#felix gonzalez-torres stacks: how do they work?

[gregdotorg]

"Untitled" (Still Life), 1989, a little paper stack work by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, was bought out of a 1990 show in San Francisco, and has been exhibited only rarely since. So if you want to get a sheet from it, head to Christie's in NYC this week (24-30 Sept 2024), before it sells.

I started writing about how the collectors bought all the Felix Gonzalez-Torres works in San Francisco at the time, but then I realized there was another stack piece being exhibited at the same time, two blocks down Folsom Street, which was also being shown in NYC. hashtag conceptual art, baby.

image: Felix Gonzales-Torres, "Untitled" (Still Life), 1989, 8.5 x 11 in. sheets of blue paper, ideal stack height: 6 in., as installed at Terrain Gallery, San Francisco, in 1990. photo by Armando Rascon via FG-T Foundation

[lauraglazer]

I realized this week that in 1994 I saw an exhibit of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ artwork. Before this week I didn’t recall his name or even the museum, just that it was while I was in high school on a date in D.C. with someone I met in an AOL chat room. We were both giddy about getting to take free posters from the gallery! (I think he took a bunch and I suspect that I took two.) When I got home I probably didn’t know what to do with them and definitely didn’t know where to begin to understand them and threw them away :(

Over the years that I’ve recalled this experience, I’m always trying to remember the name of the artist and had given up on ever figuring it out. Until last month when a classmate shared an article on Gonzalez-Torres. I’ve been sitting on the link for weeks and finally dove in which resulted in some internet cross-referencing.

I learned what I gave up on ever remembering: 

In 1994 I saw Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Traveling at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. The beautiful posters that I took and didn’t understand were "Untitled," 1989-1990, in two cubes comprised of stacks of poster-size paper sheets printed with the phrases "Somewhere better than this place" and "Nowhere better than this place." 

This is considered one of his “replenishable” pieces. 

As part of our Contemporary Art class this term, we are answering lots of questions about how we envision our art practices. My thoughts reveal to me that being able to offer pieces of a project for free is important to me. Like how the Hello Pretty City zines were always free, the radio show was free, the Albany pins were free, and access to Phillip’s handwritten bible and my photos of him are free.  

Now I realize that these free posters which I gathered so greedily and gleefully, are foundational to how I hope to conduct my art practice.

Also, I am especially enamored of how the materials of this piece are listed:

Print on paper, endless copies 26 inches at ideal height x 29 x 56 inches overall (original paper size: 29 x 23 inches)

The experience of being in that gallery room is so clear in my head but also lacks details; mostly I recall the joy I felt at realizing that piece of paper, that piece of art was for me to hold on to, to keep and somehow understanding that me taking it wasn’t going to prevent anyone else from having one, too. Enough beauty to go around. 

The article

About the exhibit

Checklist of works in the exhibit

Additional article that led me to this realization

[abutlerbbbwc2021]

Felix Gonzales-Torres

visual artist

1. What is the artist’s work about, concept? 2. What media do they use, and how does it relate to their concept? 3. How does their work fit into the BBBWC module? 4. Describe one of their pieces, and what it says to the audience.

1. He uses a minimalistic and abstract concepts. conceptual-ideas. Addresses themes like: gender, sexuality, love, loss. “Leaves the final meaning of the work open to interpretation”. 2. His paintings and photographs on billboards or frames are very minimal in terms of the space. The inner space and outta space are vast. Using simple everyday materials: beads, string lights, stacks of paper: of various different sizes, jigsaw puzzles mostly of photographs from newspapers. His most famous theme and work seems to be his ‘candy works’ on google image. Was in relation to the body weight of his partner when he was dying of aids. Spectators could take a sweet each, which represented his partners decrease in body weight through time.  3. Fits into the white cube. Engages the audience through the physical space.  4. Found his ‘Perfect Lovers’ : 2 clocks, which also fall in his theme of ‘doubles’.  They’re synchronised, sharing the same time,  which sloowly fall out of time and eventually stop. Represents loss and time. Created shortly after the death of his partner from aids. 

