, wire, 59 x 24 x 10 1/2 in., exhibited at Jay Gorney in 1991, archived at Contemporary Art Library
The yellow stripes appear in one drawing, and inside this sculpture, Tower with Crazee Windows, 1991. Beautiful photos everywhere, though the yellow does start to feel immediately overwhelming. Maybe Jenkins thought so, too. The two 1993 works he showed next were red and white.
Bad Bunny y su bandera de la independencia Puertoriqueña, una captura de pantalla del Sùper Tazòn
During the anglo excitement over Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl show, his use of a light blue flag as a symbol of Puerto Rican independence made me wonder about another Puerto Rican artist’s use of light blue: Felix Gonzalez-Torres.
Gonzalez-Torres was, of course, not from Puerto Rico, but he was soaking in it. He was born in Cuba and evacuated to Spain as a child. He went to college in Puerto Rico in the late 1970s and early 1980s and began his art practice there before moving to the USA. And he traveled back and forth while participating in the Whitney Independent Study Program.
“Untitled” (Loverboy), 1989, blue curtains as installed at Dia:Beacon, photo Bill Jacobson Studio
Light blue is a color Gonzalez-Torres used often—in mirrors and a stack, on painted walls, the go-go dancing platform, and especially in the curtains. There was a lot of talk about how the light blue Puerto Rican flag had been banned on the island for a while. In 1988 Gonzalez-Torres made Forbidden Colors, a work explicitly about the Israeli ban on the Palestinian flag.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Forbidden Colors, 1988, acrylic on panel, 20 x 16 in. each, collection MOCA
Gonzalez-Torres had spoken at length to Tim Rollins and others about the particular blue he chose for his artworks, and its associations with the Caribbean. And I wondered if there could have been a specific Puerto Rican political reference as well.
Screenshot of touchtone7’s video of “Untitled” (Go-Go Dancing Platform) where the dancer, coincidentally, decided to show up for her five minutes during the opening at Hauser & Wirth last night
“Untitled” (Go-Go Dancing Platform) is still for sale, I guess, and is now on view at Hauser & Wirth. It’s been on permanent loan to a Swiss museum, and has seemingly been available any time a museum wanted to show it, but there’s still something weird about this work being in a private collection, and being for sale, first in an art fair, and now in a gallery:
“Untitled” (Go-Go Dancing Platform) consists of a painted blue platform framed by 48 light bulbs. When the work is installed, a dancer may appear once a day, at unscheduled times—wearing silver lamé and listening to music of their own choosing through headphones—ascending the platform for brief unchoreographed performances in which they are only dancing for themselves. The dancer draws forth surprise, desire and projection.
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As Humberto Moro, Deputy Director of Program at Dia Art Foundation, said in a recent film on the work, ‘It reminds us that beauty can be ephemeral, that performance can be a private act, and that care, like memory, requires effort.
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Over the past three decades, “Untitled” (Go-Go Dancing Platform) has been realized in numerous institutional contexts, each presentation shaped by its particular time and place, allowing the work to unfold anew with every iteration.
But this is a paradox of Felix’s work: the public aspect feels incompatible with typical ideas of private ownership. Unless you have a steady stream of visitors, a candy pour in your house will go stale or get bugs. Why would you take a sheet from a paper stack if you already have them all? To wrap charcuterie? There is, of course, “Untitled” (1991), a box containing objects Felix sent to a private collector, which is intended never to be exhibited publicly.
“Untitled” (Go-Go Dancing Platform), 1991, on view at Art Basel 2025 via Hauser & Wirth
But what is the private realization of “Untitled” (Go-Go Dancing Platform) like? Does it just sit there? If there’s not a dancer coming every day, that just seems wrong. So do you just give a dancer a key to your house, and they show up whenever tf they want for their five minutes? That could be chaotically fantastic, stressful, or awkward. And you better pay them, and give them vacation, and so you need substitute dancers, or a roster. And I assume they’ll need background checks or NDAs. And suddenly you need a dancer manager/producer. But you still need to leave the dancer’s schedule up to them, and the discretion to share it with you. What if they get into a routine, stopping off for a dance on the way to their other dayjob? That also feels wrong somehow.
In the wake of the H&W opening last night, I was texting with a friend, who jokingly asked me my silver hot pants size, and it hit me: what if the owner is the dancer? The core tenet of “Untitled” (Go-Go Dancing Platform) is that it needs someone in lamé to dance on it for five minutes each day. That’s the owner’s responsibility. You knew that when you bought it. The rest is just execution.
