Felix Gonzalez-Torres: What Remains | Part 1

[Music] good afternoon i'm sylvia carmen covina executive director of the bass and i'd like to give you a warm welcome to felix gonzalez torres what remains on january 9th today exactly 25 years ago artist feliz gonzalez torres died in miami and today we celebrate the life and legacy of this enormously influential artist my first thank you goes out to artbridges for their generous support of today's talks i would like to also wholeheartedly thank our partners who for months enthusiastically enthusiastically work with the bass to make today possible the de la cruz collection felix gonzalez family archive specifically rosa de la cruz mario gonzalez and melissa wallin today's celebration is divided into three parts i hope you join us for all three before i introduce our first speaker i would like to thank all of our panelists for their contributions to today's celebration dr robert hobbs mario gonzalez elvis fuentes maria martinez liliana ramos collado andrew hatchell rosa de la cruz elena philippovich andrea rosen and melissa wallen so now i'd like to introduce art historian robert hobbs for a talk entitled felix gonzalez torres vital aesthetics thank you for joining us today hi i'm not the most technically astute individual in the world so that part of it that talk is going to be a bit challenging first i want to say since we're talking about what remains i want to emphasize very much that felix gonzalez taurus by the way i would like to refer to him throughout this talk as felix uh because he has uh an informal relationship with his viewers and gonzalez taurus also is is quite a mouthful so if you don't mind i'll be more informal in that regard but the first point i want to make is that if we're talking about what remains and his legacy his legacy is a very lively one the tense that i would think we would talk about in terms of his art is the present tense not a past tense um because his works are so easy to construct using oftentimes materials that are accessible locally and they can oftentimes be shown outside you might be interested in knowing that there are 98 works by felix gonzalez taurus that are currently on loan to various institutions felix came of age in the late 1980s at a time of multiculturalism multiculturalism was changing the whole narrative of what it means to be american instead of being american in terms of a melting pot various ethnicities were wanting to assert their differences so differences became very important felix felt that multiculturalism and being an ethnic artist was adam he wanted to be part of the mainstream tradition he also was working at a time of what was known in the 90s as the cultural wars culture wars was when hiv aids epidemic was at its height there was a great deal of interest in concern with censorship and it reached its height around 1994 and felix didn't want to be an outsider artist again he wanted to work from the inside and so he used the term virus to describe his work now this year i think if anyone uses the word virus it calls forth all sorts of really frightening unsettling concerns and this morning i started thinking but i better look up the word virus and see if there are any positive ramifications to virus as i'm sure everyone is aware a virus is a very special [Music] set of molecules that can take a crystalline state and remain dormant for years sometimes decades or it can take an organic form it turns out that virologists who work with viruses are finding that they're incredibly positive they're not all negative that we actually all mammals have viruses in their intestines plants have viruses from generation to generation viruses are helpful in combating cancer viruses are very important in terms of replacing antibiotics and they're used in genome research so when felix talks about wanting to be a virus what he's really talking is about a special form of subversion he wants to work with established art traditions and we'll be looking today at minimalism conceptual arts and i'll be referring to pop influence or pop art inflected works of art and what he does is he subverts the main intention transforming them so they fit some of his own meanings in felix's work he's very concerned with differences between the public and the private between the rationality of minimalism and conceptual art and the intimacy and sentiment that is important to his work what i think is really crucial is that his work oftentimes has a very cool uh pre-records very cool presentation even though it's dealing with quite hot and controversial topics his works almost all of them are untitled in quotation marks and then set aside from the quotation marks in parentheses are suggestive ideas but he always wanted his work to deal with multiple meanings multiple narratives as andrea rosen who is his dealer starting i believe in 1990 has noted quote he felix would call me six times a day and talk about a work from six different angles and stories there is no one reading end of quote before coming to the united states in 1979 uh to study at pratt institute felix had lived in cuba puerto rico and spain in 1979 he did pursue this degree but in 1980 and this is very important 1980 and 1983 he studied at the whitney independent study program it's actually a program that i attended and what was so important about this for felix is that it became quite involved in theory and so theory is think of it as a way of trying on different lens different ways of asking questions so theory becomes quite important to him and he was well educated