Over the summer Huw Lemmey wrote in the LRB about the implications of the British government’s designation of Palestine Action, a group of activists opposed to the Israeli genocide of Palestinians, and the support provided to the IDF by the UK government and military contractors, as a terrorist organization.
The vagueness of the statute, the Terrorism Act 2000’s definition of “supporting terrorism” is as he and many others warned: since July hundreds of people demonstrating with signs and t-shirts that “oppose genocide” or “support Palestine”. It has truly passed and lapped the authoritarian censorship madness that inspired Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ Forbidden Colors (1988) several times, and seems to show no sign of slowing down, much less reversing.
In completely unrelated UK news, this weekend’s issue of the Financial Times’ How To Spend It has this colorful How To Shop It feature with “21 mouth-watering watermelon buys,” perfect for late summer! [h/t @JeremyMillar]
ISP alumnus Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Forbidden Colors”, 1988, 20 x 67 in., acrylic on panel, collection MOCA
Extraordinary. The Whitney is burning down the Independent Study Program to save the Independent Study Program. Scott Rothkopf issued a statement suspending the ISP. He fired the new associate director, who had named him in her criticism of the censorship by senior museum administration of a pro-Palestinian capstone exhibition and performance last month by ISP participants. And he cited the absence of an ISP director as a reason to rethink the ISP altogether, without acknowledging that he had eliminated the ISP director’s job in February, before all this censorship started. Or became public.
Brian Boucher’s report on artnet has details, quotes, and links to previous incidents, including protests and callouts of trustees last week. The trustees’ involvement in arming Israel and supporting its settler-led ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is not a non-issue, but I think Rothkopf is no puppet; he is fully in control of this situation, and accountable for it. Pushing the timeline back, Dorothy Lichtenstein only died last year, and the Lichtenstein Foundation’s gift of their home and studio to the Whitney as a home for the ISP only took effect last year. We don’t have enough information yet to tell if we’re seeing the realization of the Lichtensteins’ vision for the ISP, or its betrayal.
“This color combination can cause an arrest, a beating, a curfew, a shooting, or a news photograph. Yet it is a fact that these forbidden colors, presented as a solitary act of consciousness here in Soho, will not precipitate a similar reaction.”
As we’ve seen over the last year and a half, that fact has changed.
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.
The first video I saw of the dancer in the Super Bowl halftime show breaking the choreography and unfurling a Palestinine/Sudan flag is still the most jarring. He runs around unimpeded with his flag, joining the crowd of flag wavers during Kendrick Lamar’s performance, and you can imagine him hatching plan in rehearsal. Seeing the A Minor flags, and Lamar’s mic drop ending where he stands amid a field of Black men in red, white, and blue gear, forming a giant American flag around him, and asking, “What flags are missing? Which flags aren’t being raised at this moment that should be?”
The chill comes from the end, though, where suited security agents tackle him while a grid of focused dancers continue their stepping in the foreground.
The next morning, the AP’s report of the incident, which did not make it onto the main broadcast, said the individual had been detained by New Orleans police while “law enforcement is working to determine applicable charges in this incident.”
Joshua Smith, Untitled (Forbidden Colors), 2024, via IG/@joshuasmith1983
Untitled (Forbidden Colors) has been realized again, this time as a work by Joshua Smith. The parallelogram of Los Angeles sunlight coming in might be my favorite thing about this photo, after the work itself. It would be great if it draws out the Felix Gonzalez-Torres original from MOCA’s storerooms, and even better if there can be a stop to the killings in Gaza.
I hate that this needed to come back: Gonzalez-Torres Forbidden Colors, 2021 —
NGL, it does not feel like a moment to celebrate, and it’ll take a lot of work for 2024 to not become the biggest dumpster fire yet.
