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拍品专文
"The blank spaces served as a screen for people to project themselves into those events. I started making those pieces to deal with very specific, crucial issues, with how information is transformed into meaning. Right now we have an explosion of information, but an implosion of meaning." - Felix Gonzalez-Torres
Beginning in 1988, Felix Gonzalez-Torres created sculptures of paper stacks comprised of individual sheets. Each work has a specific text, design, and/or image, and viewers can choose to take sheets from the stack. “Untitled” (Still Life) is among the very first of these sculptures. Like Gonzalez-Torres’s candy works, viewers can choose to directly engage with the material, which can affect the height of the stack as sheets are taken. Yet, as suggested by the work’s caption, which includes the phrase ‘endless copies,’ the owner (or exhibitor) can choose how often, if at all, to replenish the sheets. To encounter “Untitled” (Still Life), like any of Gonzalez-Torres’s stacks, is to recognize and reinforce a fundamental paradox of impermanence and continual renewal.
The text printed on the bottom half of each page of the work can also be understood as an intimate yet simultaneously non-specific and disjointed set of recollections. The references are intentionally generic, creating an intimacy that is mediated by distance and ambiguity. In the same year that "Untitled” (Still Life) was conceived, Gonzalez-Torres exhibited his first ‘text portrait’ installed as a frieze at the Brooklyn Museum, bearing nearly identical text: “Red Canoe 1987 Paris 1985 Blue Flowers 1984 Harry the Dog 1983 Blue Lake 1986 Interferon 1989 Ross 1983.” While each entry can be perceived as a memory, the content nevertheless remains indeterminate. Insistent on the intellectual freedom of his audience, Gonzalez-Torres instead prompts the viewer to make sense of these recollections by way of his or her own fantasy and lived experience. Meaning must be knit together both ways: a collaboration between the artist’s strategies and a viewer’s own subjective position, both informed by personal and collective memories and the larger cultural domain.
“Untitled” (Still Life) lists places, names, and phrases that orient a viewer. “Paris 1985” can signify a multiplicity of open-ended meanings; “Interferon 1989” could reference one of the many treatments historically leveraged against HIV – yet, in reflection of the fundamental capacity of language to evolve and encompass new meanings over time, to certain viewers this word may evoke the drug’s effectiveness in clinically treating a number of other illnesses – punctuated by the name of Gonzalez-Torres' great love, Ross. The inclusion of culturally recognized phrases within a list of other non-sequiturs collapses the division between personal meaning and collective cultural memory, the ambiguous and the specific, the personal and the political. Gonzalez-Torres’s work suggests that memory and history are refracted through other people, through friends and strangers, newspaper headlines, political events, and interlacing cultural identities. All are part of the web of exchange. “Giving [my work] away,” Gonzalez-Torres once mused, “was a fair way of giving back something that was not even mine. This information belongs to everybody” (Gonzalez-Torres and Robert Nickas, “Felix Gonzalez- Torres: All the Time in the World (Interview)” (2006), 45).
Gonzalez-Torres participated in hundreds of group shows during his lifetime, including early presentations at Artists Space and White Columns in New York (1987 and 1988, respectively), the Whitney Biennial (1991), the Venice Biennale (1993), and the Sydney Biennial (1996), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1995), and the Art Institute of Chicago (1995). Traveling retrospective exhibitions of his work have been organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles (1994); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1995); and Sprengel Museum Hannover, Germany (1997). A survey of his work, Specific Objects without Specific Form, was organized by WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels (2010), and traveled to the Fondation Beyeler, Basel (2010), and the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main (2011). In 2007, Gonzalez-Torres was selected to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale, in the exhibition Felix Gonzalez-Torres: America. Other recent solo presentations of the artist’s work include exhibitions at El Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales, Montevideo, Uruguay (2000-2001); Serpentine Gallery, London (2000); Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin (2006); PLATEAU and Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea (2012); Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, China (2016); and Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), Barcelona, Spain (2021); a significant solo exhibition will open in October at the National Portrait Gallery and Archives of American Art, The Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. (2024).
