“Without the public these works are nothing,” participating with Felix Gonzalez-Torres Posted on August 22, 2009 by Adrienne Skye Roberts
For the past seven months, a copy of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s black and white print of a bird soaring through a cloud streaked sky has hung on the wall above my desk. This wall is opposite my bed which means that the print is usually one of the first things I see when I wake up in the morning. I took two copies of Gonzalez-Torres’s print from SFMOMA’s The Art of Participation exhibition last January, carefully rolling them and tucking them in my bag as I biked home. I tacked one above the various photographs, postcards, and notes that have gathered on the wall above my desk and the other I gave to a friend who had just moved into a new house.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres print above my desk in the Mission, San Francisco.
During The Art of Participation these prints, known as Untitled 1992/1993, were placed one ontop of another in a stack placed on the floor of one of the galleries. The description of the print lists the printing method, offset lithograph on paper, and then includes this important detail in paranthesis: (endless copies). Visitors were encouraged to take a print home with them and as they did this sculptural stack of paper-thin prints would decrease in size and then would be replenished after hours, probably by a museum staff member, a ritual that will happen endlessly whenever this piece is on view.
The story of Gonzalez-Torres is well known. He immigrated to New York City from Cuba, gaining recognition as an artist in the late 1980s through his minimalist sculptures and installations that often referenced issues of public and private, accumulation and loss. The foundation on which the majority of his work was grounded was his relationship with his long-time partner, Ross Laycock. In 1989 he started exhibiting these stack pieces at MOMA, the Guggenheim and Andrea Rosen Gallery. It was during this time that Ross was dying of AIDS, and the stack pieces represented this process of letting go—they disappeared, yet unlike the inevitability of Ross’s death, the prints would return in their endless cycle of presence and absence. The prints themselves often depicted ephemeral moments; a bird flying or the texture of the surface of the water. These transient moments were captured on film and then in a sincere gesture, extended to others as a gift. Four years after Ross’s death, in an interview with Robert Storr for ArtPress, Gonzalez-Torres said, “When people say, ‘Who is your public?’ I honestly say, without skipping a beat, ‘Ross.’ The public was Ross. The rest of the people just come to the work.”
Felix Gonzalez-Torres print in Nicole's bedroom in the Lower Haight, San Francisco