Links: 

Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation

https://www.felixgonzalez-torresfoundation.org/works/untitled-perfect-lovers2

Moma

https://www.moma.org/collection/works/81074

The art story

https://www.theartstory.org/artist/gonzalez-torres-felix/artworks/

[junghye-yun]

“Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) Felix Gonzalez-Torres  1991

“Untitled” (Golden) Felix Gonzalez-Torres  1995

Felix Gonzalez - Torres was a Cuban-born American visual artist. He is openly gay sexual orientation is often seen as influential in his work as an artist.

Gonzalez was known for his installations and sculptures in which he used materials such as strings of lightbulbs, clocks, stacks of paper, or packaged hard candies. His work is sometimes considered a reflection of his ecperience with AIDS. Most his works are entitled “Untiltled” in quotation marks.

Employing simple, everday materials (stacks of paper, puzzles, candy, strings of lights, beads) and a reduce aesthetic vocabulary reminiscent of both Minimalism and Conceptual art to address themes such as loce and loss, sickness and rejuvenation, gender and sexuality, Artist asked viewers to participate in establishing menaing in his works. Regarding of this exhibition, his artworks are consumed and touched by viewer.

I assume that his artwork is affected by trend of art notion such as Post-modernism, Minimalis, and Conceptual art. And the way how he show his work is distingushed which is he tried people to do performing a simple action.

And also in terms of his material, they have involved meaingfull history of a artist.

Truly, I can think that the way is the connected with interactive art to my project as well.

[chrysalisofrust]

Staring at Trump’s Body, What Do You See? Artist Jonathan Horowitz Has Produced a Hellish Presidential Portrait

(article by Jerry Saltz, Vulture.com -> the link is down there)

There are many things liberal Americans are learning to live with in 2017. One of them is Donald Trump's body — and the way he talks about and acts around other people's bodies, particularly women's bodies. On the left, many had circled November 8 as the last time they would have to think about these things — the last time they’d have to think about them daily, anyway. Instead, in the months since the election, people and artists everywhere have been effectively addressing every aspect of Trump's presidency in numerous visual memes and remixes of his image. Jonathan Horowitz — long known for his activist art around gay rights, vegetarianism, and radical politics in general — has made one such extraordinary altered image of Trump. In it, he takes us on a journey into the metaphysics of this man's great, somewhat mysterious, half-beast behemoth bulk. By mysterious I mean strange, always swathed in a lot of clothes, large but unformed, awkward because he has no clear shape or outline. In the Horowitz, we see Trump's visage dominating the picture. He is photographed from behind, wearing all white except for his trademark red MAGA hat. The image is Trump golfing and was taken at Trump's Scottish golf course by Ian MacNicol in 2012 and widely published. Horowitz's alterations are simple, smart, and somehow vividly give us not just Trump's elephantine omnipresence but his vulnerabilities, insecurities, and anger at other bodies.

The Horowitz is part of a great group show at Petzel Gallery: We need to talk ... Artists and the public respond to the present conditions in America. The large exhibition was mounted by the gallery's staff after the election and is meant to address the political situation at hand and fathom how art might speak to it. It was assembled in less than 30 days and is fantastic; it includes more than a hundred videos taken via open call. Kudos to the gallery and its staff. I walked home from the show obsessing over this work, turning it over in my mind. Only when I emailed my editor did I learn that the piece had actually been originally commissioned by New York, though it never ran — strange coincidence.

Horowitz enlarges the found photograph and mounts it on recycled Hexacomb paperboard so that it takes on the formal presence of a painting. Behind the figure of Trump, Horowitz has inserted a keyed-up post-nuclear apocalyptic sunset. That's almost it. You instantly get the feeling of precarious doom, a Cat in the Hat character playing with the world. Yet the title of the picture detonates this even more. Keep in mind that only the most talented artists can successfully occupy the immaterial Duchampian space between a work of art and its title — making layers of new meaning manifest. (e.g. Nude Descending a Staircase). Horowitz's title is Does She Have a Good Ass? No. Does She Have a Fat Ass? Absolutely. The words are Trump's from a 2013 interview of him fat-shaming Kim Kardashian. Not included in the title is him assuring the interviewer he'd never "want to go out with her."