“Untitled” (Go-Go Dancing Platform) has been realized in numerous institutional contexts, sure, but performance can be a private act. So imagine it realized in numerous private contexts: is it a ritual? A break? A chore? To you take a go-go break instead of a smoke break? A daily practice of go-go dancing? A quick go-go before going out? Does the whole family take turns? Is go-go dancing on the job wheel on the fridge, along with walking the dog or mowing the lawn? Are you notorious for go-go dancing during dinner parties, or is it a rare treat? Do you take a break when the work’s on loan somewhere, or do you keep it up?
Should “Untitled” (Go-Go Dancing Platform) be considered alongside other works of daily practice, like On Kawara’s date paintings, or Byron Kim skies, or Rob Pruitt’s sunsets or Obamas? Or should it slot in along the maintenance and labor works of Meyrle Laderman Ukeles? Should the yawning gap between the eight-figure value of the work and the wage value of the dancers’ daily labor be a subject of critical evaluation? Does the owner/dancer change that?
What if the next owner of “Untitled” (Go-Go Dancing Platform) decides to never loan it again, and just keeps it for themselves? These questions are all we’ll have left. I guess we all better hoof it over to 22nd street while we still have a chance.
[10 minutes later update: of course I know the Foundation’s core tenets for the work (pdf) only say it “may” include a dancer, not that it “must.” It also says “bikini or briefs,” though I think no non-cis male-presenting dancers ever performed in Felix’s lifetime. If the work can accommodate questions of gender, it can certainly withstand scrutiny of the rights (sic) and responsibilities (sic) of its owner, and that person’s relationship to the agency, labor, and body of someone involved in realizing the work.]
All these years, Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940) has been simultaneously over-quoted and under-read, to our peril:
One reason why fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are “still” possible in the twentieth [🙃] century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge—unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.
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[cuts section about the Klee which, not right now, Angel of History, Ima need you to focus!]
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At a moment when the politicians in whom the opponents of fascism had placed their hopes are prostrate and confirm their defeat by betraying their own cause, these observations are intended to disentangle the political worldings from the snares in which the traitors have entrapped them.
somehow ambushing me in the appendix of the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Always To Return catalogue, available in bookstores near me Sunday!
In retrospect maybe it was obvious that the mindblowing work of an artist who challenged so many expectations of what art could be ends up so invested in defining what it’s not.
In the beginning was the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Catalogue Raisonné, with its work works, and its two catalogue appendices: Additional Material and Registered Non-Works. These included some variations of works; some works that were shown and later declared non-works; non-works that were originally sold or given as works; and works he gave to friends that turned out to be non-works.
Then there were the photographs and snapshots given to friends, a warm sea of images Felix and his friends soaked in, and from which he drew so many of the images he used for puzzles, billboards, and other works.
There was the book, or book projects, which the artist approached as a work as he made and selected images, his collaborators reported, but which nonetheless do not make the CR.
There were the unrealized works, some of which were realized posthumously.
Then there were the exhibition copies, which are not stacks or candy spills, or billboards, non-persistent, certificate- and ownership-based works whose temporary realizations are called manifestations. Exhibition copies are copies outside an edition, of puzzles, for starters, which turned up among the complete set of puzzles first presented for sale at Basel, and then shown at the National Portrait Gallery.
Speaking of which, there were also the exhibition copies of snapshots, which were not works to begin with, and which were a surprise, frankly. But if the Smithsonian wanted to borrow the light string Christmas cards Felix sent me, I’d look for a workaround, too.
Archival Material Associated with Felix Gonzalez-Torres Project for the Cover of The Paris Review, Fall 1991, sold at Sotheby’s from the collection of William Georgis and Richard Marshall
To all this is [now?] [also?] added Archival Material. So far, one example has come to public/market attention, and if it were any other artist, it’d be tempting to call it a study or a drawing. In March 2024 Bill Georgis sold the collection he and longtime Whitney curator Richard D. Marshall had accumulated over their many years together. It included numerous works artists made or gave Marshall to be used for the cover of The Paris Review, a side hustle Marshall had from 1975 until around 1990.
images of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ covers for The Paris Review No. 120, Fall 1991, with, and I quote: Untitled (Perfect Lovers), 1988 and Untitled (Dolphin Halos), 1990. Unquote. THE DOLPHINS ARE HALOS
Though the cover Felix designed was for the Fall 1991 issue. As the signed note indicates, Felix had an idea for a portfolio for the magazine, but was content with just the cover—clocks on the front, dolphins on the back. The color sample is from Duron paint [not Pantone], and based on vintage issues I’ve seen online, the ink faded pretty dramatically.
