The day Felix Gonzalez-Torres put on a constantly evolving show

Entitled Every Week There Is Something Different: A Four-Part Project by Felix Gonzalez-Torres at Andrea Rosen Gallery, it did exactly as promised, the artist removing some works and adding others to produce a fluctuating narrative. At the opening, the 13 photographs in Untitled (Natural History) were all displayed, but the following week only three remained – Humanitarian, Soldier and Explorer (words that described Theodore Roosevelt) – and were now joined by Untitled (Go-Go Dancing Platform), which was literally what it said, occasionally hosting a live go-go dancer in silver shorts gyrating to music on a Walkman.

 

In the third week, Gonzalez- Torres added his Blood Works, curves traced on graph paper, meaning that around a dozen works were exhibited and then replaced, until the appearance in the last week of Untitled (Placebo), a rectangular floor display composed of hundreds of candies wrapped in silver paper. By recombining a reduced set of works, Gonzalez-Torres increased their narrative possibilities and destabilized gallery conventions. “I thought there’s no rule that I have to leave something in the gallery for the entire month,” he explained to critic Robert Nickas. “I’ll change it, create some kind of narrative … put it out and take it back, create something and then destroy it, create a tension that nothing is stable. You can’t even depend on a one-month show.”