A snapshot sent from Felix Gonzalez-Torres to Anne Umland, dated Dec. 21, 1992, MoMA at NPG
One unexpected thing from the Felix Gonzalez-Torres exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery is the inclusion of a few examples of the artist’s correspondence, the notes and snapshots he regularly sent to friends and colleagues. They’re shown amidst all 55 of the artist’s photo puzzles, which underscores their similarity to the photos and letters Felix used. But only to an extent. By expanding the borders of the pool of imagery and text from which the artworks were drawn, they reveal nuances of the artist’s decisions.
verso note from FG-T to Anne Umland, collection, MoMA
And when it’s correspondence with curators and collaborators, they trace the network of relationships in which Gonzalez-Torres worked and lived. One example is two similar Christmas cards sent to Julie Ault and MoMA’s Anne Umland in 1992. Umland’s lightstring snapshot might be the OG Felix Navidad.
The text reads: “Dear Anne, To more years of living, loving, leaving for long train trips, fat cats, sweaters, breathing deeply salty air, new white shirts, unexpected flowers, new friends, streets full of lights, simple moments, views to remember, tough art objects, Paris, moving poems, writing, crying, learning, growing, shopping, hoping, waiting for love letters, heart beatings on one’s [?], little radios, and more, so much more, …in 1993 and beyond, Feliz Navidad, Felix”
One thing I can’t figure out, though: according to the checklist, this is an exhibition copy, on loan from MoMA. Did the museum decide not to loan a piece of correspondence from their archive? Or did Umland keep the personal card, but give the museum a facsimile? What goes into producing a double-sided photo & handwritten text? Because I feel some new facsimile objects coming on.
It’s also installed at the National Portrait Gallery, but after seeing the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation’s instagram, I realized I had missed this 1991 stack, “Untitled” (Party Platform 1980-1992), at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Library. So I went back to see it, and the place was full of people voting.
The inclusion of all 55 of the artist’s puzzle works [first shown like this at Art Basel 2019, including with five exhibition copies, which I didn’t know was a thing here.]
The inclusion of strong non-signature works like “Untitled” (Fear), above, and “Untitled” (A Portrait), the artist’s only video work.
The inclusion of twovariants of the portrait [sic] of flowers on Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas’ grave. [n.b.: There are more.]
But the most intriguing and effective thing was the threading of Felix’s work throughout and among the collection of the NPG. It worked in small, even tiny ways, like reuniting a little Eakins portrait of an ancient Walt Whitman with a candy pour, “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), which had been shown together at the NPG’s 2010 Hide/Seek exhibition of queer portraiture.
But it hit hardest and most unexpectedly in the most intrusive installation: “Untitled” (Death by Gun), the stack of photos of Americans killed in one week of gun violence, on the floor of a heavily trafficked hall gallery, in front of two works that felt like the NPG’s 19th century bread and butter.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Always to Return installation view with “Untitled” (Death by Gun) installed in front of Christian Schussele’s Men of Progress at the National Portrait Gallery
The painting turns out to be Christian Schussele’s 1862 Men of Progress, an amalgamated portrait of various American inventors, including Samuel Colt, inventor of the revolver pistol that made shooting people easier, quicker, and more convenient.
Catlin the celebrated Indian traveler and artist, firing his Colt repeating rifle before a tribe of Carib Indians in South America, c. 1855-60, installed at the National Portrait Gallery
Next to them [in a way I could have photographed all three together, had I only realized the complexity of the connection] is a print after a George Catlin painting, where the artist shows off a Colt rifle to a group of Carib Indians. Turns out that after the economic failure of his massive “Indian Gallery” project, Catlin accepted a commission for a series of paintings for an aggressive marketing campaign promoting Colt’s new guns. That went well. For the gunmakers, at least.
