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Gonzalez-Torres’ ephemeral art on view in Shanghai
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IF you haven’t checked out the “Felix Gonzalez-Torres” exhibition at the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai, consider doing it now, because some of the artworks are, quite literally, “disappearing.”
The exhibition, the first in China to show Gonzalez-Torres solo, flaunts more than 40 works by the late Cuban-American conceptual artist, who is internationally known for his minimalist aesthetics and ephemeral installations.
Among the disappearing works on display is “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in Los Angeles), which started out as 80 kilograms of multicolored candies, free for visitors to sample. The resulting diminishment of the candy pile parallels the weight loss of Gonzalez-Torres’ partner, Ross Laylock, whom the artist lost to AIDS five years before his own death in 1996.
Only a few yards away, at the very center of the exhibition space, lies “Untitled” (Public Opinion), a carpet of cellophane-wrapped licorice. At once fragmented and monolithic, it exudes a pungent smell that permeates the entire room, giving off an aggressive presence. Two levels above, visitors walk through “Untitled” (Golden), a curtain of faux-gilded beads, to stumble upon “Untitled” (Throat), a tiny mound of cough drops placed on a vulnerable handkerchief — yet another anti-monument meant to be depleted and renewed.
Apart from pieces of candies and beaded curtains, Gonzalez-Torres’ unconventional catalogue of art supplies also includes stacks of paper, strings of lightbulbs, clocks, puzzles and mirrors. It is with these everyday objects that he contemplates themes of memory, ephemeral presence, and the boundary between public and private.
While Gonzalez-Torres’ artistic practices engage with the socio-political realities of 1980s-90s’ America in relation to his sexual identity, at the very core, they are still deeply, intensely personal: in more than one interview, the artist said, half-jokingly, that he had only one “public,” and that public was his partner Ross. The intimate nature of his art and its strategies of abstraction in turn open up myriad possibilities of resonance, beyond particular identities and historical contexts.
At the Shanghai exhibition, as with elsewhere, the viewer is invited to see, hear, touch, smell, taste and walk through the conceptual artist’s mutable work, and to eventually draw their own meanings from it.
Gonzalez-Torres’ oeuvre offers not fixed interpretations, but what Susan Sontag called “the naming of emotions” — or rather, the un-naming of them, since all the exhibited works are “Untitled,” with no captions, ready to be given a new significance by a new audience.
“Felix Gonzalez-Torres”
Date: Through December 25 (closed on Mondays), 10am-6pm
Address: 20 Huqiu Rd
Tel: 3310-9985
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