Both an Artist's Statement and a Press Release were published on the occassion of this exibition.
ARTIST'S STATEMENT
INSTALLATION BY FÉLIX GONZÁLEZ-TORRES
September 16 - November 20, 1988
When I was asked to write a short statement about the work in this space I thought it would be a good opportunity to disclose and, in a certain sense, to demystify my approach. I hope that it will guide the viewer and will allow an active participation in the unraveling of the meaning and the purpose of this work. Many may consider this text redundant; an unnecessary intrusion, or even a handicap. It is assumed that the work must "speak for itself," as if the divine dogma of modernism were able to deliver a clear and universal message to a uniform “family of man.” Others know this is not true--that each of us perceives things according to who and how we are at particular junctures, whose terms are always shifting. Preferably the exhibition gallery will function as an educational device, simple and basic, without the mysteries of the muse, reactivating history to affirm our place in this landscape of 1988.
This work is mostly personal. It is about those very early hours in the morning, while still half asleep, when I tend to visualize information, to see panoramas in which the fictional, the important, the banal, and the historical are collapsed into a single caption. Leaving me anxious and responsible to anchor a logical accompanying image--scanning the TV channels trying to sort out and match sound and sight. This work is about my exclusion from the circle of power where social and cultural values are elaborated and about my rejection of the imposed and established order.
It is a fact people are discriminated against for being HIV positive. It is a fact the majority of the Nazi industrialists retained their wealth after the war. It is a fact the night belongs to Michelob and Coke is real. It is a fact the color of your skin matters. It is a fact Crazy Eddie's prices are insane. It is a fact that four colors--red, black, green and white--placed next to each other in any form are strictly forbidden by the Israeli army in the occupied Palestinian territories. This color combination can cause an arrest, a beating, a curfew, a shooting, or a news photograph. Yet it is a fact that these forbidden colors, presented as a solitary act of consciousness here in Soho, will not precipitate a similar reaction.
From the first moment of encounter, the four color canvases in this room will “speak” to everyone. Some will define them as an exercise in color theory, or some sort of abstraction. Some as four boring rectangular canvases hanging on the wall. A few experts will interpret them as yet another minimalist ecstasy. Now that you've read this text, I hope for a different message.
For all the PWAs.
Félix González-Torres
New York City 1988
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PRESS RELEASE
"A son brings in a large straw coaster woven with the black, red, green, and white of the Palestinian flag. Under an Israeli military order, it is illegal on the West Bank to possess any object with these colors in proximity." -- U.P.I. NEWS RELEASE
The work of Félix González-Torres is unassuming, to say the very least. Its unwillingness to occupy the gallery is everywhere present. Combining text panels, monochrome canvasses, and altered appropriated photographs of crowds, González-Torres' installation startles the viewer by its reticence, its utter lack of interest in the occupation of space.
What is the viewer to make of artwork that refuses to occupy the space of its own installation, in which she meets it head on, looking for the art? (How can she meet it head on when it's barely there?) Is this lack of occupation a device? The text panels for example, refuse to occupy with images even the eye and mind of the beholder. There is blank space. There is a caption. For the rest, the viewer is on her own, left to her own devices. The device, then, is to leave the viewer to her own devices.
But she is not alone. If art is lurking in the installation's clock, it is barely visible. And yet it is there. The words and dates that seem to caption nothing at all harbor images, ideas, messages, indictments, interdictions, atrocities, whole histories. Prowling in the very letters themselves, and then in their contiguity, their state of adjacency, are techniques and tools of persusasion whose exercise usually passes unremarked in the ease with which "meaning" is conveyed. In Forbidden Colors, the monochrome canvases hung like laundry in a line, shift their frame of reference away from the art world. In the context of the occupied territories of the West Bank, these colors in proximity take on the syntax of a temporary tenancy in the extreme.
González-Torres' work is about occupation and insinuation, about domination, about how meaning is effaced and made. In its refusal to occupy space in the sense of domination, it accomplishes two tasks. First, it quietly calls the space in question into question, setting up a situation in which the viewer becomes sensitized to occupation: the occupation of her mind by the media, of her body and mind by the urban environment (its techniques and spaces), of her being by daydreams, fantasies, expectations and other foreign agents (of course, they are not foreign at all). Facing the texts she is confronted with a question mark and forced to fork over her meaning and memories embarrassingly fragmentary and banal as they may be.
The caption reads "Center for Disease Control 1981 Streakers 1972 Go Go Boots 1965"; repressive tolerance as far as she can see. The viewer squirms. Is this an interrogation? Is that a grainy, faded newsprint photo of a crowd? Or is it a diagram of HIV?
Occupation, insinuation, infiltration. The second task accomplished by this artwork is to encourage intervention in the production of culture at a very basic level. If occupation operates by infiltration, to be startled into seeing is to be asked to act. Through its reticence, González Torres' art points up the discursive maneuvers at work in the fine art of occupation. How can she meet it head on when it's barely there? Yes, it is a grainy newsprint photo of a crowd, but also a diagram of HIV. There is finally a terrible and tender fear lurking in his work which will not go away.
Laura Trippi
Assistant Curator