Study for Gonzalez-Torres Untitled (Porch), 2024, good candies in wrappers, endless supply, ideal weight 175 lbs
Ten days out, our neighbors have already put a bowl of candy on a table next to their front door. I am baffled. But as leaving piles of candy for the taking season approaches, I was hit by the idea of a Felix Gonzalez-Torres candy pour for Halloween. A Sturtevant show just opened in Paris, so I feel good about putting this out there while you people with porches still have time to shop for 175 ideal pounds of candy.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled” (Still Life), 1989, stack of light blue 8.5 x 11 in. paper with an ideal height of 6 in., as installed at Terrain Gallery in 1990, image: Armando Rascon via FG-T Fndn
I was going to write that in early 1990 Berkeley radiologist Robert Shimshak and his wife Marion Brenner bought all the Felix Gonzalez-Torres works in San Francisco. Which was three: two puzzles and a little stack. But that’s not quite true.
Those three were all included in a group show, This Symphony Will Remain Always Unfinished, organized by Armando Rascon at Terrain Gallery, the art space on Folsom Street he operated with Peter Wright. The show ran from 8 February through 10 March and included works by Gonzalez-Torres, Lucia Noquiera, Jessica Diamond, and Nayland Blake. [It took me a while to figure out that the show has lived in Felix’s exhibition history with an inverted title, This Symphony Will Always Remain Unfinished, while the other three artists and Rascon match the contemporaneous gallery listings.]
And it is true that the Shimshak/Brenners bought them, because they are now sellingthemall at Christie’s. The text on “Untitled” (Still Life), “Red Canoe 1987 Paris 1985 Blue Flowers 1984 Harry the Dog 1983 Blue Lake 1987 Interferon 1989 Ross 1984,” is nearly identical to Felix’s first frieze portrait, which he’d just exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum in December 1989.
But as I was trying to figure out who else was in the Terrain show, and how Felix’s work came to be in Terrain’s show, which I’d understood was Felix’s first show in San Francisco, I discovered that it was not. The first show, that is.
In their 2016 AAA oral history with Alex Fialho, Nayland Blake talked at length about the contemporary art world’s recognition of a fuller range of art by queer artists and about the queer experience. While making and showing art themself, Blake was also working at the New Langton Arts, an artist-run space also on Folsom Street, where he met Felix and Julie Ault when they came to SF in 1989:
So I was working in a curatorial capacity, you know, I mean Armando at Terrain did, I think, Felix’s first show in San Francisco, but, you know, I included, you know, one of Felix’s stacks in a show, I think the next year, at New Langton. And so we were—so I mean in those situations when I was meeting with people about looking at artists that we could show or that we could bring in, I was also telling them about San Francisco artists.
But that show Blake curated, The Word: text – object – ontology, opened on 25 January 1990, and ran through 17 February. So not only was Blake the first to show Felix’s work in the Bay Area, for nine days in February 1990, there were four works by Felix on view within two blocks of Folsom Street.
[an hour later and after checking the David Deitcher interview tab I had open update: NEVER MIND] Blake was the first to show a Felix stack in the Bay Area, but he remembered correctly that it came a year after Armando Rascon. Because there was a whole other group show with Felix’s work at Terrain in January 1989: Matter/Antimatter: Defects in the Model included two photostats and a rub-on transfer work. In 2013 David Deitcher recalled this show was one of the first times he’d seen Felix’s work.]
“Untitled” (1989/90), installation view from Oct. 2015-Jan. 2016, at the Metropolitan Art Centre, Belfast, image: MAC, Belfast via FG-T Fndn
And the stack in Blake’s show, “Untitled” (1989/90), was actually a double stack, with two texts: “Somewhere better than this place” and “Nowhere better than this place.” And it was realized in two places at once: in the center of Felix’s inaugural show at Andrea Rosen’s new gallery in SoHo, which opened on 20 January, and then, five days later, in San Francisco. And it was certainly not bought by the Shimshak/Brenners, because it was bought by the de la Cruzes.
