Felix Gonzalez-Torres

Installations of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s “Untitled” (America) can vary: composed of twelve strings of light bulbs, with forty-two low-watt bulbs on each string, the work may be shown inside or outside, in an unlimited range of configurations, including laced above a city street (as in the installation pictured here) or suspended from the ceiling in several lines, and with all the bulbs illuminated or all of them dark. This mutable quality was essential to the work of Gonzalez-Torres, who is known for the sculptures, photographs, and installations he created in New York in the 1980s and 1990s. He conceived of the processes through which art is acquired, presented, encountered, and interpreted as collaborative—an ongoing exchange between the artist and those who owned or viewed his work. Other of his projects whose form and installation vary involve piles of wrapped candies, from which viewers are able to draw, and stacks of sheets of paper, printed with texts or photographs, which also may be taken. 

A number of Gonzalez-Torres’s works include the word America in their title, a choice that might be understood as related to the artist’s biography: born in Cuba, he grew up in Puerto Rico and moved to New York in 1979. The light from the bulbs in this work might resonate as cheerful in one context and melancholy in another—indeed the artist’s abiding themes included change, impermanence, and loss—leaving viewers to reflect on their ideological or personal associations with the idea of “America.”

Dana Miller and Adam D. Weinberg, Handbook of the Collection (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2015), 150.