Private Space on the Public Street: Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s Bed Billboards

Ondine Chavoya: I’m thrilled to be able to speak with you, Anne, about this incredibly generous and significant Projects exhibition that you organized in 1992 with Felix Gonzalez-Torres.

Anne Umland: Thank you for inviting me. I can’t believe how many years it’s been since this exhibition. It was a privilege at the time to work with Felix. It felt very special, even then. And it’s fitting to look back, because Felix’s work engages with ideas of how you activate memory. How do you bring things that are gone back into the present? What’s the exchange between the two? And that exchange can go in so many different directions.

OC: There is a bit of a personal element for me as well, because your exhibition was so impactful, I think, for the museum, for Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s career, and for my personal trajectory as a curator. When I arrived at MoMA as a summer intern in June of 1992, Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s Projects 34 exhibition was firmly in place in the museum and across the city.

AU: It was up during May and June of 1992 but its life span extended well beyond those dates. As late as September 1992, for instance, Vince Aletti reported in the Village Voice that there were still Felix Gonzalez-Torres billboards up around New York City. I loved that because I think that that whole project consistently perturbed or provoked institutional boundaries and norms, including that an exhibition has a set close date. Felix’s Projects show had a life well beyond what the museum dictated.

OC: It sounds like it really sparked something in your imagination. How did you meet the artist and what do you recall about those initial meetings or conversations?

AU: At the time I was a new curatorial assistant here at The Museum of Modern Art. That’s how you start: you’re like a baby curator. But that was great because, at that level, we were all encouraged to present proposals for the Projects exhibition series. I was really excited about being able to present ideas to the Projects committee, and I was really nervous, so I was out looking all the time, you know, just trying to think what would make a compelling idea.

Reading more about Felix’s art made me think, well, this would be an artist I’d love to work with, someone I’d love to bring into the museum. I’m going to put that name out on the table at the Projects committee meeting. And so I did. I don’t remember meeting Felix in person until the fall of 1991 when he came to the museum. We also talked on the telephone; he had different ideas of what he might do.

OC: So you were proposing to work with Gonzalez-Torres, but not with a prescribed or set project in mind.

AU: No, no, no. That, to me, was how Projects worked. I was there to ask the artists what their vision was and to say, “How can MoMA help you make this?”

OC: And I love this idea that the conversations started and developed between you two on the telephone. Because Felix didn’t necessarily have a studio, right? So there wouldn’t have been a traditional studio visit.

AU: Right! He would rather proudly say, “I don’t have a studio.” So over that summer, I did a lot of reading at Andrea Rosen Gallery, which had wonderful archives. And I remember the critic David Deitcher had written what I found to be really cogent texts about Felix’s work. So, in lieu of a studio visit, I did an archives visit, a research visit, and was having phone conversations with him.

OC: How did the idea of billboards first come up? He’d worked with billboards previously, right?

AU: Felix had different bodies of work at that point. He had done the paper stacks, he’d done the dateline pieces with seemingly unrelated factoids from the news or from personal memory strung together with a blank space above. He had done puzzle pieces and a couple of billboard projects. So I knew that Felix was an artist who worked with a lot of different formats, different platforms, different sizes, different scales. He just called me up one day and said, “I have a new idea for the Projects show. I’d like to put up [at that point it was 10 to 15] billboards around New York City. The image for the billboards should be a blowup of a photograph, a mundane image. I want it to look like anyone could have taken it. It should be a very private image, a private space, projected into the vast public arena of New York.” He wanted the public to meet the private head-on. And he also talked about how he really loved this notion of the fragmented nature of the exhibition, that it could never be seen all at one time. This was while the Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill hearings were going on. And he was really distressed and feeling cynical about those. In one conversation with Felix, you’d go from politics to a beautiful, very fully realized idea for an exhibition, to the poet Mallarmé, to photography—that was Felix’s mind, and that was my memory of every conversation I ever had with him. Because it just was all those...

OC: Poetic associations…

AU: And topical associations! He was a real news junkie. And so the cultural, political, social dimension is always so omnipresent.