Horowitz mixes up a lot of different interesting medicines in this picture. First, the terrible way Trump talks about women is combined with this picture of his own terribly out-of-shape body. From behind there's no getting around this. The psychic tables turn instantly; you can't help notice how like a blancmange Trump's body is. In this way the picture also amplifies the double standard always in play between the sexes — feminizing him by subjecting him to his own odious male gaze. We think about how uncomfortable Trump often looks in his body — the strange pictures of him pawing his daughter, kissing his vice-president. We recall the memes of him leaving his wife stranded at podiums, in limousines. We think about how his sexuality seems adolescent, mean, misogynistic, and how it generally lacks sensuality. And how he's always covered in this great broad-shouldered Mafioso-style overcoat. Like a male muumuu. Or his idea of a power suit. All to cover something — or rather, everything. I fancy him a tailor's nightmare. Trump has never been known for his sportive side, either. From a very young age he's shown signs of being overweight and out of shape; maybe this is why he produced that "most fit ever" "doctor's report." In his work, Horowitz also gets at Trump's over-cleanliness, his admitted germophobia — he's said he hates shaking hands or touching people. A kind of boy in a virginal bubble. This then gets sexual when we recall the incredible national discomfort felt when at a Republican debate he held up his hands and assured the country there was "no problem" with his penis. In this very efficient way then Horowitz makes Trump's many attacks on other people's bodies boomerang and places Trump as butt of his own sexism. This is art and caricature at its political best — not just humor of partisanship, but deep insight and simple truth made visible, unavoidable.

But there’s more: The shift in color and Trump's aloneness in the landscape transforms the setting from golf course to world stage — and gives the background a sense of Boschian destruction. I thought of the first words of 2015's Mad Max: Fury Road: "My name is Max. My world is fire and blood." All this makes this straightforward picture as complicated as any of Daumier's images. As with the many amazing signs, slogans, and images already produced by protesters everywhere, the Horowitz is further proof of new generations rising to defend their country in any way they can. (Horowitz also makes stacks of the work available at the gallery entrance, à la Felix Gonzalez-Torres's piles of free posters, a beautiful echo of nascent 1990s AIDS activism.) I think Horowitz's image should become the official presidential portrait to hang in all federal buildings, courthouses, and post offices. It speaks volumes.

January 31, 2017 12:58 p.m. (original article here)

(those Vulture.com articles are what I expect journalism and art critique to be)

[biofunmy]

Can Virgil Abloh Fit in a Museum?

CHICAGO — There is one room in “Figures of Speech,” the Virgil Abloh exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, that vividly demonstrates how his aesthetic principles, emotional range and commercial ambitions all cohabitate cozily.

On one wall is an Inez & Vinoodh triptych of a young black child playing with Louis Vuitton items, from Mr. Abloh’s first ad campaign as the artistic director of Louis Vuitton men’s wear design. The most striking is the middle image, in which a girl wears a psychedelically colorful sweater with a “Wizard of Oz” theme — is draped in it, actually — with small, fragile origami paper boats strewn at her feet. Her left arm is outstretched and she’s gazing off into the distance — it’s beatific.

But step to the other side of the room and see these photographs anew. On the floor in front of you will be a sculpture of a sort, an array of 16 numbered yellow markers, the kind used to denote the location of evidence at a crime scene. (What’s not on any information card is that 16 is the number of shots a Chicago police officer fired at Laquan McDonald in 2014, killing him.)

On the floor, there is tragedy. On the wall, there is hope.

It was also striking just how many people stepped right around the ghost on the floor — barely noticing it, if at all, as they snapped photos of an ad.

[Read more about Virgil Abloh on his career and the MCA exhibition.]