in it from his whitney program in 1987 he received a degree in photography at the nyu graduate school and was working with the international center of photography and he considered himself a photographer and fully over half of his works do deal with photography so may i have the next slide please now what i wanted to do in this next slide is to present several ideas that i want to take up so i'm starting off with the idea of viral strategies in his work i'm going to if you see after briefly recounting one of the dominant ways of looking at felix work and that is going through the art historical literature you see that p a lot of people are dealing with the artist biography and i will consider this briefly at the beginning then there's certain themes that i will play i will deal with again and again the first is how his art sets up possibilities for multiple conflicting and new interpretations that challenge viewers to reach their own conclusions about his work two how his art subverts earlier art and remains open to being subverted in turn by viewers collectors and institutions three how his work characterizes art viewers as readers this is very important reception is crucial to his work so his viewers are readers active participants and also collaborators 4. his art poses the questions when is the art occurring and can an artwork stop being art 5. his work revels in the playfulness of its high or his high-low interactions and six it remains open to the creative role of context and its role in affecting and infecting meaning may i have the next slide now with the biography of the yard estate we i should point out that felix did was aids positive very few people knew about it during his lifetime but they were clearly aware of the fact that he lost his partner of eight years ross laycock in 1991 and it's interesting 1991 is also a very second year for felix and you might think that the work is morbid and it's about death and it's about ideas of that sort but i think what's interesting is this pile of candy and i'm showing you a detail of it and this should read ross in la and i should point out that ross and felix lived in different cities ross was canadian they did meet in new york they did spend time together in la so la is very important to the story and this was initially made with a very colorful fruit called fruit flasher candies felix always felt it was miraculous that he could take a simple material like like candy and create something that is meaningful he's very much in the tradition of marcel duchamp who took a snow shovel called it in advance of a broken arm and he became his first ready-made in the second decade of the 20th century but one of the things that is of great concern to felix in this piece is that it's about excess and pleasure and there's a wonderful quotation he said it's also about excess about the excess of pleasure it's like a child who wants a landscape of candies first and foremost it's about ross then i wanted to please myself then everybody end of quote next slide next slide please when people have taken up the biography of the artist and talked about ross premier primarily and the loss that felix experienced they have gone to the whole idea of talked about aids and um if you notice i'm not sure it's showing at the bottom of the slide but it's supposed to show that it's um the ideal body weight the ideal weight of this piece is 175 pounds which was ross laycock's weight now the interesting thing is that the piece does not have to be 175 pounds and as we will see in a few minutes if they're very different weights but of course one of the things that happened with people where they were huge loss of weight and i'm showing this benetton ad there was one of picturing one of the great aids activists david kelly with his family dying next slide please now another term that's used is the eucharist and the whole idea of the transformation of uh the work in the bodies of the viewers who are who are using it so some art historians have talked about the transformation of bread and wine into the blood and body of jesus christ and they've used these religious terms for felix's work you might like to know that felix has said very clearly i'm an atheist i'm 100 atheist but next slide please the whole idea of christian subject matter has been very important and uh i'm showing you andre serrano's piss christ as well as his madonna and child number two these were small chotskys that he had collected little plastic figures of christ in europe his own urine that he collected over a two-week period i'm also showing you the uh later publication of the book the sexuality of christ by leo steinberg that was done in the 80s but became important in the 90s as a matter of fact i have been told that copies of it were sent to members of congress in 1994 uh when there was so much controversy about uh the culture wars and about uh serrano's work and of course warhol is at the bottom and he made over a hundred iterations of this particular last supper after leonardo da vinci it was actually shown in his space opposite leonardo's last supper at one point next slide please and part of this same story has to do with the idea of a mental mooring a minto mori is a statement in italian that traditionally slaves used to tell their uh the generals that when they were in war if they had too much hubris that beware you too must die we need someone to tell that to trump right now but um the idea memento mori was very important in the golden period of dutch art because what you find is the idea of vanitas that