Lot Essay
"We are part of this culture, we don’t come from outer space…"
Feliz Gonzalez-Torres
In 1987 Felix Gonzalez-Torres began a pivotal series of works in the form of photographic jigsaw puzzles. The imagery for each puzzle work ranges from personal snapshots, photographed letters, snippets of text, and images of collective visual culture culled from mass media outlets –yet removed from their original contexts, these images become untethered. Released from their geographic and temporal moorings, a fragility is emphasized by the materiality of these works themselves as each puzzle appears to be precariously held together, enclosed and protected solely by a plastic sleeve. Accordingly, the puzzles constantly threaten to self-destruct and thus “make manifest the fragility of reminiscence,” observes Nancy Spector, “for, with recollection comes the acknowledgment of absence or loss” (N. Spector, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, exh. cat., The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1995, p. 44). A sense of nostalgia is alluded to in the present work, “Untitled” (Paris, Last Time, 1989), whose parenthetical title suggests a moment now past. The two chairs leaning towards one another suggest an absent couple, a vanished love; paired objects could serve as stand-ins for lovers.. Here, however, there is no explanation, and part of the beauty of these apparently fragile objects is the way in which they entwine personal and social histories. Throughout the artist’s oeuvre, memories are often deployed to add complexity, to “augment and enrich a more wide-ranging intent, one that challenges cultural assumptions of privacy and publicity at every turn” (Ibid, p. 44). Without a figure, this could be any lost relationship, any absent friend, any journey now completed. Gently plaintive, “Untitled” (Paris, Last Time, 1989) is a poetic meditation on the instability of memory, the passage of time, and the traces of history.
Feliz Gonzalez-Torres
In 1987 Felix Gonzalez-Torres began a pivotal series of works in the form of photographic jigsaw puzzles. The imagery for each puzzle work ranges from personal snapshots, photographed letters, snippets of text, and images of collective visual culture culled from mass media outlets –yet removed from their original contexts, these images become untethered. Released from their geographic and temporal moorings, a fragility is emphasized by the materiality of these works themselves as each puzzle appears to be precariously held together, enclosed and protected solely by a plastic sleeve. Accordingly, the puzzles constantly threaten to self-destruct and thus “make manifest the fragility of reminiscence,” observes Nancy Spector, “for, with recollection comes the acknowledgment of absence or loss” (N. Spector, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, exh. cat., The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1995, p. 44). A sense of nostalgia is alluded to in the present work, “Untitled” (Paris, Last Time, 1989), whose parenthetical title suggests a moment now past. The two chairs leaning towards one another suggest an absent couple, a vanished love; paired objects could serve as stand-ins for lovers.. Here, however, there is no explanation, and part of the beauty of these apparently fragile objects is the way in which they entwine personal and social histories. Throughout the artist’s oeuvre, memories are often deployed to add complexity, to “augment and enrich a more wide-ranging intent, one that challenges cultural assumptions of privacy and publicity at every turn” (Ibid, p. 44). Without a figure, this could be any lost relationship, any absent friend, any journey now completed. Gently plaintive, “Untitled” (Paris, Last Time, 1989) is a poetic meditation on the instability of memory, the passage of time, and the traces of history.