Unlike the de la Cruzes’ stacks, which have been shown a lot, both in Miami and on the road, “Untitled” (Still Life) has only been exhibited rarely, and off the beaten path. So Felix stack compleatists, beat a path to Christie’s this week, because “Untitled” (Still Life) goes on rare public view tomorrow (9/24).
Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ portraits are, by design, a conflation of the public and private, the world historic and the individual, the news and the intimate. And the artist encouraged his subjects to add and edit important events, people, and dates, authorizing them to decide what version of a portrait should be used whenever it is exhibited.
So I am pretty sure that when “Untitled” (Portrait of the Rosenbergs), 1994, was installed at Paula Cooper Gallery this summer, the text was provided by its subjects, OG Tribeca collectors Colombe Nicholas and Leonard Rosenberg. The work appears in Tabula Rasa, a fascinating-looking group show tracing study, influence, and relationships across a network of artists around Sarah Charlesworth.
Covid arrives when again? detail of Felix Gonzalez-Torres “Untitled” (Portrait of the Rosenbergs) in Tabula Rasa at Paula Cooper Gallery, screenshot from @aaron_krach’s 10 July IG
And I guess one way to interpret the inclusion of “Covid arrives 2021” is as the date it finally made its way into the Rosenbergs’ pod? Did they somehow miss the entirety of Covid in 2020, when it was very much a thing? Did the date baked right into the name, COVID-19, not factor in? Did they perhaps mean “Vaccine arrives 2021”?
The very nature of Felix’s portraits, and also the nature of human history as an accumulation of lived individual experience and interaction, and also the ultimate impossibility of knowing someone else’s subjective experience, and also the inevitable failure of art, no matter how powerful, to perfectly capture and transmit the essence of that subjectivity, makes me reluctant to call the factcheckers. If or until I hear back from them or the gallery with more info, for the Rosenbergs, at least, Covid arrived in 2021.
Detail of “Untitled” (Portrait of the Magoons), 1993, Nancy Magoon Version, as installed in 2023 at David Zwirner
Meanwhile, in his 2023 show of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ work, David Zwirner exhibited another portrait, “Untitled” (Portrait of the Magoons), 1993, but in three versions. Artists Coco Fusco and Glenn Ligon created their own versions, and collector/subject Nancy Magoon provided her own version. [cf. this YouTube video of them speaking with Helen Molesworth about the portrait(s).]
In her version Magoon, whose husband and co-subject Robert passed away in 2018, included “Covid lonely 2020.” Which, taken together with “Bedazzled 2019, 2021, 2022,” might mean the pandemic canceled Ms. Magoon’s annual screening of the Elizabeth Hurley/Brendan Fraser classic. Such is the nature of a Felix portrait, of course, that we may never know.
Speaking of epic editions from the 1990s at The Renaissance Society, they have Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ tattoo, “Untitled” (1992), available. Proceeds from the unlimited edition support the Renaissance Society and the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation. [status update: it’s complicated.]
This has long been on the top of my list of artist tattoos I would have gotten, had I gotten a tattoo, and I have considered getting it several times over the years. At some of those times, when I was getting close, I felt like the tattoo was not readily or easily available.
At some point, it felt like I missed a window in which the Renaissance Society offered it. That window is now open, but I find this level of engagement with the work has been sufficient for me. The description says, “you may also gift the tattoo,” so if I need to level up, I’ll just find someone who wants it.
Joseph Kosuth, Remarks on the Foundation of Mathematics, 2015, 2x3m carpet, photo: Francesco Lagnese via Equator Production
For years now, I’d assumed that it was vaporware. Research inquiries had always turned up nothing. But where the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation closes a file, Joseph Kosuth…unrolls…a carpet.
Critic Deborah Solomon mention this morning of a carpet in Kosuth’s house led me to Equator Production, an artist carpet venture by Petra and Ranbir Singh with Reiner Opuku, that ran from 1985 until 2003. Petra seems to have rebooted it [Kosuth’s carpet, Remarks on the Foundation of Mathematics, has the earliest date of the new bunch: 2015.]