But whether via email, commentary, hyping or buying things, many people have engaged with me, the blog, and the various projects this year, and I’m grateful for all of the thoughtful and invigorating interactions. To close out the year, here are a couple of art accomplishments in 2023 which I found satisfying. They are in roughly chronological order:
Celebrating Ellsworth Kelly’s 100th: EK 10 MAR 23 T [via]Biggest show of the year: Mural With Girl With A Pearl, obv [via]Jasper Johns’ Stolen Balls [via]Meanwhile, in this, year three of me swearing I’m not a dog painting guy: Jacques Barthélémy Delamarre Facsimile Object (D1), ‘Pompon’, obv [via]Underground Projection Room (for Rattlesnakes), 2023 [via]Proposed Katharina Grosse (PKG) for Basel, 2023 [via]The Second Deposition of Richard Prince, 2023—? [via]Happy Joan Mitchell Season T [via]
The Smithsonian has added the Hirshhorn Museum’s audio archive to their digital library collection, and it’s great. Too often in the art world, what happens in Washington not only stays in Washington, it’s forgotten in Washington. So it’s unsurprising that the Nation’s Attic has interesting, even important stuff in it that really should be dusted off.
One of the first recordings I headed to this weekend was a lecture by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, in association with his Summer 1994 retrospective. I hadn’t heard Felix’s voice in almost 20 years, and I’d never heard him talk at length about his work. I was not prepared, either, to hear him say he was getting tired about an hour into the recording. After that, I couldn’t not hear his exertion to complete what was clearly a difficult, but imperative task.
It turns out I was also not prepared for how unfamiliar his work sounded in his own words. And how different his practice was from the received, sort of calcified, canonical understanding of it. The things he emphasized vs the things we saw or now see as being elemental.
Felix read part of his 1993 interview with Tim Rollins, which we know. But he also talked along to a selection of slides, which I tried to follow along in my books. Easily half the works he discussed were not included in ostensibly definitive catalogues and anthologies. Many had different titles. Some weren’t illustrated.
All of this is of a piece with Felix’s work, though. He would change the titles of pieces. Works he showed and sold were, near the end of his life, recategorized as “additional materials” and “non-works.” But some things, installations and site-specific projects in particular, seem to have been sorted out of his canon completely and/or ignored by critics.
We work with what we have, but we too often don’t see what else there is. And when we find out we’ve been using incomplete or inaccurate info, we’re slow to adapt.
So here’s a single example. It’s a piece Felix started his Hirshhorn talk with, and which he said “is a key to a lot of my work, and also the way I am.” And it’s piece I’d never heard of or seen, whose bare, incomplete, and contradictory references in the record so far I have completely overlooked. The artist called it “Untitled” (Quatrenium).
Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Forbidden Colors, 1988, acrylic on panel, 20×16 in. each, collection, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Felix Gonzalez-Torres actually made a lot of paintings. Most are Bloodworks paintings, gesso and graphite grids bisected by a diagonal line, referring to a doomed medical readout.
But in 1988 he also made Forbidden Colors, four 16×20-in acrylic monochromes in white, green, red and black. He showed the piece, along with four framed photostats, in a project installation at The New Museum, 25 years ago right now.
INSTALLATION BY FÉLIX GONZÁLEZ-TORRES September 16 – November 20, 1988 When I was asked to write a short statement about the work in this space I thought it would be a good opportunity to disclose and, in a certain sense, to demystify my approach. I hope that it will guide the viewer and will allow an active participation in the unravelling of the meaning and the purpose of this work. Many may consider this text redundant; and unnecessary intrusion, or even a handicap. It is assumed that the work must “speak for itself,” as if the divine dogma of modernism were able to deliver a clear and universal message to a uniform “family of man.” Others know this is not true that each of us perceives things according to who and how we are at particular junctures, whose terms are always shifting. Preferably the exhibition gallery will function as an educational device, simple and basic, without the mysteries of the muse, reactivating history to affirm our place in this landscape of 1988. This work is mostly personal. It is about those very early hours in the morning, while still half asleep, when I tend to visualize information, to see panoramas in which the fictional, the important, the banal, and the historical are collapsed into a single caption. Leaving me anxious and responsible to anchor a logical accompanying image scanning the TV channels trying to sort out and match sound and sight. This work is about my exclusion from the circle of power where social and cultural values are elaborated and about my rejection of the imposed and established order. It is a fact people are discriminated against for being HIV positive. It is a fact the majority of the Nazi industrialists retained their wealth after war. It is a fact the night belongs to Michelob and Coke is real. It is a fact the color of your skin matters. It is a fact Crazy Eddie’s prices are insane. It is a fact that four colors red, black, green and white placed next to each other in any form are strictly forbidden by the Israeli army in the occupied Palestinian territories. This color combination can cause an arrest, a beating, a curfew, a shooting, or a news photograph. Yet it is a fact that these forbidden colors, presented as a solitary act of consciousness here in SoHo, will not precipitate a similar reaction. From the first moment of encounter, the four colour canvases in this room will “speak” to everyone. Some will define them as an exercise in color theory, or some sort of abstraction. Some as four boring rectangular canvases hanging on the wall. Now that you’ve read this text, I hope for a different message. For all the PWAs.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen Forbidden Colors in person. It was in a group show at White Columns in 1993, and MOCA showed it once in 2002. That’s it. I’ve noticed it in the catalogue raisonne, of course, though without really paying the piece much attention. Really, I didn’t understand the reference. And the photo didn’t really reproduce the green panel; it looked black.