Beginning in 1988, Felix Gonzalez-Torres created sculptures of paper stacks comprised of individual sheets. Each work has a specific text, design, and/or image, and viewers can choose to take sheets from the stack. “Untitled” (Still Life) is among the very first of these sculptures. Like Gonzalez-Torres’s candy works, viewers can choose to directly engage with the material, which can affect the height of the stack as sheets are taken. Yet, as suggested by the work’s caption, which includes the phrase ‘endless copies,’ the owner (or exhibitor) can choose how often, if at all, to replenish the sheets. To encounter “Untitled” (Still Life), like any of Gonzalez-Torres’s stacks, is to recognize and reinforce a fundamental paradox of impermanence and continual renewal.
The text printed on the bottom half of each page of the work can also be understood as an intimate yet simultaneously non-specific and disjointed set of recollections. The references are intentionally generic, creating an intimacy that is mediated by distance and ambiguity. In the same year that "Untitled” (Still Life) was conceived, Gonzalez-Torres exhibited his first ‘text portrait’ installed as a frieze at the Brooklyn Museum, bearing nearly identical text: “Red Canoe 1987 Paris 1985 Blue Flowers 1984 Harry the Dog 1983 Blue Lake 1986 Interferon 1989 Ross 1983.” While each entry can be perceived as a memory, the content nevertheless remains indeterminate. Insistent on the intellectual freedom of his audience, Gonzalez-Torres instead prompts the viewer to make sense of these recollections by way of his or her own fantasy and lived experience. Meaning must be knit together both ways: a collaboration between the artist’s strategies and a viewer’s own subjective position, both informed by personal and collective memories and the larger cultural domain.
“Untitled” (Still Life) lists places, names, and phrases that orient a viewer. “Paris 1985” can signify a multiplicity of open-ended meanings; “Interferon 1989” could reference one of the many treatments historically leveraged against HIV – yet, in reflection of the fundamental capacity of language to evolve and encompass new meanings over time, to certain viewers this word may evoke the drug’s effectiveness in clinically treating a number of other illnesses – punctuated by the name of Gonzalez-Torres' great love, Ross. The inclusion of culturally recognized phrases within a list of other non-sequiturs collapses the division between personal meaning and collective cultural memory, the ambiguous and the specific, the personal and the political. Gonzalez-Torres’s work suggests that memory and history are refracted through other people, through friends and strangers, newspaper headlines, political events, and interlacing cultural identities. All are part of the web of exchange. “Giving [my work] away,” Gonzalez-Torres once mused, “was a fair way of giving back something that was not even mine. This information belongs to everybody” (Gonzalez-Torres and Robert Nickas, “Felix Gonzalez- Torres: All the Time in the World (Interview)” (2006), 45).
Gonzalez-Torres participated in hundreds of group shows during his lifetime, including early presentations at Artists Space and White Columns in New York (1987 and 1988, respectively), the Whitney Biennial (1991), the Venice Biennale (1993), and the Sydney Biennial (1996), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1995), and the Art Institute of Chicago (1995). Traveling retrospective exhibitions of his work have been organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles (1994); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1995); and Sprengel Museum Hannover, Germany (1997). A survey of his work, Specific Objects without Specific Form, was organized by WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels (2010), and traveled to the Fondation Beyeler, Basel (2010), and the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main (2011). In 2007, Gonzalez-Torres was selected to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale, in the exhibition Felix Gonzalez-Torres: America. Other recent solo presentations of the artist’s work include exhibitions at El Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales, Montevideo, Uruguay (2000-2001); Serpentine Gallery, London (2000); Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin (2006); PLATEAU and Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea (2012); Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, China (2016); and Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), Barcelona, Spain (2021); a significant solo exhibition will open in October at the National Portrait Gallery and Archives of American Art, The Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. (2024).