they say all life is vanity it's vanity of vanities everything is passing but you find a contradictory interpretation both in that and as i've already suggested in felix's work because there's a great pleasure in the materiality of things in the dutch painting the very expensive glass rumor that is half filled with wine the exotic fruit the lemon the polished pewter tray even though it's half off the table and looks like it's going to fall over and certainly with felix's portrait of ross may i have the next please now if we take different candies if we take different uh configurations and all of this is something that felix felt was very important perhaps feeling mortal he realized that his art to live after him his legacy must be to be open to other people turning his work into different shapes and different forms and here you're seeing his piece the portrait of ross at the art institute of chicago i think it's interesting that in some room next to roy liechtenstein uh i would suggest it could even be pop art inflected in terms of of this work and not morbid and no longer a memento mori next slide please and i'm showing you if you look at the bottom bookshelf the second to the right you'll see a few little candies that are put together this also is portrait of ross it does not have to continue the same ideal weight of 175 pounds next slide and i couldn't resist putting in his peace revenge untitled revenge um what does revenge mean it's open-ended he has been he has said living is the best revenge and it could be an affirmation of life at any rate uh these are different iterations done in different shapes different configurations and as you can see two very different candies may i have the next and felix himself provided a narrative for uh looking at works in two different ways his perfect lovers untitled perfect lovers he says in this particular instance that i'm citing time is something that scares me the peace i made with the two clocks was one of the scariest things i have ever done so he talks about his fear in doing it i wanted to face it i wanted to feel the face the clock i wanted those pieces right in front of me ticking the idea of pieces being endless happened at that point because i was losing someone very important next slide it is going to be very difficult felix is writing for members of congress to tell their constituents that money is being expended for the promotion of homosexual art when all they have to show are two plugs side by side or two mirrors side by side or two light bulbs side by side so here we have a very personal reading and a very political reading two very different ways of looking at the same piece may have the next um these are subjects important to gonzalez tourists and i'm indebted to andrea rosen she put this together this week we had a number of really wonderful and enlightening conversations and what she really did one early one morning and she said she'd never done it before and of course she's the president of the foundation felix gonzalez torres foundation is to show how few works really deal with ross with the idea of lover boy with aids there are under 50 works that deal with this but if you look below their 80 works refer to politics 30 to war 20 to crowds 10 to 12 deal with usa or america five pieces about the supreme court and of the 300 entries in the catalog resume rather roughly 175 can be considered photography may i have the next slide please now i couldn't resist putting this in this is called forbidden colors it's political piece felix was also a painter and made some paintings this is a four panel piece and uh the colors are the those of the palestinian flag and they would be forbidden this combination of colors being used in israel next slide please and i couldn't resist putting in this also this billboard um which is an untitled the new plan which is simply a close-up picture of denim and it refers to the denim revolution when the berlin wall came down and i was delighted to find online a whole article by levi strauss company talking about what a political sign levi denim jeans were in east germany and you can see a picture here that i took from their website of all these people wearing jeans so something can appear when it's first made as very political however it can later change and so i think the meaning we would attach to this could be very different so if we're talking about felix's legacy the legacy is multi-fold the legacy changes the legacy is open-ended next slide please now i thought i would just recap at this point the viral strategies by having the quote that i referred to before uh by felix i want to be like a virus that belongs to the institution in other words the mainstream all the ideological apparatuses are replicating themselves because that's the way culture works so if i function as a virus an imposter an infiltrator i will always replicate myself together with those institutions and i'm going to talk about in a few minutes the fact that this virus first is artist initiated then it happens with his viewers his collectors the institutions who look at the works there's a very famous statement by roland barth and felix read again a lot of theory and it's from his essay called the death of the author and in this piece roland barth this french critic basically culminated the essay by saying the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author and what happens is we rather than looking for artist initiated meanings and saying what is the meaning of the art that the artist provided we start reading and saying what