Gonzalez-Torres leads the way to Hodges in Chelsea (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
FLOATING A BOULDER: WORKS BY FELIX GONZALEZ-TORRES AND JIM HODGES
FLAG Art Foundation
545 West 25th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Wednesday – Saturday 12 noon – 5:00 pm through January 31
Admission: free
www.flagartfoundation.org
PAIRED, GOLD: FELIX GONZALEZ-TORRES AND RONI HORN
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
1071 Fifth Ave. at 89th St.
Through January 6 (closed Thursday)
Admission: $18 (pay-what-you-wish Saturdays 5:45-7:45)
212-423-3500
www.guggenheim.org
Even in death, Cuban avant-garde artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres continues to team up with some of his friends and colleagues and offer presents to strangers. At the beginning of 2009, Andrea Rosen presented “A Shadow Leaving an Object,” a dual exhibition matching Gonzalez-Torres’s mirror piece “Untitled (March 5th) #1” (1991) with Robert Gober’s “Prison Window.” From certain angles, you could see Gober’s work, way up at the top of a wall, in Gonzalez-Torres’s eye-level mirror in the otherwise large, empty Chelsea space. Gonzalez-Torres’s and Jim Hodges’s pieces interact similarly at the FLAG Art Foundation, where Hodges has curated a two-floor show combining his fragmented circular mirrors, stained-glass screens, colorful fabric hangings, and “the bells/black” sound installation (yes, you can ring the bells, which are all at a different pitch) with Gonzalez-Torres’s double clocks (“Perfect Lovers”), candy and poster sculptures (yes, go ahead and take one of each), and lighted go-go-dancing platform, where every day at an unannounced time a male dancer will get on the lighted stage and gyrate away for five minutes. Primarily focusing on temporality, the exhibit, which also includes six billboards by Gonzalez-Torres spread across three boroughs, closes January 31.
Gonzalez-Torres leads the way to Horn at the Guggenheim (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
The Guggenheim has gotten into the action as well, teaming up Gonzalez-Torres, who died of AIDS in 1996, with another living artist, New York native Roni Horn, in “Paired Gold,” which can refer to both the material itself as well as their brief but treasured friendship. After winding your way through the Guggenheim’s Kandinsky retrospective – we’ll have more to say about this wonderful show in an upcoming post – make sure to go into the very last gallery at the top of Frank Lloyd Wright’s spiraling structure, where you’ll have to walk through Gonzalez-Torres’s large-scale ceiling-to-floor gold-colored beaded curtain, “Untitled” (Golden), in order to see Horn’s “Gold Field,” two pounds of pure gold pounded into a delicate sheet that looks like it would disintegrate at the merest touch. (Don’t try this or the security guard will be very unhappy.) Gonzalez-Torres called Horn’s 1990 sculpture, “Forms from the Gold Field,” a “new landscape, a possible horizon, a place of rest and absolute beauty”; it’s simply delightful to see these two innovative and influential sculptors back together again, sharing a place of rest.