This midcareer retrospective of Mr. Abloh’s work turns on unanticipated juxtapositions — visual, sociopolitical and even structural. As an artist, he’s a light-touch conceptualist, his work a series of small disassemblies and reassemblies. Mr. Abloh trained as an architect and was Kanye West’s right-hand man for several years before branching out and becoming a fashion designer for Louis Vuitton and his own line, Off-White; a D.J.; a visual imagineer for other clients; and a collaborator with Nike, Ikea, the Red Cross and others.

He is the standard-bearer for the internet-speed globalization of haute post-hip-hop style, suggesting that the chasm between taking a marker to your shoes and ending up the head designer at an iconic fashion house may not be as vast as it once seemed.

That he has achieved so much so rapidly is its own provocation, one amplified by “Figures of Speech.” It is his first museum exhibition, and fundamentally it asks how a museum — by practice, a static institution — can capture and convey the work of someone who moves quickly, has prodigious output, and who isn’t nearly as preoccupied with what he did yesterday as what he might do tomorrow.

HIP-HOP, STREETWEAR, SKATEBOARDING AND GRAFFITI are all art practices born of resistance, and by the time Mr. Abloh found them, they were eking their way into institutions. More than any of his generational peers, he has applied their disruptive urges in new contexts.

His art is about besting capitalism — from within. He has a just-make-it ethos; the essence of his work is process as much as product. In a 2017 lecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design — published as a book, “Insert Complicated Title Here” — he focused on “shortcuts,” about how changing an existing thing just 3 percent is often enough. “I’m sure that you’re trying to challenge yourself to invent something new, trying to be avant-garde,” he told the students. “Basically, that’s impossible.”

For Mr. Abloh, there is no art practice outside the mode of consumption. You sense that for him, the sneaker in the store (which costs you money) and the picture of the sneaker in the store that goes on Instagram (which costs you time) serve effectively the same purpose.

That same blitheness is at work in “Figures of Speech,” curated by Michael Darling, which gives equal weight and space to Mr. Abloh’s most meaningful work and his loosest-conceived projects. Perhaps most jarringly, the space given over to his signature work — his fashion design for Louis Vuitton and Off-White, his various sneaker prototypes for Nike — is rather small.

In the second gallery, clothes hang on racks that make it tough to appreciate the unusual details — whether in terms of silhouette, or design in-jokes — that Mr. Abloh has made his stock in trade. At the end of one rack are some prototype Vuitton pieces with a strip of paper attached that reads “LEWIS VUITTON,” an intriguing in-house tweaking of a design lineage that could also fit in at a group exhibition at a Bushwick art gallery. (Such garments were never actually produced.)

Later, a grid of Abloh/Nike prototype sneakers has been set at ground level. Presumably artifacts like these are what draw many people to the exhibition, but the presentation minimizes their importance and their strengths.

There is a kind of exhibition that’s effective for work like this, something more process-focused that shows the inspiration and the innovation side by side — a display of tools, techniques and gambits.

In places here, that happens — mentioning Calder on the wall text next to a mobile-like sculpture made of pink insulation foam, or pointing out the Caravaggio that was referenced in his earliest clothing line, Pyrex Vision. But some are obscured: the oversize version of the clear CD case Mr. Abloh designed for Kanye West’s “Yeezus” album is missing any mention of Peter Saville, a mentor of Mr. Abloh’s, who did something similar for New Order.

BORROWING IS IN MR. ABLOH’S DNA, and one of the unlikely pleasures of this exhibition is the way he freely absorbs the work of others. One wall is completely wheatpasted with posters of the Chicago rapper Chief Keef wearing a Supreme T-shirt, photographed by Ari Marcopoulos — it all clings to the wall like a proud stunt, one of several places where Mr. Abloh imports a vernacular context into the museum setting. Similarly, there are works made of concrete cast to resemble outdoor benches that would be manna to skateboarders.

