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20  The day Felix Gonzalez-Torres put on a constantly evolving show

The day Felix Gonzalez-Torres put on a constantly evolving show

Art

On 1 June 1991, a month-long exhibition by 34-year-old Felix Gonzalez-Torres came to an end in New York.

 The day Felix Gonzalez-Torres put on a constantly evolving show  The day Felix Gonzalez-Torres put on a constantly evolving show

Entitled Every Week There Is Something Different: A Four-Part Project by Felix Gonzalez-Torres at Andrea Rosen Gallery, it did exactly as promised, the artist removing some works and adding others to produce a fluctuating narrative. At the opening, the 13 photographs in Untitled (Natural History) were all displayed, but the following week only three remained – Humanitarian, Soldier and Explorer (words that described Theodore Roosevelt) – and were now joined by Untitled (Go-Go Dancing Platform), which was literally what it said, occasionally hosting a live go-go dancer in silver shorts gyrating to music on a Walkman.

 

In the third week, Gonzalez- Torres added his Blood Works, curves traced on graph paper, meaning that around a dozen works were exhibited and then replaced, until the appearance in the last week of Untitled (Placebo), a rectangular floor display composed of hundreds of candies wrapped in silver paper. By recombining a reduced set of works, Gonzalez-Torres increased their narrative possibilities and destabilized gallery conventions. “I thought there’s no rule that I have to leave something in the gallery for the entire month,” he explained to critic Robert Nickas. “I’ll change it, create some kind of narrative ... put it out and take it back, create something and then destroy it, create a tension that nothing is stable. You can’t even depend on a one-month show.”