Felix Gonzalez-Torres: inbetweenness

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The exhibition includes “Untitled” (Loverboy) (1989) and “Untitled” (1991-1993), works that engage the distinctions between art and architecture, the public and the private, and specificity and indeterminacy.

Curated by Flavin Judd, the works were selected with consideration to the way in which they would respond to the architecture of 101 Spring Street. Judd notes “I am interested in the way Felix Gonzalez-Torres infused meaning into objects. The exhibition allows for the viewer to see how these two works deal with space: neither of them are on the floor, you are in them to some extent not walking around them but walking along them. The primary interest was in matching the works to the space and letting them both interact.”

The exhibition is accompanied by a newsprint publication edited by Flavin Judd and Caitlin Murray that includes newly commissioned texts by Josh T. Franco, Raquel Gutiérrez, Grant Leuning, Caitlin Murray, and Eileen Myles.

“Untitled” (Loverboy) and “Untitled” involve interpretations that are simultaneously specific and open-ended. This dynamic effects both the production of meaning and the conditions of the fabrication and installation of the works. The kind and quality of the fabric of “Untitled” (Loverboy), and the specificity of the light blue sheer curtains, “a color you might want to wake up to” as Myles writes, is part of the work’s unique manifestation. The brushing past of a body, a rush of air from an open door, or the forced air of a heating and cooling system effects the movement of “Untitled” (Loverboy). “A curtain,” Leuning writes “lifts off the flat glass and rests back against it with the elegance of a dancer’s trailing leg.”

“Untitled” engages purposeful contradictions. It is a billboard, yet in this manifestation it is installed indoors at 101 Spring Street a domestic space, now public. The outside, the sky with its accompanying birds, moves inside. The sky becomes architectural, forming a dark corner. The viewer might wonder how to make sense of these contradictions. Or perhaps is it not sense-making but sensuality that the work is addressing. In the context of this co-authoring of meaning, Gutiérrez asks “What is it that we give back to the work or the artist in return?”