CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 7/5/2018

Looking, identity and other texts in 'Felix Gonzalez-Torres'

"I love formal issues. Actually they have a very specific meaning. Forms gather meaning from their historical moment. The minimalist exercise of the object being very pure and very clean is only one way to deal with form. Carl Andre said, 'My sculptures are masses and their subject is matter.' But after twenty years of feminist discourse and feminist theory we have come to realize that 'just looking' is not just looking but that looking is invested with identity: gender, socio-economic status, race, sexual orientation.… Looking is invested with lots of other texts." —Felix Gonzalez-Torres, quoted by David Breslin in David Zwirner Books' beautiful new monograph.
Installation view, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, David Zwirner, 537 West 20th Street, New York, 2017. Foreground: "Untitled" (Water), 1995; background: "Untitled" (Ross), 1991. Photo by Dan Bradica. © The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation Courtesy Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York and David Zwirner, New York/London/Hong Kong