Mr. Abloh also applies that mode of creative direction to his own emotions. In one case, he displays some of his gold and platinum paper-clip jewelry (by the celebrity jeweler Jacob Arabo), made-real versions of pieces he once fashioned for himself out of actual paper clips, an aspirational nod to the luxury rapper chains he never expected to be able to afford.

Just across the gallery from those pieces is one of the show’s most convincing arrangements. On the left is Mr. Abloh’s D.J. setup — austerely beautiful wooden speakers (by Devon Turnbull), glimmering CD turntables (by Pioneer DJ) — presented as a shrine. And hanging on the wall to the right is a cease and desist letter from the United Nations chiding Mr. Abloh for using its logo on fliers for D.J. gigs.

There it is — reverence and flippancy all together, and a reminder that flippancy can often be a byproduct of reverence.

And yes, Mr. Abloh is in on the joke. A biographical video near the end of the show includes a scene in which he waters, with a hose, the “WET GRASS” rug he made with Ikea. By the gift shop, I spied some tickets on a table that read “Virgil Abloh: ‘Bathroom Pass.’”

Mr. Abloh even folds critique into his work — a rug in the first room is imprinted with an arched-eyebrows quotation from a Four Pins story about Pyrex Vision in 2013. An information slide in the fashion gallery alludes to some unkind things the fashion designer Raf Simons once said about Mr. Abloh: “Simons described Off-White as not bringing anything original to fashion. Abloh immediately responded with the collection ‘Nothing New.’”

When Mr. Abloh is playful, he can be exhilarating — there’s serious joy in the gallery that includes a pile of his Ikea collaborations, which looks as if it were assembled via tornado. When he works in the métier of consumer goods, he understands how to differentiate just enough from the norm to stoke passion. But the pieces here that hew closest to traditional artistic disciplines are the least inspiring.

More than a dozen are marked as having been made in 2019 and as belonging to a private collection. Mostly they are room fillers: grand-scaled billboards, an all-black Sunoco sign sinking into the ground, and so on. Taken together, they betray an anxiety about what type of work might belong in a museum exhibition. They eat a lot of space, but don’t communicate a lot of information.

Mr. Abloh’s best work could fill these rooms several times over, just in a very different fashion. He is a tinkerer. Rather than a simple grid of sneakers, what about a video of him drawing on them, or cutting one up and making something new? Instead of racks of largely obscured clothes, what about the WhatsApp messages between him and his colleagues that led to his creative decisions? For Mr. Abloh, paterfamilias to a generation that understands garments are to be modified, not simply worn, that would have been apt. (The show’s hefty, excellent catalog embraces this spirit, deploying a titillating level of detail.)

As this exhibition is standing there, still, Mr. Abloh is plowing through ever more references on his Instagram stories. What about a screen that displays his real-time preoccupations? The notion that the museum can only hold finished works is an obsolete one.

THOUGH THERE IS NO ROOM for true hands-on interactivity in this exhibition — probably a crowd control measure — at least two works elsewhere in the museum do invite interaction: Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s “‘Untitled’ (The End),” an endlessly replenished stack of paper that you can take freely from, and Ernesto Neto’s “Water Falls From My Breast to the Sky,” basically a divan you can sit on, covered by crocheted nets extending to the top of the building.

But Mr. Abloh still found ways to break the borders of a museum show. Security guards wear limited-edition cool-blue Nike Air Force 1’s that he designed for the occasion. One guard told me he’d been offered $7,000 for his pair. (They’re currently going for around $2,000 to $3,000 on resale sites.) And the exhibition extends into the gift shop, which sells a rotating collection of T-shirts, posters, art pieces and $5,000 gradient-painted chairs — almost everyone I saw bought something.

Millions of people rarely, if ever, experience art in a museum setting. They see it on the streets, in their clothes and sneakers, on the walls around them. The way for art to have wide impact is to set it free — Mr. Abloh understands that his real museum is the world outside these walls.

