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Too Much, 2020
Cryogeyser
In 1995 the Guggenheim Museum organized a retrospective exhibition of Gonzalez Torres's works, which was exhibited at the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris from April through June the following year. The installation of the Gonzales-Torres retrospective was uncommonly affecting. Exhibitions in L'ARC are most often installed to exploit the building's signature quality, its unbroken circular flow of space. Gonzalez-Torres exhibition ended abruptly in a cul-de-sac at the point where one would usually continue into the connecting galleries. This decision recalled Dani Karavan's Homage to Walter Benjamin at Portbou, Spain, where the visitor descends a steep staircase incised into a cliff facing the sea (Somewhere Better Than This Place) only to find his progress blocked by a wall of glass. Like Benjamin, he must retrace his steps, up the stairs and back to the world (Nowhere Better Than This Place).
Lewis Baltz / Texts, 2012 / p. 134-135
In a much-published interview, Tim Rollins asked Gonzalez-Torres what he would like from his students. He replied that he would like them to be generous. It was a revealing answer from an artist who placed such a high priority on generosity in his own work. The celebrated paper stacks and the arrangements of candy described by the artist as having an ideal height or weight and from which the visitor was invited to take one (or more) elements to be replaced as necessary from an endless supply, function as symbolic generosity while alluding to another, impossible generosity: the hope of endless renewal, a secular realization of divine grace. This is the language of prayers and a gesture approaching transubstantiation, but like the wily priest, Gonzalez-Torres' gifts create obligations. The 'gift' work seems to fulfill an unkept promise of the 1960s, the decommodification of art, but they are not precisely that. Gonzalez-Torres proposes a transaction as old as the ritual of gift-giving: to accept an element of his work is to be implicated in its realization, and in its future.
Lewis Baltz / Texts, 2012 / p. 133-134
Lisboa Industrial District, 2023
The artistic milieu that Gonzales-Torres entered - New York in the late 80's - was a drastically impoverished one for a thoughtful artist. The waves of innovation that had swept the New York art world since 1945 had subsided, leaving behind a monolithic commercial edifice purpose-built for marketing reactionary to a newly created of class of speculators who demanded, and of course received, a traditional and easily comprehensible art. Oppositional practice mirrored (and perversely supported) the sterility of the market. Feminist artistic discourse devolved from the complexities of Eva Hesse into the simplistic sloganeering of Barbara Kruger. Gay art, in previous decades defined by artists such as Johns, Rauschenberg, and Warhol, was now characterized by a dominant practice of homoerotic pinups.
Gonzalez-Torres refused this (and every other) gay stereotype as repressive and, moreover, as playing directly into the hands of the homophobic ultra-right. Instead he adopted a strategy of détournement, subverting received forms of high culture-Minimalism, Conceptualism, et. al. to his own purposes. Approprating the idiom of the master narrative, Gonzalez-Torres an art with multiple and often conflicting readings. He mainstreamed the 'gay agenda' or his gay agenda, by addressing both gay and straight audiences with works that were not only personally and politically charged, but were a meditation on the conditions and possibilities of art. The themes of time (as instrument and arbiter of mortality) and of generosity (as an engine to defeat, or forestall mortality) are pervasive in Gonzalez-Torres work. His allusions to mortality are sometimes blandly literal, as in "Untitled" (Perfect Lovers), 1987-1990, two synchronous battery-powered wall clocks placed side by side, marking the passage of time until one or the other falls out of sync, slows, and stops. His portraits invert the received notion of portraiture, 'immortalizing the sitter.' Timelines, installed as friezes, melding significant moments in his subject's lives with dates of contemporary historical events, imbedding them in the passage of time and the corruption of the flesh, an homage of sorts to the best-known unexecuted portrait of the last century, Dorian Gray.
Lewis Baltz / Texts, 2012 / p. 132-133
Gwen, 2023
7am spectating Rua das Portas de Santo Antão, 2023
In "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Redux: The Artist's Voice after the Death of the Author," David Hickey quoted a colleague of artist Ray Johnson, upon learning of Johnson's suicide: "A smart career move."? Hickey explained his cynical and unoriginal remark (it was earlier attributed to Gore Vidal about Truman Capote's death) with the argument that death, and only death, provides the necessary closure for an objective assessment of the artist's contribution. Hickey is probably correct in the long term, but the short term is more problematic. When an artist dies pre-maturely his work is often only viewed through the prism of a truncated mortality: criticism collapses into anecdote or, worse, hagiography. For artists like Diane Arbus or Robert Mapplethorpe, death confers both a questionable martyrdom and an irrefutable proof of authenticity: "They were not tourists in the world that they moved through; they shared the ultimate complicity with their subjects. They died as they lived; they died for their art." And so forth.
For Felix Gonzales-Torres, whose work thematized the ephemerality and fragility of life, an early death compounds the risk that an unwanted sentimentality might infect the elegiac with the mawkish, which is contrary to what his art demanded. Gonzales-Torres was many things: Cuban immigrant; gay man; post-studio artist, mourning lover, a person with AIDS, and an articulate and sympathetic spokesman for all of these facets of his identity. He also possessed the finest artistic intelligence to emerge in American art in the last decade.
Lewis Baltz / Texts, 2012 / pp. 131-132
The photograph necessarily shows what was in front of the camera; the painting only shows what was in front of the canvas optionally--and the option is the painter's.
Barthes makes this point by saying, "Painting can feign reality without having seen it"; Kendall Walton makes it by saying, "Photographs are counterfactually dependent on the photographed scene even if the beliefs (and other intentional attitudes) of the photographer are held fixed". His point is that paintings are "based on the beliefs" (again, or other intentional attitudes) "of their maker", photographs are not.
Walter Benn Michaels / Photographs and Fossils in Photography Theory edited by James Elkins, 2006 / p. 434
Over & Over, 1979
Fleetwood Mac
Source: Spotify