Instructions for Uncertain Futures

Abstract

This article explores concepts of safety, care, and conservation in the work of American artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres (b. 1957 in Cuba, d. 1996 in USA). Though conservation may be characterized as an invariable commitment to the art object’s physical integrity in perpetuity, Gonzalez-Torres’s work insists on alternative practices that accommodate material, social, and infrastructural transformation. This reading attends to the Certificates of Authenticity and Ownership that accompany the artist’s work, which are read as theoretical engagement with and extension of his practice. Developed by the artist and his gallerist Andrea Rosen in the 1990s, these instructions outline the terms of the initial installation, ongoing maintenance, and future stagings of his highly dynamic work. This essay traces the implications of the instructions across three expanding time frames to demonstrate how they allow for work that exists in both radical excess and negation of the norm; in expanded material, social, and ecological coalitions; and that anticipates infrastructural change in the face of unknowable futures. In contradistinction to conservation’s normative horizon and the safety of the ever-same, the artist outlines an inchoate care ethic, one this article calls safekeeping and that continues decades after the artist’s death to enable ways of being with change amid uncertain prospects before the futural.