Project 34: Felix Gonzalez-Torres:May 16-June 30 1992

Last night I was reading Nancy Spector's amazingly lucid book on the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres. A lucid art book read is not a usual thing and I loved Spector's precision in situating Gonzalez-Torres' work within the context of the post-modern/ post-colonial activism of the Early 90's . I did not know, for instance about the heavy relevance the collective Group Material bore regarding the artist's career. Here is an excerpt of what Spector had to say which totally reinvigorated me this morning.

"Group Material exhibitions, staged in more recent years in cultural institutions such as the Whitney Museum Of American Arts and the Dia Center for the Arts, bring together the works of diverse artists and display them in relation to each other , often deliberately contradictory objects from mass culture. In addition to providing a bricolage of visual stumuli, each exhibition interrogates the age-old distinction between rareified art and real life by asking for whom is culture is really intended and in what ways it might come truly to reflect the diversity of the community"

The brilliant irony in that is a lot of the strategies generated by Group Material and artists like Gonzalez-Torres have re-surfaced as a new strain of thought in contemporary culture. Hi/Lo, bricolage, cut-up, the personal made political, DIY...you see it all now on youtube..on blogs...in the new way music is made and marketed. That , for me is the great relevance of art in a contemporary society. The value is less about the object and more in the way art forces us into new ways of thinking. Even when we don't realize it is happening.

PS That Nancy Spector book is really really outstanding!