is there in terms of reception another french critic who's very important at this time is of course jacques derrida and derrida is dealing with one of his terms is different he takes the word difference and puts an a in it to refer to the fact that meaning say of a work of art he was talking about literature has to do with the fact that a sign say a work of art is a sign how is it interpreted differs and defers over time so there is no longer one definitive meaning but it is perpetually open to new interpretations artists certainly were aware of this concept and talking about it next slide please and i simply wanted to add this because this was something else that was very timely felix doesn't refer to harold bloom but harold bloom was a great literature specialist at yale and in the 70s he came out with these three books i will simply focus on the anxiety of influence to say what he was doing was dealing with the idea of what happens with late coming what happens with misreading what happens to an artist or poet who talked about poet who comes later say someone who comes after shakespeare or someone who comes after t.s eliot and he says one of the things they do is they have strategies of purposefully misreading changing they become original by taking something and you know transforming it subverting it is a very good word and certainly a kind of subversion i was thinking of examples one would be presenting um hamlet shakespeare's hamlet in modern dress another one would be say leonard bernstein's west side story taking the classic story of romeo and juliet these are deliberate misreadings transformations and changing now in art this misreading this transformation takes on the term appropriation art next slide please and i'm showing you with appropriation art uh sherry levine's on the right and she was playing on the whole idea of feminism and art and the fact that um it was an essay written by the art historian linda knoplin who said why have they been no great women artists it was published in 1971 and in it she said women didn't always have access to big cities they were frequently living out in the country away from centers of art and so they would have access to reproductions one of the things that sherry levine does is she takes photographs from books like the walker evans and re-photographs it and she mentioned to me at one point she said well you know what was very important to me was a short essay by the german critic walter binyamine when he was talking about the history of photography and he said originality has to do with very small differences between one work and another so she's dealing with a different type of originality now appropriation has to do with the fact that there are tensions between new and old meanings so when we look at the sherry levine we also think of the walker heavens and vice versa so it's like you don't see one without the other next slide please and just to reinforce this idea uh here is a richard prince untitled cowboy he's taking a very famous set of marlboro ads perhaps marlboro was concerned with the whole idea the danger of of smoking and decided to turn it into the wild west and cowboys and he is involved in cropping and changing and transforming it so he appropriates it and everyone's aware of the fact that this was a marlborough ad so it was something that was commercial changed into fine art may i have the next now this is felix's own misreading his viral aesthetics he's taking robert morris famous piece from 1964 painted gray because robert morris said it was a non-color and instead of this it was made of plywood instead of making it from a resilient material like this he makes it in fortune cookies and in the fortune cookies are open to viewers taking them next slide please and there was a brilliant really brilliant and very generous undertaking this year by both andrea rosen gallery and david zerner and the foundation by inviting a thousand people throughout the world uh to make uh their own cop their own versions not copies versions of the fortune cookie corner and i'm showing three different iterations at the bottom of my wife and i participated in this and it was really fascinating we got a thousand fortune cookies put it in our dining room the smell was incredible and invite because it was covered still is coronavirus we did invite a few people in with mass to look at it um so what happens is the piece can change over time it is open and one of the things that happens with this is that when people take a fortune cookie and read it and open it up hopefully the whole narrative of good fortune of moving beyond the coronavirus is one of the effects of this piece man the next uh this is felix uh viral aesthetics what i'm calling part one it's his placebo he says a placebo is a substitute placebos are used in clinical trials he felt there would never be any kind of uh way of of healing or getting beyond the the hiv viruses curing aids um this piece is one of his really huge works um because it excuse me it's between a thousand and twelve hundred pounds of candy it's approximately uses of 35 to 40 000 pieces of candy in it and one of the things that he's doing is he's knowingly taking uh the minimalism of carl andre here and the the scatter art of robert morris this is made with industrial thread and other industrial materials and he's changing and transforming it in doing so we could say there are several narrations or narratives for this work one we could say is that it's all about consumption we could also say that it is querying the macho aspects