It seems worth noting that though the drawing is signed, Sotheby’s does not attribute it to Felix, just describing it as “Archival Material associated with Felix” &c. &c. Two objects Christopher Wool made for Marshall for the cover of the 1989Whitney Biennial are also labeled as “archival material,” but Sotheby’s at least lists Wool as their maker.
All three archival material lots sold, and both the Felix and the best Wool sold for more than 4x their estimates. Whether it complicates ownership as a defining feature of Felix’s works, the market seems ready to handle these objects.
How they enter into the larger discussion of the artist’s work and what they reveal about his practice remain unclear. Finding out how audiences might respond to Archival Material would probably involve them turning up more or less at random, and somewhere besides an estate auction.
[Mail Call Update] I knew that Felix had not contributed any content for the interior of The Paris Review. I did not realize an illustration of a Donald Moffett work accompanied the table of contents. Glory, 1991, does not appear elsewhere online, though a similar bowling ball with a single, similarly sized hole, Untitled (You You You), 1990, is in the collection of the Walker Art Center, a 2015 gift of Eileen & Michael Cohen (the first owners of “Untitled” (Leaves of Grass).)
Felix’s works, meanwhile, are captioned as Untitled (Perfect Lovers), 1988, without the quote marks around “Untitled”, or the work’s more expanded date range (1987-90); and Untitled (Dolphin Halos), 1990. Besides being the only mention I can find describing the dolphin ring motif as a halo, this double dolphin halo [!] design corresponds to no other work, non-work, or published additional material. Perhaps there is a new category of lost works, or lost non-works, remaining to be explored?
There was this Tom Friedman drawing on a pedestal at Feature that was a forest of amputated daddy longleg legs.
A Sarah Sze sculpture with Tic-Tacs hot-glued to cantilevered packs of gum and boxes of French matches.
“Untitled”, 1990, embossed paper in archival box, 8 x 14 x 14 in., ed 12+5AP, image: Brandon Wickencamp/Andrea Rosen Gallery via FG-T Fndn, not the example being sold at Bonhams tho
And a Felix Gonzalez-Torres paper stack where you’re not only not supposed to take the paper, but you’re supposed to keep it eight inches high. Also, it’s not printed with a dolphin motif, but embossed, so it’s irreplenishable.
These are artworks I love that give me conservation nightmares.
Hmm, doesn’t that stack look like a little raggedy? You better keep it straight. Wait, are all those sheets at the bottom getting compressed unevenly, putting the embossment at risk of getting smushed away? Do they need to be rotated without being overhandled? Or perhaps interlaced with archival protector sheets? I’m getting anxious just looking at it.
Godspeed all seventeen of you paper conservation maniacs.
So “Untitled” (Go-Go Dancing Platform), 1991, is unique, but it is not the only one. Now that it has sold“a serious hold” and a $US16m asking price, let’s take a look at the six [!] related works Felix Gonzalez-Torres made. And then decided were not works after all. What are they, where are they, and what is to be done with them?
Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ “Untitled” (Go-Go Dancing Platform), 1991, in what I think is a dress rehearsal at Art Basel Unlimited, where it is being shown by Hauser & Wirth, not Zwirner & Rosen. via ig/hauserwirth
Hauser & Wirth showing Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ “Untitled” (Go-Go Dancing Platform) at Art Basel Unlimited this week. Seeing a video on H&W’s insta of the dancer hopping off the platform and heading out of the halle, accompanied, like a Disneyland character, by a handler, reminds me of artist Pierre Bal-Blanc’s 1992 video work, Employment Contract.
Bal-Blanc was a go-go dancer for the 1992 installation of Felix’s work at the Kunstverein Hamburg, for a show called “Ethics and Aesthetics in times of AIDS.” Employment Contract is a wordless slice of Bal-Blanc’s life that happens to have a brief go-go dancing stint in the middle of it.