And in 1991 Equator Production made “Untitled” (Free Tibet), a handwoven carpet with a text saying “FREE TIBET” on it, by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, which was listed as no. XXVI in the “Registered Non-Works” appendix of the 1997 catalogue raisonné.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled”, 1989, silkscreen on paper, 16 1/2 x 21 /3/4 in., published in an edition of 250 + 10 AP by the Public Art Fund, image: Andrea Rosen Gallery via FG-T Fndn
There are two paper stack works by Felix Gonzalez-Torres where every sheet in the stack is a signed, numbered edition, and the whole thing constitutes one work. You can’t take those. [Though “Untitled”, from 1991, is made up of 161 signed prints from an edition of 250 the artist made with Public Art Fund in 1989, above. The other 89 prints, plus 10 APs, are all circulating as individual works, sold (and resold) separately.]
“Untitled”, 1990, embossed paper—that’s a ring of dolphins, btw—in archival box, 8 x 14 x 14 in., ed 12+5AP, image: Brandon Wickencamp/Andrea Rosen Gallery via FG-T Fndn
There is one paper stack work that was published as an edition of stacks: 17 8-inch tall stacks of embossed paper in archival boxes. You can’t take those, either. [Unless? HMU?]
“Untitled”, 1991, light blue printed on white paper, 3 1/4 in. ideal height, 8 1/2 x 11 in sheets, the Artist Proof, selling as lot 444 at Sotheby’s on 16 Nov 2023, from the estate of Chara Scheyer
And there are two classic paper stack works, with endless supplies of paper and ideal heights, etc., that were created as editions. Which is distinct from a stack being able to exist in two or more places at once; in this case, an edition is about the number of owners, not the number of stacks. One, “Untitled” (Ross in L.A.), is an edition of three, though there’s only one out there: the de la Cruzes gave one to what’s now ICA Miami, and the Raleses gave one to the NGA.
The other is “Untitled”, above, which is an edition of 1 plus an artist proof Felix gave to Michael Jenkins, an artist, friend and collaborator. [Their two-person show together in 1991 at Xavier Hufkens in Brussels included “Untitled” (Ross in L.A.) and Felix’s text portrait frieze of Jenkins, but not the stack they made together the year before with a naked sailor on it, “Untitled” (Join), which the Rubells whip out all the time.] Anyway, Chara Scheyer bought Jenkins’ little stack a while ago, and now it’s back. If there’s a more manageable stack out there, I haven’t seen it.
From the jump, the experience of encountering a Sturtevant is different from almost all other artworks. The moment of recognition, of loading up your assumptions and expectations of an artist’s work, of anticipating a certain kind of engagement is the same, until the instant it isn’t. Sturtevant’s work triggers a recognition, and then it thwarts it. When you realize a work is by Sturtevant, you consider how close she has gotten to the artist you thought it was by; then you start marking differences. You may also start to reflect on your upended expectations, and to question the systems that produced them.
July 2023 installation view of Sturtevant’s Gonzalez-Torres Untitled (Blue Placebo), 2004, at the Whitney, via Scott Rothkopf’s IG
And by you, I mean me. And the Sturtevant work that has been confounding me for months is Gonzalez-Torres Untitled (Blue Placebo). The 2004 sculpture is a repetition of “Untitled” (Blue Placebo), a 1991 pour of blue cellophane-wrapped candy. The Sturtevant was acquired by the Whitney Museum in 2016, and it went on view for the first time this summer in “Inheritance,” an expansive collection exhibition about legacy and lineage curated by Rujeko Hockley.
As far as I can tell, Sturtevant only made one candy pour. It was shown at least twice in the artist’s lifetime, and this is the second time since her death. How does it work? What does it do? How does a museum handle it? Is there a certificate?
I’ve been thinking about the works Sturtevant made of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ works lately, and noticed this spread in the catalogue for her 2004 exhibition at the MMK Frankfurt. It’s called a catalogue raisonné, but maybe that was to subvert the idea of a catalogue raisonné. This notebook page feels a little more reliable, and yet.