of morris and andre and the term that felix used was art in drag no may i have the next and this has continued tino seagal is one of the really fascinating artists of our day who is known for his constructed situations and conversations and certainly this is a different kind of conversation for him whereby he is taking something like the robert morris he may not have been looking at it exactly and he's providing a whole different iteration and way of thinking about felix gonzalez taurus placebo and notice the weight changes it doesn't have to stay the same may have the next this leads to the whole idea of the institutional definition of art when felix thought of the miraculous qualities of taking candy and making them into art he was really subscribing to this idea that was first developed in theory by arthur danto a columbia university philosopher who wrote about it in 1964. and i've taken this one quotation about it danto says what in the end makes the difference between he's asking between a brillo box and a work of art consisting of a brillo box is a certain theory of art so what art is is an object with a theory it's an object with an institutional definition and then he goes on to say of course without the theory one is unlikely to see it as art and in order to see it as part of the art world one must have mastered a good deal of artistic theory and i'm showing you one of the may i go back thank you one of the very small you know pieces by felix i think it's really wonderful it's untitled throat and it's just simply a handkerchief with a few um pieces of cough drops and have the next now that release relates to contextual definitions of art whereby the space where a work of art is presented oftentimes changes it and one of the signal pieces that is shown with is louise lawler uh pollock and turin arranged by mr and mrs burton to remain great collectors in connecticut and it shows that china trade porcelain terrain beneath the pollock and the pollock is cropped and the idea is that pollock in a museum is very different than a pollock in a domestic setting and she also takes pictures of works in sales rooms and galleries and even in store rooms and how the place where they are positioned does change them and i'm showing this incredible piece that is in the de la cruz collection which is portrait of dad the artist's father it's made with a white cellophane wrapped mint candy and i'm showing it in a very formal museum type setting on the right and on the left it's at the telfair museum which is a house turned into a museum and you can see also that both are portraits of dad but they're using different candies may i have the next this idea of in exhibition and spaces changing works of art it was important to group material and felix belonged to group materials at one time about 20 members and he was a member for a while and the guggenheim catalog pointed out that no it wasn't important to him i think actually it was of crucial importance to him group material was active between 87 and 91 and they saw themselves very much as cultural workers they're much concerned with roland barth's idea of the artist as reader the artist as a person who is involved in signifying and so exhibitions became important the work on the left is good there are people's choice where they invited people in the neighborhood to bring objects of importance to the importance to them they didn't have to be works of art and so you see a wedding portrait uh there's a military portrait they're religious icons they're dolls and they exhibited them as if their art suggesting what by and asking the question what is art what makes something art is something art to one social economic group or another the work on the right the castle was presented in europe and uh their exhibitions would oftentimes include loads of other artists and included in this was uh andre serrano and hiram steinbach among others may i have the next um billboards were important to group material and billboards were also important to felix and this is an early billboard that he did uh untitled piece but it was presented at sheridan square and it was a block away from the stonewall end which of course is very very important for liberation of gay rights and the assertion of them and he included words that are deliberately too small that they couldn't be read easily because he wanted people to think about what he was presenting may i have the next the whole idea of what bertolt breck calls the alienation effect was important for felix the alienation effect was a way of defamiliarizing something putting it in a new setting distancing people from it breck who was interested in theater would sometimes have a character step out of character and present a soliloquy uh and talk about themselves as a character because he did not want people to become involved in the fictive idea of the play so that he was as felix said and i have a quote um that what he wanted to do he did not want people to be involved um in the catharsis of a work of art but instead that people would be very much thinking about it um and that was important for brecht it was important for felix he wanted to move beyond the sensationalism of somebody like maple thorpe as important and brilliant a photographer as maple thorpe is felix was offering a different type of art may have the next and here you see us sitting he took the billboard and he changed the billboard to a paper stack and the paper stack is um has the words on it that are in no particular order so that people have to think about it and make