Tag: felix gonzalez-torres

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.

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.

Lot 1286, ending 12 Mar 2026, Michael Jenkins, Thirteen Lights, 1992, EUR500-700
Lot 1288, ending 12 Mar 2026, Michael Jenkins, Counting, 1992, EUR500-700 [christies]

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.

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.

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.

tl;dr: probably not.

Continue reading “Los Tonos de Azul”

“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.

…

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.

…

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.

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.]

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled” (Go-Go Dancing Platform), 12 Feb — 18 Apr 2026 [hauserwirth]
Previously, related: All in a day’s work
All the other Felix Gonzalez-Torres dancing platforms

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.

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.

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 1989 Whitney 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 were these incredible Marco Maggi drypoint drawings on aluminum foil at 123 Watts, including one on a literal roll of Reynolds wrap.

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.

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.

I don’t know about the first two, but if you want the diametrically opposite anxiety of stewarding a Felix stack from all your fellow Felix stack collectors, you are in luck. Because the fourth of five APs from the 1991 edition “Untitled” is coming up for sale again this week at Bonhams, and with a low estimate that’s 80% lower than the frankly wack estimate it had at Sotheby’s last year, and more like the ed.8/12 that sold this past summer.

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.

[update: sold for $20,000+5,600 buyer’s premium]