One of the tenets of “Untitled” (Go-Go Dancing Platform), reaffirmed just a couple of weeks ago when the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation published an in-process version of core tenets for the work, is that the dancer’s schedule is their own, and it is undisclosed. The dancer chooses whether to share their schedule with the exhibitor, and the exhibitor is to take care not to disclose it, and to provide adequate accomodations for the dancer to go about their business. From the viewing, and even the exhibiting standpoint, this work of Felix’s entails a high degree of uncertainty, and a very low probability at any one moment of there being a dancer dancing.
screenshot from Pierre Bal-Blanc’s Employment Contract (1992) via ubu
Bal-Blanc turns this sense of expectation entirely inside out. The video camera tracking him as he jogs through the streets of Hamburg gives no hint at all of what is to come; he’s just a guy, jogging, in jorts. The surreal absurdity of him walking into a museum, unlocking a supply closet, stripping down [to silver and black briefs, a kludgey two-tone outfit that would not pass muster with the Core Tenets crowd], and grooving in an empty gallery for several minutes, defies narrative logic. And yet he goes right on with it, and back out of the museum. All in a day’s work.
This question of context and expectation is one of the perennial sources of power for Felix’s work, especially this one. Encountering a go-go dancer in a museum might feel as disorienting as a pile of candy you can eat from. More than 30 years on, Hauser & Wirth’s instagram comments are somehow still full of people still confused or contemptuous of this work as art. And while art world folks have certainly consumed and processed Felix’s work fully, seeing this piece, from this gallery, at an art fair, the least wild thing about it is the dancer.
[next day update]: indeed, it looks like the Core Tenets got updated just in time, because the work that had been on “permanent loan” to the Museum St. Gallen is for sale by the Swiss collectors who’ve owned it all along. Donald Judd would not be surprised. It does make me want to take a new look at the five go-dancing platforms and lighted pedestals listed in the “non-works” section of the CR.
a selfie in the work at npg [honestly, maybe the real art is the way the light reflecting off my dome lines up with the light string behind me]
“If an owner has chosen to lend the work for an exhibition, the owner may choose to simultaneously install the work.”
“An authorized manifestation of [the work] is the work, and should be referred to only as the work.”
Via a recent post to Instagram by the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation I learned what I could have realized many years ago: that “Untitled” (Fear), 1991, the blue-tinted mirror, is not an object, but a work. And as such, it can be presented in multiple manifestations simultaneously.
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.
installation view of Strange Ways: Here we come, Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Donald Moffett, at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Fine Art Gallery in November 1990, image via FG-T Fndn
Maybe it’s the passage of time, the advancement of discourse, the writing and thinking about it for so long, the engagement with the work and history of an artist who wrote so emphatically, that he’d always believed artists were allowed “to do whatever they please with their work.” Or maybe it’s the moment, when something I’ve seen and written about before looks different. And when something I’ve read a dozen times before finally sinks in, maybe because now I’ve had that same experience.
“I’m not afraid of making mistakes, I’m afraid of keeping them,” Felix Gonzalez Torres told Tim Rollins in 1993.
Andrea Rosen put that quote in context in her CR essay [pdf], and how Felix’s decision to not have a studio meant the first time he’d see a work realized was when he installed it in a gallery: “Putting the work in public immediately allowed him the opportunity to sense if he felt confident about his decisions. From time to time Felix would decide that he did not feel strongly enough about a piece to have it remain a work, even if it had already been exhibited.”
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].
screenshot of Kriston Capps’ IG of an installation photo from the National Portrait Gallery of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ light string work, “Untitled” (Leaves of Grass), turned off. photo: Matailong Du/NPG
As my comment on Kriston Capps’ insta shows, it’s somehow always a surprise to see a Felix Gonzalez-Torres light string with the lights off. My reaction led Kriston to doublecheck with the National Portrait Gallery whether it’d been OK to post [tl;dr it was, but hold on], and it sent me looking for more.
“Untitled” (Toronto) [on] and “Untitled” (Miami) [off], installed in 1992 at Andrea Rosen Gallery, image via FG-T Foundation
Of course, it goes back to the beginning, where they were shown on and off, side by side. Gonzalez-Torres’ whole point of his works was that the owner [or exhibitor] was to decide how to display them, and that includes whether to turn them on. The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation has photos of an unlit “Untitled” (Tim Hotel), 1992, in a collector’s home, which feels like the normal, private state. Maybe it gets turned on for company, which raises the question of public vs. private presentation as well as space.
Because obviously, they look the sexiest when they’re on, and it’s understandable for curators of public exhibitions to want that glow. But that allure also underscores the impact and importance of seeing them turned off sometimes.