up their minds about what is being presented also because most of his paper stacks almost all of them except this i believe all of them uh are giveaways so viewers could come in and take them but not with this one this is 161 pieces so he set up a rule he broke the rule it makes people think about what is being presented may i have the next next slide please and here to there two slides i'm going to show you a billboard that really deal with the public and the private uh this untitled it's a bed and people have talked about you know the depressed pillows and felix and ross and other things um with the bed was presented it could be presented in as few as six and as many as 24 locations and around new york city and because he was using a commercial form for something that was very intimate and very personal it is something that was discussed a great deal it's been reenacted several other times may have the next just to show you the differences it could be in only one indoor location but it needed to be outdoors and at least six of them shown at any one time next slide please another billboard is his untitled it's just a matter of time and it's a matter of time was shown after 9 11 in new york it took on one particular meaning when it was shown in german germany using a traditional german script it's a matter of time would take on a very different meaning either the idea that say the third reich is totally over or that it could return with the neo-nazis so the work really deals with a number of different ideas it's open to a number of different ways of being considered and thought may i have the next felix refers to altoser the french marxist on a number of occasions and i think one of the things that we now need to do with felix is look more closely at these texts and exactly how he used them and what he took from them there's a very famous idea of interpolation of louis altaziers interpolation is a nice fancy word for being hailed or called forth the example which i have here is it a police officer who says hey you there and if the person turns around they have been interpolated as a potential suspect now people can be interpolated in any number of different ways and part of the power of interpolation is that it is a way in which people are called forth as certain citizens of particular kinds of situations and for felix situations were never natural all situations were cultural and it's a way of socializing his work i'm showing you on the left museum viewers taking uh pieces from a paper stack which they were offered and i'm showing you on the right the domier the print collector and what happens is both are interpolated as collectors or potential collectors and then of course it gets very interesting with felix what happens when one becomes not just a disinterested viewer we're no longer dealing with kant's idea of as the aesthetic as disinterest instead we're looking very much in terms of a very interested collector viewer next it's also a way of undermining the value of the art if one can take a piece uh for free then what is the value of art it's got to be a personally attributed value so you see a person taking a piece on the left three girls or three people uh who are in a subway a uh a poster which is on the right which has been uh obviously being revered and the lower left you have this same piece which has been um discarded and i looked on ebay last night and i thought well i'm wondering if um any of these pieces have been sold on ebay and yes indeed this particular one is being offered not the stack but an individual sheet next slide please um now there's the whole idea of aesthetic withdrawal which is a different type of interpolation and i'm comparing this to a conceptual work of art by robert morris and robert morris was a little bit upset with the architect collector philip johnson who was on the board of the museum of modern art and collected a number of works because he hadn't been paid for it so he decided what he would do is that he would take the he would withdraw the aesthetic value of the work uh from it and if an artist can give value the artist can take it away what happens with felix is this is left up to the viewer so that the viewer uh makes the determination this is a type of risk taking that felix gonzalez taurus is involved with it's a very dicey very chancy thing to say okay i'm gonna let people take something they may not revere it as art they may simply throw it away on the street next slide please okay uh this is he sets up works he did a whole series of puzzles and i'm showing you three um puzzles i think are a way of sort of epistemologically thinking about art as a kind of knowledge a kind of knowledge that one figures out it becomes a kind of puzzle and these are actually jigsaw puzzles i don't know why he did 30 different iterations or versions or of crowds i don't know why they were important it's a good question to ask on the right the untitled is chief justice hans it's william rehnquist and he was one of the most conservative ever chief justices of the supreme court and then the puzzle that's down below is um the kind of collection of objects one could buy as a packet and send off to a gi during the gulf war so what he's doing is literalizing in my estimation the function of the work of art as a kind of puzzle that people think about and cogitate over this fits very much with kant's idea of beauty so instead of beauty being a gorgeous photograph you notice these are kind of washed out they fit very much for the whole tradition of conceptual art which focuses