SERPENTINE GALLERY Mounting an exhibition of the work of the late Cuban-born American artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957-96) delineates a serious challenge.

SERPENTINE GALLERY

Mounting an exhibition of the work of the late Cuban-born American artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957-96) delineates a serious challenge. How can undivided shed light on a relatively small corpse of work that has been in like manner widely exhibited, reproduced, and collected? Curator Lisa Corrin did it according to taking into consideration one of the artist's main concerns: by what means meaning shifts and travels from one side different contexts. Eschewing a chronological approach, she showed stimulating juxtapositions of works, enlightening on the same level viewers who might have felt all too familiar with the artist's candy spills, paper stacks, jigsaw complicates lightbulb strings, mirrors, beaded curtains, photographs, and billboards.

single in kind fine juxtaposition was the pairing of Untitled (Natural History), 1990 and Untitled (Go-Go Dancing Platform), 1991 The first piece comprises a series of twelve photographs of bas-relief inscriptions in stone, part of a remembrancer to Theodore Roosevelt, of almighty categories similar as AUTHOR, STATESMAN, SCHOLAR, PATRIOT, EXPLORER, SOLDIER. The next to the first is a large pale pallid box with a string of lightbulbs; it serv as a platform for a go-go dancer who performed upon it for five minutes a day while listening to a Walkman and make readyed in a silver-lame bathing suit and sneakers. the one and the other works rely on metonymy to take the part of absent figures. Untitled (Natural History) confounds a critique of the statue (which here is showed through its absence) and its pre-modernist heavy, monumental, and masculine qualities. Untitled (Go-Go Dancing Platform), upon the other hand, borrows the same stalwart, ponderous, and solid characteristics from high modernism (in the guise of Minimalism). Art spectatorship and sexual scopophilia conve rge here, now it is the dancer who haves the power to decide when his or her display as a sex-object-turned-art-object will take place.

Other juxtapositions were just as carefully organizeed emphasizing the works' underlying themes and motifs. Lightbulb pieces, the hearty of a Viennese waltz in a Walkman, and photos of details of crystal chandeliers set excess and minimalism, pleasure and restraint, into play. Placing an image of the flower-strewn grave of Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas near sum of two units stacks that read "Somewhere better than this place" and "Nowhere better than this place" elicits questions of monumentality and memory, life and afterlife.

Gonzalez-Torres's work calls attention to the economy of the art butt; goal and of the exhibition space. The viewer's participation has been closely associated with his work--we are invited to take pieces of paper from his stacks and candies from his spills; collectors and curators may at times determine aspects of the installation and uniform composition of some works--size, amplification weight, among others. And to display the work suitably the Serpentine show had to fare beyond the walls of the classical gallery space at Hyde Park, not no other than installing billboards on the highways and in the Underground, however exhibiting other pieces at the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Camden Arts middle the Royal College of Art, and the Chelsea & Westminster Hospital. The importance of Gonzalez-Torres's work lies not sole in its treatment of the issues of connection that are so crucial to the production and exhibition of contemporary art. It's also in the way his work brings together seemingly irreconcilable questions pertaining to sex and death, power and politics, verse and beauty, formal aesthetics and art history, language and meaning. It is probably for this reason that the work has gained praise from in the same state [i]or[/i] condition diverse groups in the art world: from members of the October dispose to queer critics, from art observers adverse to high theory to those infatuated with it. Gonzalez-Torres's work has had the power to unite disparate factions in a sort of fin de siecle art consensus.

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