UNTITLED (AMERICA)

Felix González-Torres's strings of lights in the warehouse and the Museum of Fine Arts derive from a history of the strong aesthetics of minimalist art. But González-Torres, like others of his generation, made a career of introducing symbolic content into the emptiness of a neutralizing abstract tendency in minimalism. The lights at the warehouse-hanging in curtains, one string offset behind the next act as a simple reminder of the energy necessary to give light, each individual bulb as likely as the next to burn out. Surprisingly, this casual form and its simple media enact a drama of loss, of time passing and time lost. In contrast to the industrial and phallic connotations of, for instance, a Dan Flavin fluorescent structure, these bulbs of González-Torres are more domestic (and perhaps feminine) in association, and therefore more human in their relations to the body. Yet they hang like strings of male genitalia as well, mimicking the vulnerability of a gendered human body and the energy which courses through it. This passage from male to female and back again sharpens the discourse in which the work plays out its history. At the Museum of Fine Arts, the strings of light participate in a less edgy play of associations. Santa Fe is a city where lights in trees are common and lights, particularly candles, have a social meaning which is read at reli- gious festivities, both indoors and out. On the Museum's exterior, González-Torres's lights are more communal and less interventionary. They act to literally decorate a space, a bright reminder of the museum's place in community life and its possible integration within the mutuality of place. On the balcony, they seem almost "naturalized" to the Plaza. But by using the same piece in two locations, González-Torres, like other artists in the exhibition, joins two discourses one of sexuality and power and the other of mutuality and celebration. The separation within the piece allows for a wider interpretation, as meaning and poetics emerge across the gap between the two buildings. The generosity of this work, its play of the relation between specific and general, is a reminder of the relations between humans in general, and those in a democracy specifically. That these relations are filled with pathos and hope simultaneously, and that they can be symbolically conjured by such simple material acts, is the remarkable achievement and legacy of Felix González-Torres.
Text written by Curator Bruce W. Ferguson and Vincent J. Varga for the exhibition catalog.