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.
On June 16, 2021, Pablo Martinez, the head of programming at MACBA, the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, gave a talk about Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ use of the motif of crowds in his work. In a socially distanced auditorium still wary of crowds and the threat of viral contagion they posed, Martinez presented key early works by Gonzalez-Torres where crowds alluded to the protests and epidemic fears of the AIDS crisis. With callbacks to Baudelaire, Benjamin and Barthes, crowds also embodied the dualities of community and alienation, catalyzing liberation and identity as often as they dissolved the self into anonymity.
Martinez spoke as part of “The Performance of Politics,” a one-day conference on Felix’s approach to identity politics: “Felix Gonzalez-Torres deliberately sought to stand outside any identity essentialism and, on the contrary, to activate various strategies of disidentification, as José Esteban Muñoz put it, in response to the state apparatuses that employ racial, sexual and national subjugation systems through protocols of violence and exclusion.” [All the talks are available on YouTube, which is pronounced youtubae in Spanish.] Which was part of an exhibition, “Felix Gonzalez-Torres: The Politics of Relation,” curated by Tanya Barson, that examined the artist’s work in the context of the Latin world.
And here I thought that Gerhard Richter’s critique of the art market by making an offset print in an open edition was surpassed only by his using the prints as note paper. Claudio Santambrogio is much better than I at deciphering Richter’s handwriting, and he figured out the entire note Richter wrote to his dealer August Haseke in November 1969 when he finally delivered the first half of his 1967 open edition, Blattecke. And it is a whole new art direction casting its shadow:
Lieber August, Hier sind heute endlich 101 Stück (Nr 286-386). Jetzt liegen noch ca. 350 Stück hier; zu Deiner Information. Ich bin so erkältet, dass ich die 101 Stück gut signieren konnte. Ich habe mich bemüht, die Viren gleichmäßig über die Blätter zu verteilen. (Die nächsten 50 hoffe ich mit etwas schickeren Viren infiltrieren zu können, vielleicht Tollwut oder so was). Eine ganz neue Kunstrichtung wirft ihre Schatten. Alle gute Euch herzliche Grüße Dein Gerhard
Dear August, Here are finally 101 pieces today (nos. 286-386). Now there are still about 350 pieces here; for your information. I have such a cold, I could sign 101 pieces. I have tried to distribute the viruses evenly over the sheets. (I hope to infiltrate the next 50 with some fancier viruses, maybe rabies or something). A whole new art direction is casting its shadow. All the best to you best regards Your Gerhard
This is not what I envisioned when I mentioned a Felix-like stack, and yet the shadow is cast.
[week later update: these notes and additional related material are now in the Richter Archive in Dresden. Apparently it took Richter three years to work his way through signing the first 739 Blattecke.]
Queer Ancestor: Thomas Eakins, Walt Whitman, 1891, printed 1979 [? how’d that work?] installed with FG-T at the NPG
Well that took five minutes.
The erasure or diminishment or downplaying or whatever of the gay, AIDS, and immigrant identity of Felix Gonzalez-Torres and those identity characteristics as vital context and reference in which he made his work in the 1980s and 1990s, is real and should be called out and resisted. It happened publicly and messily at the Art Institute. It happened similarly at Zwirner. It happened in subtle, coercive ways art historians and critics called “oppressive.” But addressing it’s not a question of either/or, but of both/and, as Johanna Fateman skeeted, and expanding the meaning of the work, the contexts in which it resonates, and the changes in the world around it every time it’s exhibited should build on the artist’s achievement in its original moment, not replace it.
Anyway, this debate is not advanced by the current outcry over the show at the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian, Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Always To Return, because the claimed erasure is not happening. I’m not going to litigate Ignacio Darnaude’s impassioned but wrongheaded, blinkered, and inaccurate article condemning the way “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), a 1991 candy pour is presented. Its connection to AIDS is not erased. Felix’s connection to Ross is not erased. And as I walked out of the Felix galleries, past the James Baldwin and The Voices of Queer Resistance exhibition next door, and on through the permanent collection install, I have to say, there is no museum anywhere doing more of the work right now than the NPG & SAAM.
l to r: eakins’ whitman, leaves of grass, ross in la @ npg
So. Here is the way “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) is presented.
Specific Objects Without Specific Form, the 2010-2011 retrospective of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ work, curated by Elena Filipovic, was a pivotal influence in the posthumous reconsideration of the artist’s work and legacy. It was co-curated with three artists, Danh Vo, Carol Bove, and Tino Sehgal, in three European museums: WIELS (Brussels), the Fondation Beyeler (Basel), and MMK Frankfurt.
Frequent changes and reinstallations were the default, and each artist brought entirely different concepts for reimagining the work and its history. I would be surprised if a hundred people on earth saw every iteration and variation over the show’s 15-month run, and so the massive catalogue, published in 2016, is the primary vehicle for transmitting the experiments and experience of the exhibition.
The core of the catalogue, at least as it relates to the recontextualization of Gonzalez-Torres’ work, is a 20+ page conversation between Tino Sehgal and dealer Andrea Rosen. Rosen is the single most influential figure in the history of FG-T’s work, and the single biggest reason it’s been preserved, shown, and studied during his life, and after his death. I don’t know of any more extensive discussion of Rosen’s views on Gonzalez-Torres’ work, and the core of her message here is that it is about change.
Though there are some persistent, static objects in Gonzalez-Torres’ body of work, the most significant ones are all recreated every time they’re shown. It is the discussion and decisions that occur around each of these realizations that constitute the history of the work. Those changes, and marking them, and questioning them, and questioning the context a work is presented in each time it is realized, are, Rosen argues, central to Gonzalez-Torres’ original intention for his work.
“He would always say,” Rosen quoted Felix as saying, “‘If someone chooses to never install a work again, or manifest a manifestable work again, it may not physically exist, but it does exist, because it did exist.'” Some of his works have recently been manifest at the National Portrait Gallery, and the changes and decisions around them have prompted criticism. This has happened before, with these same works, with the same institution, even, and with some of the same people—including Rosen—stewarding Gonzalez-Torres’ work. The most public shift and criticism has been specific objections about specific identities: the seeming erasure or diminishment of the artist’s identity as a gay man, a person with AIDS, and a Cuban-American, as generative to his work. It got attention after Rosen brought David Zwirner in to co-represent the artist’s estate. But, as this show, and this book, and this interview, document it’s been underway for much longer.
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.
