Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Photostats
Monica de la Torre author Ann Lauterbach author Lisa Pearson editor Richard Kraft editor
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Siglio Press
Published:7th Jan '21
Should be back in stock very soon
Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ text reveries on the intersections of the historical and the personal, gathered for the first time in this elegant clothbound volume 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 Made at the height of the AIDS crisis, these profoundly suggestive lists of political, cultural, and historical references disrupt hierarchies of information and linear chronology, asking how we receive and prioritize information, how we remember and forget, and how we continuously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. This elegant volume is a discrete space in which to closely read the photostats with sustained attention: it opens from both sides, reproducing the framed photostats as objects on one, and from the other, details of the texts can be read as writing. In between the two, original writings by Mónica de la Torre and Ann Lauterbach, explore adjacent territories, signaling the multiple entry points for understanding the works.
In the middle of another pandemic fueled by government neglect, Gonzalez-Torres’s investigations into the contingencies and coincidences of history resound with urgency. -- Kyle Croft * Bookforum *
Photostats honors Gonzalez-Torres in all the right ways ... To my mind, [the Photostats] are best described as concrete poems that speak to the ethics of memory in a culture of coerced and embodied forgetting; collages of remembering, naming, and the contention of individual existence, particularly that of the marginalized and dispossessed ... They will take your breath away. -- Elizabeth Zuba * Hyperallergic *
Unlike the stars, we do not write, luminously, on a dark field (Mallarmé). Yet Gonzalez-Torres’s inscriptions do act as constellations, as celestial alphabet. Events worth remembering, the count of years—they are light beams orienting us as we go on forgetting. -- Mónica de la Torre * Paris Review *
Made at the height of the AIDS crisis, in a pre-internet era, the photostats—a series of fixed works with white serif text on black fields framed behind glass to create a reflective surface—are profoundly suggestive lists of political, cultural, and historical references. These works disrupt linear time, the seemingly causal relationships of chronology, and hierarchies of information as they ask how we receive and prioritize information, how we remember and forget, and how we continuously create new meaning. The photostats have a deep kinship with poetry in their use of specificity and ambiguity, operating as open fields: each juxtaposition and its oblique friction illuminates connections and disconnections. * Art Agenda *
Photostats is a timeless social commentary on the difficult and ongoing work that lies ahead to create a more just world. This volume is gorgeous in its simplicity and profound in its form, invoking multiple reads and multiple meanings upon each view. -- Lee Ann Norman * Brooklyn Rail *
ISBN: 9781938221262
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
88 pages