Within and beyond: Felix Gonzalez-Torres's "Crowd"

Abstract

In one of his best-known works, Felix Gonzalez-Torres installed thirteen blackand-white photographs at Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York, each depicting a single, carved laudatory word from the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial at the Museum of Natural History on the Upper West Side. Devoid of people, the photographs' concern seemed resolutely formal: the spatial tension between the flatness of the pictures' surfaces and the actual curve of the semi-circular wall depicted, emphasized by the concurrence of the wall's cornice and the photographs' top edges. A week later, however, Gonzalez-Torres struck all but three photographs: Soldier, Humanitarian, and Explorer. A celestial blue box, the upper perimeter of which was lined with light bulbs, was placed at the center of the room. Part minimalist box, part pop-art camp, this installation was enhanced by the gyrations of a go-go dancer, who briefly appeared atop each day wearing only silver briefs and a Sony Walkman. And if this performance playfully re-coded the stolid virtues fronting one of New York's foremost museums,1 so the institution of art in general received further assault on the third week of the exhibition. A rectangular pool of silver-wrapped candies now covered nearly half the floor of the emptied space. Gallery goers were invited to take these candies, and depending on the number of visitors and their constitutions, the shape of the installation altered, only to be replenished and reformed into a rectangle at closing in preparation for the next day.