It’s not clear when this was written, but the continuity of the pen makes me think it was after 1997, when her (Blood) bead curtain was shown at Ropac. Some of the artist’s notebook pages reproduced contain sketches, as if the work was not realized yet. This page, neatly laying out two works, feels like a transcription from other, less formalized sources. A lot of the objects’ details have been worked out, and this is how future exhibitions and sales will be recorded. A CR in progress.
A lot of details, but not all. It’s interesting to see what Sturtevant needs to repeat, and what she does not. Here, for example, she was still working through the titles. Here these works are called “Torres Untitled” (Something in parentheses, whether it’s Go-Go ^Dancing Platform or Blood). As it happens, I’d just been reading Tino Sehgal and Andrea Rosen’s conversation in the Specific Objects Without Specific Form exhibition catalogue, and Andrea spoke at length about the specificity of Felix’s “Untitled in Quote” (Something in parentheses) title format. Sturtevant seems to have considered it, maybe even used it for a while, before going with her own format: Gonzalez-Torres Untitled (Go-Go Dancing Platform).
And “1994-95.” [FWIW, this was published as 1995 in 2004.] I don’t know how it only just occurred to me that Sturtevant was making these works while they were being shown in Gonzalez-Torres’ retrospective at the Hirshhorn, MOCA, and Guggenheim.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled” (USA Today), 1990, detail image from a 2011 installation at the MMK Frankfurt, FG-T Foundation via Jewish Museum
Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ “Untitled” (USA Today) was included in Take Me (I’m Yours), an exhibition of participatory artworks, which opened at the Jewish Museum in New York in September 2016. The show was first conceived by Hans Ulrich Obrist in 1995 in particular reference to Gonzalez-Torres’ work. HUO was joined by Jens Hoffman and Kelly Taxter at the Jewish Museum in organizing the expanded view.
I opted for the image above because it feels like it could be from anywhere, but it is from Specific Objects Without Specific Form, a three-venue, 2011 exhibition of Gonzalez-Torres’ work organized by Elena Filipovic in 2010-2011. Filipovic included the work at Wiels in Brussels and at MMK Frankfurt in 2011. When the show was reconfigured by the artist co-curators at each venue, Danh Vo and Tino Sehgal, respectively, the work was removed, swapped out with another candy piece owned by MoMA, “Untitled” (Placebo), 1991. The extensive catalogue for the show was published in 2016.
The parenthetical in the title, USA Today, was originally a reference to a brightly colored newspaper with nationwide circulation, which you’d have to step over every morning on your way out of your mid-range hotel room. The artist once told Bob Nickas the piece referenced the “sugar rush” of patriotism. Obviously, I chose it for the color and everything else.
A poster from “Untitled,” 1993, the endless stack of free posters Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Christopher Wool first made for Printed Matter as a fundraising edition [!] is being sold a “Poster for an exhibition” and an “offset print” from “a so-called ‘Stack’-work” by Christopher Wool. It would be, I believe, Wool’s first and only Stack-work.
sogenannte “Stack”-Arbeit, hmm?
Gonzalez-Torres’ stack piece made with an image of Wool’s painting is, of course, in the Sammlung Hoffmann in Mitte. So if you lose the auction, maybe just head into town one weekend and pick up an uncreased copy.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres, No Title, 1989, offset print on pale blue? paper, framed, image via Doyle
Red Canoe 1987 Paris 1985 Harry the Dog 1983 Blue Lake 1987 Interferon 1989 Ross 1984
We’ve been here before. As a diptych stack by the artist once endlessly put it, “Somewhere better than this place/ Nowhere better than this place”.
Doyle is offering a work by Felix Gonzalez-Torres that threads every conceptual needle. It is an edition. From an endlessly replenished stack. It’s in the catalogue raisonée, but not as a work.