Capitalizing on his relationships with established brands, he set up de facto satellite locations for the show. At the NikeLab installation next to the Nike store on Michigan Avenue, a few blocks away from the museum, there was an ocean of shredded sneaker bits in the windows and walls. Inside, you could piece together D.I.Y. projects with markers, rubber ink stamps and various embellishments — I filled in a coloring book outline of an Air Jordan Spiz’ike in shades of pink, green and brown, and pocketed a couple of pink chenille swooshes.

Louis Vuitton opened an orange-themed pop-up location in the West Loop neighborhood carrying select items from the FW19 collection. (New York had a similar green-themed one a few weeks later.) The space was filled with life-size (and larger) mannequins that were surprisingly emotional, and wouldn’t have been out of place at the museum.

But perhaps the greatest provocation — the most ineffable artistic moment — came at the main Louis Vuitton flagship store on Michigan Avenue, which was carrying several pieces of Abloh-designed clothing emblazoned with references to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. One varsity jacket had a hand-embroidered patch on the back in the shape of Africa. In this temple of high fashion were clothes that shouted their radical intentions, locating black history at the very center of the aesthetic conversation. It was moving, and also undaunted — a dash of capitalist conceptualism hiding in plain sight.

Virgil Abloh: ‘Figures of Speech’

Through Sept. 29 at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; 312-280-2660, mcachicago.org. The exhibition will come to the Brooklyn Museum in 2020, after making stops at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and the ICA Boston.

Sahred From Source link Fashion and Style

from WordPress http://bit.ly/2NrS4Im via IFTTT

[macaulipirillo-blog]

Week Thirteen- Social Practice

This week’s articles were very informative. I truly have always thought of art as the basics like drawing, sculpture, photography, and painting but this class has really opened my eyes. Basically artwork can only be considered “relational art” or social practice if it is based on social interaction.  It really reminds me a lot of performance art except that this actually has interaction with others instead of “putting on a show”.  I looked up Felix Gonzalez-Torres from the An Introduction to Relational Aesthetics and Social Practice article, and a lot of his work is definitely installation but I will say I do enjoy his work and love the colors he puts into them. But I guess I don’t really understand how just because he puts a bowl of candy or stack of posters out by his work that makes his art work a social practice. Couldn’t almost any artist do this and become a social artist then?

I enjoyed learning about Tania Bruguera. I like how she thinks the most productive point for her is when people question whether or not some work is art. I find this interesting because I do personally question that what she did was art. I do like how she uses her art to spread awareness and information for different things such as her culture. She kind of reminds me of Theaster Gates in this way. I liked the concept she used when bringing the mountain police in on the horse to do their normal job in order to show what it really feels like and show that police are really helping people. But maybe I’m just not fully understanding social art but I don’t see how this is considered art?

For this week’s relevant artists, I chose Theaster Gates. He was born in Chicago in 1973 and still resides there. He is an urban planner, potter, and artist. He creates sculptures with clay and tar and renovates buildings. He transforms the raw material of urban neighborhoods into reimagined places of opportunity for the surrounding community. He has a non-profit called Rebuild Foundation in Chicago that manages a lot of projects such as Arts Bank, Black Cinema House, Dorchester Art and Housing Collaborative, and Listening House. A lot of his work also revolves around his African-American identity and the struggle for Civil Rights. I think that’s what made me enjoy his art so much. I’m firmly against racism and I enjoy seeing someone out there doing something positive for once to try and influence the change. He has a piece called “My Labor is my Protest”, which was my favorite. The title alone says a lot about the work. In the piece there’s a classic fire truck hoisted from the ceiling and a huge metal container that has hundreds of African American magazines inside. I feel like the message he is trying to get across is that if we “hoist” the Civil Rights out of our view then it becomes meaningless and we’re able to forget about it and go on with our lives.

