Bound tête-bêche. Includes bibliographical references.
Contents:
To be an infiltrator / Mónica de la Torre -- Untitled (event) / Ann Lauterbach.
Summary:
Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957-96) is one of the most significant artists to have emerged in the 1980s. An artist whose beautiful, restrained and often mutable works are abundant in compelling contradictions, Gonzalez-Torres was committed to a democratic form of art informed as much by the aesthetic and conceptual as by politics. His work challenges authority and our obeisance to it, dissolves the delineations between public and private, and creates a rich, open field into which the viewer is invited to complete works with her own inferences, imagination, and actions. The photostats are a series of fixed works with white text on black fields framed behind glass to create a reflective surface bringing the viewers' reflection into the work. Made at the height of the AIDS crisis, these profoundly suggestive lists of political, cultural, and historical references disrupt hierarchies of information and linear chronology, asking how we receive and prioritize information, how we remember and forget, and how we continuously create new meaning. The photostats also recall the screens (the television, and now the computer) which furiously deliver information from which we must parse substance from surface and choose what to assimilate and what to reject. Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Photostats offers its own formal conceit, presenting the series in two symmetrical and mirrored halves, each with thirteen plates, an installation view, and an essay. From one side of the book, the works appear in detail, printed full-bleed on matte stock; from the other, the are shown framed and printed glossy. In lieu of an art historical exegesis, Mónica de la Torre and Ann Lauterbach extend the associative logic of the photostats into lyrical musings on the ever-compounding layers of history embedded and reflected in the work. Consistent with the artist's approach, the volume avoids definitive representation, instead providing multiple ways into the artworks. In the middle of another pandemic fueled by government neglect, Gonzalez-Torres's investigations into the contigencies and coincidences of history resound with urgency.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.