Felix Gonzalez-Torres
Untitled, 1991
Billboard; dimensions vary with installation.
âBetween February 20 and March 18, Felix Gonzalez-Torresâs âUntitledâ (1991) peppered the New York skyline, on six billboards throughout Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens. With locations ranging from 10th Avenue near the Javits Center to the far corners of Brighton Beach, the work reached diverse populations and altered the associated media landscapes. The provocative yet ambiguous image on eachâan enlarged black-and-white photograph of the artistâs recently shared double bedâstood out amid the text-heavy advertising signage that dominates the city. Devoid of the text, logos, or captions typically associated with billboards, this work summoned a second look or even a momentary pause, the introspective quality of the image bringing a perceptible stillness to the surrounding bustle of the city.
âŠThroughout his work, Gonzalez-Torres (American, born Cuba. 1957â1996) questioned the notion of the unique art object, making series of works based on identical pairs (two clocks ticking side-by-side, two mirrors embedded in a wall) or finding inspiration in the possibilities of endless reproducibility (stacks of sheets as give-aways for visitors, piles of candy to be continually replenished). He wanted his work to be disseminated, to exist in multiple places at the same time, and to be realized completely only through the participation of the viewer, which he described as âone enormous collaboration with the public,â in which the âpieces just disperse themselves like a virus that goes to many different placesâhomes, studios, shops, bathrooms, whatever.â Reproducibility, collaboration, and circulationâsound familiar? His particular approach, which has been enormously influential for contemporary artistic practice, also made Gonzalez-Torres an essential presenceâŠ
For Gonzalez-Torres, art was an effective means of addressing social concernsâeven more so when it could be multiplied. Inhabiting the familiar forms of Minimalism and post-Minimalism with his stacks and floor pieces, the artist embedded subtle but insistent references to current issues, from political violence to gay rights. In billboard projects like âUntitledâ, the artist played with the powerful juxtapositions that could be generated between private and public spaces. By choosing this photograph of his bed, the artist exposed this most intimate of spaces, emphasized by the rumpled sheets and the recent impressions of two heads in the pillows. In the early 1990s, with controversies surrounding homosexuality and the AIDS crisis simultaneously wreaking havoc across the gay community, the bed also represented a site of conflict, symbolizing both love and death. That Gonzalez-Torresâs partner, Ross, died of AIDS in 1991 brings an intensely personal note to this work, but does not diminish it of its universal associations with comfort, intimacy, loneliness, or loss.
Every time I passed by my âlocalâ billboard, on Queens Boulevard and Van Dam Street, I stopped to take it in again. It is a commanding work, even capable of overshadowing the roar of the elevated 7 train and the honking cars exiting the Long Island Expressway (not an easy task!). The presentation in Print/Out marks the 20th anniversary of the first realization of âUntitledâ, for MoMAâs Projects 34: Felix Gonzalez-Torres, organized by Anne Umland in 1992. Imagining the future reception of this work, Umland presciently wrote in that exhibitionâs accompanying brochure, âA photograph promises the possibility of replication, of reemergence in a different time and under different historical circumstances, a moment when this poignant image of âa dwelling in the evening airâ may come to mean very different things.â I look forward to seeing the next iteration!â
-Kim Conaty