[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: Falling in Love with a Felix Gonzalez-Torres Go-Go Dancer

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled” (Go-Go Dancing Platform) (1991), wood, light bulbs, acrylic paint, and Go-Go dancer in silver lamé bikini, sneakers, and personal listening device; overall dimensions vary with installation; platform: 21 1/2 x 72 x 72 in (Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, on permanent loan from a private collection; © The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation)

It was the squeaking of the shoes that caught my attention. I knew exactly what was going on, and that the pale blue platform which I had seen empty a minute earlier was now occupied. I quietly rushed through the gallery to the small room where I saw him.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled” (Go-Go Dancing Platform) (1991), wood, light bulbs, acrylic paint, and Go-Go dancer in silver lamé bikini, sneakers, and personal listening device; overall dimensions vary with installation; platform: 21 1/2 x 72 x 72 in (all photos and video by the author for Hyperallergic unless indicated otherwise)

Upon walking in, I froze and stared. He danced, in a silver lamé bikini, mirrored sunglasses, white socks, and tennis shoes. His glasses reminded me that silver is a mirror, and I saw myself in him, in his shiny briefs. His body moved across the small platform with authority and confidence, as he held his iPhone in hand and techno filled his ears. The platform was completely his; I couldn’t have imagined anyone else on it. His bleach blond buzzcut, which reminded me of Eminem, complemented the small gold gauges in his ears and the yellow earbuds. The squeaking shoes, now only a few feet from me, were shrill, like the sound of a cat who has been stepped on; but there was no aggression in his dance. Though he danced like I imagine any go-go boy to dance, I moved through the cliché and saw him as an individual. Each movement of his body was decidedly him, sexy without trying to be. I shifted to the floor without thinking, and sat cross-legged as his body slowly began to glisten, damp with sweat. He might have danced for 15 minutes, or maybe an hour — time was elusive. I watched his entire performance, seldom even blinking. Eventually, he hopped off the platform, went upstairs past a little rope, presumably to the David Zwirner offices, and was gone. Was I being creepy?

I had read plenty about “Untitled” (Go-Go Dancing Platform) (1991) by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and had watched videos on YouTube of the performance many times. But something about seeing this guy in person stayed with me. I wanted to know his name, his occupation (was he a dancer by trade?), his thoughts on the work. Why was I so drawn to him?

After searching on Instagram for about a half hour, it became clear that this guy wasn’t dancing very often. Other dancers appeared frequently and were tagged by friends, but he evaded me. Eventually though, I found him, and sent him an email with the subject: “my favorite dancer.” His name is Ben.

Ben Ross Davis, an artist himself, was in Berlin when we finally connected, so we decided to video chat.

“Do you remember me?” I asked. I positioned my phone at a flattering angle and closed the curtains halfway, in order to get even, diffused light on my face. He said the audio was a bit patchy, but told me: “You look good.” My heart rate rose even though I knew he was talking about the image quality.

He didn’t remember me. “I don’t know if I remember particular faces like that,” he said. “When I first approached it I decided to not make eye contact with people because I wanted to focus on channeling the piece and the music, almost for myself.” I have to admit, I was somewhat disappointed, hoping that the moment he saw my face on the screen he might remember how I was transfixed by him, might have connected with me a bit. But I had underestimated his own connection with the piece, with the history of Gonzalez-Torres’s work, and the magic and weight that come with participating in that context.

The author’s collection of candies from Felix Gonzalez-Torres works

Gonzalez-Torres often talked about the important role of the public in his work. “I need the viewer … I need public interaction,” he told Tim Rollins in a 1993 interview. “Without the public, these works are nothing. I need the public to complete the work … to help me out, to take responsibility, to become part of my work, to join in.” I have taken pieces from his piles of candy several times. I always eat one and save one, and now I have a small collection of candy, a museum of my own, from seven different works of his. (Recently, ants took a liking to them, so they now sit in an airtight jar.) I have felt the romance and tension of participating in Gonzalez-Torres’s work many times, the reverence of joining in, the connection with the artist (or the illusion of such). There is no way to passively view these works; to see them is to participate, to choose to engage or not engage. But the go-go platform is unique within his practice because it adds another layer of audience or public, an additional responsibility. Between the institution and the viewer is a third party, the dancer, who completes the work as much as the viewer. This threesome is complicated, because all parties show up with very different but equally crucial responsibilities and roles.

