In 1991, Felix Gonzalez-Torres had a show at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. The culture wars still raged; two years earlier, the Corcoran Gallery had canceled a Robert Mapplethorpe survey.
Senator Ted Stevens, Republican of Alaska, was threatening to shut down Gonzalez-Torres’s show for obscenity. The artist, a gay man born in Cuba, described Stevens in a 1995 interview as “one of the most homophobic anti-art senators,” and said that Stevens “would have a hard time explaining to his constituents how homoerotic and how pornographic two clocks side by side are.”
The show stayed open.
Gonzalez-Torres’s clock example was a reference to “‘Untitled’ (Perfect Lovers),” from 1991, a pair of identical, synchronized wall clocks. The work is partly a eulogy for the artist’s partner, Ross Laycock, who died of AIDS-related illness that year. (Five years later, Gonzalez-Torres would die of AIDS.)
But his art was homoerotic, just not in obvious ways. His themes of desire, companionship and mortality aren’t limited to sexual politics. This was Gonzalez-Torres’s innovation: to pack grave themes in the austere languages of minimalism and conceptualism, and challenge the possibilities of mainstream art. Speaking with the artist Joseph Kosuth in 1993, he phrased his strategy pointedly: “I want to be like a virus that belongs to the institution.”
Another work from 1991, “‘Untitled’ (Go-Go Dancing Platform),” is on view at Hauser & Wirth in Chelsea through April 18. For the often understated Gonzalez-Torres, the piece is flamboyant: a sky blue pedestal, edged with round bulbs like a backstage mirror, provides a stage for dancers gyrating in their choice of silver lamé shorts or bikini. (It wasn’t shown at the Hirshhorn.)
But if you come expecting a performance, you’ll probably be baffled. The platform is usually empty. A dancer appears only once a day — per the artist’s instructions — for just a few minutes, at unspecified times.
When the dancer does appear, they are simultaneously a sex symbol on the catwalk, a Greek statue on a pedestal, a bronze monument on a plinth. The piece provokes questions about what sort of bodies you desire to see dancing for your pleasure, or what kind of go-go dancer you’d be.
This play of absence and presence chimes with the way identity politics is a contest of erasure and visibility. In the art world, galleries and museums strive to amplify diverse voices. On the political stage, undocumented immigrants are afraid to go outside and trans people face the loss of legal status. The Trump administration removed the T and the Q (standing for trans and queer) from L.G.B.T.Q. on government websites, including that of the Stonewall National Monument in the West Village, an especially bitter gesture, given that trans people were crucial participants in the Stonewall uprising. In early February, the Pride flag at Stonewall was taken down.
But visibility is not the endgame for Gonzalez-Torres’s piece. When a dancer is present, the setup emphasizes privacy. Only they can hear the music in their headphones, and they dance whether anyone is there. At the opening, more than 100 people waited over an hour for a glimpse; when the performer appeared, she whipped her ponytail and rolled her chest. Then she slipped into the applauding crowd.
In between performances, the bare stage feels like a monument. Not a singular one, but a marker standing for each time this work has been and will be installed. For admirers of the artist, it’s a place to reflect on how Gonzalez-Torres injected political efficacy into contemporary art and to remember the promise of more dancing.
When Gonzalez-Torres made this piece, visibility for gay men had acute stakes. L.G.B.T.Q. activists in the 1980s worked relentlessly to keep H.I.V. in the public mind, fighting its stigma as something shameful. The work’s emotional charge draws on the artist’s own experience and on the incalculable loss of AIDS in total.
All this in a light blue box. Then again, that hue alone evokes clear skies, hospital gowns and antiretroviral pills. Gonzalez-Torres coded his politics in ways that kept — still keep — censors off balance. This strategy raises the risk of framing his provocative work as a harmless novelty. Some see a trend, as the New York Times critic Holland Cotter noted in 2023, of institutions trying to broaden the appeal of the artist’s work, posthumously, by keeping their wall texts and news releases vague.
The Art Institute of Chicago and the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery recently spurred controversy by displaying another 1991 work, “‘Untitled’ (Portrait of Ross in Los Angeles),” one of the artist’s famous piles of candy, with labels that omit or gloss over mention of Laycock and his death. (The Smithsonian disputed the accusations; the Art Institute changed the label.) Hauser & Wirth’s exhibition materials for “‘Untitled’ (Go-Go Dancing Platform)” elide the artist’s sexuality, and emphasize themes of mourning and visibility.
People are understandably on guard for any sign of queer erasure. But this is a sticky point. During his lifetime, Gonzalez-Torres preferred to keep descriptions of the work minimal and, while candid about his identity, avoided explaining his art with personal anecdotes. With “Go-Go Dancing Platform,” that’s part of its sadness. It’s a meditation on the limits of art. Like a gallery itself, it’s a mostly empty box punctured by serendipitous bouts of pleasure.
You can topple a statue or take down a flag. But you can’t erase absence. What makes Gonzalez-Torres’s work powerful and timely also makes it difficult. The artist wanted to slip his work past gatekeepers without tempering its fierce humanity. He understood that institutions can be fickle — one reason many of his artworks come with strict installation guidelines.
He also left room for uncertainty. The instructions for “Go-Go Dancing Platform” don’t specify age, sex, gender, race or immigration status, only silver lamé. His work shifts the burden of keeping personal memory alive away from institutions and onto the populations they serve — onto us.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres
Through April 18. Hauser & Wirth, 542 West 22nd Street; 212-790-3900, hauserwirth.com.
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