on journalistic photography beauty for kant is basically where the imagination provides various sources and various ideas to the understanding and then he says understanding then adjudicates understanding then judges what is correct what isn't but this whole process of cogitation and thinking about a work is beauty according to kant i really love that i'm not sure felix knew it but the work functions in this way may i have the next and i couldn't resist showing this untitled supreme court majority these are made out of paper they're uh the different dunce hats so it's a real political comment next slide please and uh wanted to show the whole idea of change being so important at the andrea rosen gallery in 1991 there was a series of different installations every week there's something different he started off with the teddy roosevelt monument at the museum of natural history in which certain characteristics are chiseled in stone so the whole idea of a static unchanging work of art a certain kind of monument may have the next slide then another week he presented this raised dice painted a pale blue which he saw as a very happy color uh with the light bulbs and it was empty most of the time so you're dealing with a different kind of monument the the base of a monument when you're dealing with the idea of presence and absence and for a few minutes every day there would be a go-go dancer who would wear these silver lame swimsuit tennis shoes and a walkman and i think what i know about the 1990s and the whole idea of uh the fascination with disco culture in the 70s and 80s which was uh so communal is this is very isolated and there's a certain poignancy to this piece may i have the next and he did a series of portraits and this is a very risky kind of work because although it looks terribly dry it actually is something where the person who is being commemorated the portrait of the individual is open-ended so they can add they can subtract they can change and i'm showing you the they're usually a freeze up near the ceiling on the right you can see three tier uh let's see tier three 1980 and then uh um below is where the person julie alt who was a member of group material has inserted a national endowment for the arch which was important for her so each of these portraits change over time he did them for friends he did one for himself he did them for collectors also may i have the next and i'd like to close with the last two images this perpetual openness to change he did 25 light pieces which are made with ordinary light bulbs strung together and uh decide decided he wanted to deal with 24 different subjects two of them deal with america and i'm showing you this uh one piece that is presented on the left in england on the right i'm not sure where it's being shown it's inside and down below it's at the american pavilion at the venice finale and the last slide is uh this perpetual openness to change is the america of 1992 which is shown in a loft space on the right and now it's being shown at the whitney museum of american art unfortunately it's such a successful piece and is so loved it may not be open to change the legacy may be that this piece becomes static because it's so successful and that concludes my lecture thank you very much are there time is there a time for for questions um the first question is it's interesting that the german text does not say okay question has come down it's interesting that they these are changing as i'm trying to answer them okay it's interesting that the german text does not say it's a matter of time but rather that it's a question of time thank you very much this is from a scholar whom i admire very much phil opslander okay someone uh took two pieces from felix that say somewhere better than this place and nowhere better than this place anything i can say about it i do know these very well because actually my wife took those two and um framed them and we lived with them for a number of years and it very much had to do with the place where we lived that uh and mixed feelings it was wonderful and that at other times it was problematic and that's a personal interpret an interpretation to the work of art okay another question um could you share more information on how felix might specifically represent duchamp in other ways it's a very good question i think that what's interesting in a lot of the literature i've gone through is how little duchamp is referred to and i think one of the great strengths of felix gonzalez taurus is how he personalized things so much uh that people don't think about him so much in terms of the art historical tradition but think very much about him in terms of um what he's done how he's changed it how he's transformed it and what his contributions were certainly i think any number of artists including felix gonzalez taurus is very much indebted in a very good sense to duchamp and to his ready-mades and i'll take one more question uh someone is saying i'm currently writing on felix gonzalez taurus and focusing on his mirrors i made it to the presentation so i may have discussed this already but uh on his mirror works um this is becomes a very very long um i'd be lifted to talk with you later i think my time is up but i think it's a very good question so uh you're very welcome to contact me separately thank you very much

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Rating: 5 out of 5

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Id: yN8jCMe4NkI

Length: 49min 26sec (2966 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 05 2021