UPDATE Thanks to petitemaoiste, who just tweeted that the piece was also included in John Farmer’s 1995 collection show, “The Compulsion to Repeat.” It’s interesting, though, how you notice things, or take notice of them, when your own frame of reference changes.
The ban on the Palestinian flag, its colors, and any “artwork of ‘political significance'” was lifted in 1993 as part of the Oslo Peace Accords.
[December 2023 UPDATE: In 2021 in response to Israeli violence against Palestinians, I made a replicable version, Gonzalez-Torres’ Forbidden Colors, and offered it to any institution who wanted to show but could not borrow the original. Also, the original was included in the 2023 Carnegie International. Meanwhile, it is a new fact that Israel, Germany, the UK, and places in the US, among others, are actually banning display of the colors of the Palestinian flag, part of an attempt to silence protest of the ongoing genocide in Gaza and attacks in the occupied West Bank.]
I’m trying to imagine this happening today, or this century–or last, for that matter–and I just can’t. The best account of it I’ve found is from Calvin Tomkins’ 1964 New Yorker profile of Rauschenberg, so I’ll just quote him:
[Rauschenberg and Jean Tinguely] joined forces with several other avant-garde talents to put on a rather bizarre performance in the theatre that is part of the American Embassy.
This spectacle presented simultaneously a motorized Tinguely sculpture that went back and forth across the stage doing a strip tease; a performance, in and around the piano, of John Cage’s “Variation II” by the American pianist David Tudor; a picture-shoot by Niki de Saint-Phalle, Tinguely’s present [sic] wife, who creates her works by firing a .22 rifle at papier-mache constructions in which plastic bags of paint are embedded; and the onstage creation of a painting by Rauschenberg, whose brushstrokes, hammer blows, and other sound effects were amplified by contact microphones attached to the canvas. (Only the back of the painting was visible to the audience, which expected to see the finished work at the end but was denied that pleasure.)
Jasper Johns, who was also having a show in Paris, contributed a painted sign reading “Entr’ Acte” and a large target made of flowers. The performance drew a large and enthusiastic audience, although the Embassy, uncertain what to expect, had forbidden any advance publicity.
I mean, can you imagine it? The performance was June 20, 1961. Johns and Rauschenberg were both in Paris for shows, but from what I can tell, the impetus was the beginning of David Tudor’s European tour. [Though Tudor’s site doesn’t seem to mention a tour.]
“Variation II” is one of Cage’s most complicated, abstract works. Cage’s scores almost always baffle me–when described, they often sound like impossible-to-follow instructions for making a Sol Lewitt wall drawing without a wall–and “Variations II” is no different. Here’s the Getty Research Institute’s explanation:
Cage’s original notation consisted of five points and six lines on eleven individual plastic sheets and instructed the performer to create measurements between the dots, representing sound events, and the lines, representing parameters of sounds (amplitude, duration, overtone structure, frequency (pitch), point of occurrence, number of sounds structuring each event). The resultant measurements defined the parameters of each sound event.