Davis agrees that watching is an active gesture. Deciding how long to stay, where to stand, how close to get, whether to take a photo or not, are all decisions that become a kind of negotiation or, as Davis says, an interaction.

Seeing the dancer — like really looking — is an active decision, one that I made. “Initially, I didn’t want to insert too much of myself within the piece, but then as I got a bit more comfortable, I felt like it was a bit important for me to insert part of who I am into the work,” Davis said, discussing his eventual inclusion of the mirrored glasses he had made. But to not insert himself would have been impossible anyway; how could I not see his tattoo of a Snellen eye chart on his bicep, the other tattoo of a magnet on the inside of his forearm (which I couldn’t make out while he danced but later identified on FaceTime), or the mole on his left butt cheek? When we talked, I learned that in addition to techno mixes, he even danced to his own music at times. “I made [the song] for myself in a lot of ways, like as a catharsis in a way, and to make me move, so it worked really well actually,” he said.

Perhaps this individuality is what really attracted me. Gonzalez-Torres made a work that fully relies on a “type” — all the dancers are male, athletic, attractive, most with a few tattoos and very little body hair (but some) — but also allows for total individuality when you scratch the surface. Even the schedule of dancing was personalized, determined by each individual dancer according to his availability. “The piece itself was completely up to the dancer, so I could basically come and go any of those days, as I wanted,” Davis said. “You can come down for 15 seconds and leave, or you can dance for the whole time if you want.”

Screenshot of the author’s video chat with artist Ben Ross Davis

As I talked with Davis, I realized the piece was just as much for him, if not more so, than it was for me and the other viewers shuffling through the gallery. By design, Gonzalez-Torres’s work gives more the more that people experience it, literally being refilled in the case of the candy piles or paper stacks; there’s always more than enough.

“There were definitely people that I don’t think really understood it, and I think there were some people who were offended by it, and there were people who laughed, and then there would be people who would just sit there and hold their heart,” Davis told me. “The laughing and the fear, more or less, is just as important as the really intense intimacy, because I think that emotions are important, a gamut of emotions are important, and I think that’s cool that it affects people in different ways.”

When I asked him if he felt sexy, there was a long pause. “Um, sure. But also, I’m not really a sexy dancer,” he said. “I was just dancing the way I would normally dance, so I wasn’t like, ‘I’m going to go on this platform and be super sexual and sexy,’ I just went on there and danced how I dance.” He’s wrong about not being a sexy dancer, but the point he was making is that he got to be himself up there, and that seems important. He compared the lamé briefs to an armor, which I interpreted as permission to be powerfully himself. He was confident but tender when he talked, in a way that seemed like the armor had stayed with him, or maybe he had it all along.

My boyfriend Fred was napping upstairs while Davis and I talked. When I asked if he’s gay, he said, “100%,” and when I asked if he has a boyfriend, he said he’s made the promise to himself while he’s in graduate school to focus on his work. Then we got into a conversation about the importance of love, the importance of connection, and we agreed that there are times when those things are easier to attain than others.

We hung up because my phone was dying, but I felt like I had a hundred more questions. (How did the gallery find him? Through a friend. Did he get to keep the shorts? Yes. Did it pay well? Well enough.) I went upstairs and woke up Fred and told him about the conversation. After talking at length with Davis, I decided that experiences related to Gonzalez-Torres’s work, though intimate and personal, are meant to be shared. His work has been called “viral” in the way it spreads out into the world, leaving the gallery or museum. “Untitled” (Go-Go Dancing Platform) seems no different. The dances spread online as social media posts, allowing me to reach out and get a little closer, to Davis of course, but also, perhaps, to Gonzalez-Torres.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres continues at David Zwirner (537 West 20th Street, Chelsea, Manhattan) through July 14.

The post Falling in Love with a Felix Gonzalez-Torres Go-Go Dancer appeared first on Hyperallergic.

from Hyperallergic http://ift.tt/2sVifZP via IFTTT