OC: Absolutely. He wasn’t just collecting the information. He was analyzing it, synthesizing it, and then redistributing it. Many of his artist talks involved him reading his analysis of the news rather than addressing his artwork directly.

AU: I just find Felix’s work so stimulating. It makes me go down all these rabbit holes. For example, there’s an article in the New Yorker magazine by the critic Alex Ross from 2016, in which he writes about the difficulty of Mallarmé. And he says that Mallarmé staged “collisions of grand abstraction and mundane reality.” And for me, that’s Felix. And then Ross said in the same article that for him, the poet that was most influenced by Mallarmé was Wallace Stevens, and Wallace Stevens is a poet whose work Felix admired greatly. At one point Felix read a Wallace Stevens poem to me and said that imagery from that poem had inspired his selection of the bed photograph and the idea of the exhibition. It was a reminder of how important poets and poetry was for him.

OC: That’s crucial. And the photography, I think you recalled that the photograph of the bed may have had an earlier iteration or life before it was used in the billboard.

AU: Felix told me that he had taken this photograph earlier in the year, in 1991, of his empty double bed, and I did not realize at the time that it was used for another project. Anyway, it came to us as a black-and-white photograph that Felix cropped. Felix was so insistent that he didn’t want an art image. He didn’t want an image that called attention to itself for its aesthetics. And yet, it’s such a beautiful image.

OC: It’s so associative and powerful. I think about it in relationship to the earlier billboards. What is different from his previous billboard installations is that there’s no text whatsoever. The earlier ones, the Sheridan Square 1989 billboard and the Health Care Is a Right billboard for the 1990 Day Without Art, were all text.

AU: At the time, I saw that absence of text in relation to the whole theme of absence and the dialectic of absence and presence. Taking something away where you’d expect it. On a billboard, you expect to see text or an advertisement and this was something that instead advertised, I don’t know, silence and interiority and reticence. And I think it did have the effect of drawing attention, as Felix wanted, away from that image, out into the space that surrounded it. And recognizing how that surrounding space, that urban space, that city surround was what changed, and was what was colorful and what was alive and undid another hierarchy. It was just an invitation to look around.

OC: Oh, that’s beautiful, an invitation to look around. I recently listened to a lecture that Gonzalez-Torres gave at the Whitney soon after the MoMA Projects exhibition, and he sounded very proud of the beautiful elegance of the installation inside the gallery, and then showed images of the billboard out in the city, and he uses that as an example to say that context is meaning. That invitation to look around, to think about the urban environment or the broader cultural, social context that something exists in, whether that’s in the city, on the street, or in the museum.

AU: Yes. It’s very powerful. That nothing is ever, in a formalist sense, an isolated, autonomous object. It’s always dependent on what surrounds it and, I think, also dependent on who’s looking.

OC: Do you recall what the conversations were around having the billboard installed within the museum, as well as in locations outside the museum?

AU: We had a long conversation about all sorts of things about the billboards: the number of billboards, where they would be installed, where they wouldn’t be installed, about the announcement, the brochure, et cetera. By November, Felix had decided that there would be 24 billboards—not the originally planned 10 to 15—and that he didn’t want anything installed in the museum gallery other than one billboard and the brochure box. And then he was still saying at that point that there was a chance that he wouldn’t want to install anything in the Projects gallery. That came up many times during our conversations. But I came to believe that if you didn’t have something attention grabbing in the museum, people wouldn’t know about the exhibition’s brochure, which listed the locations of the 24 billboards, and they wouldn’t know to go back out into the city and find them, which is what Felix wanted. But to this day, I still wonder.

We had the same billboard company, Seaboard, that installed the works outside install the single billboard at MoMA. I remember John Latona, who was the owner of Seaboard, saying, “Well, it might take a little longer because it’s art.” And then there’s Felix saying to me, “Well, it doesn’t really have to be perfect because you know it’s not art.” So that whole tension of what putting something inside the frame of the museum does, and the assumption that somehow the one in here was special, when it’s materially the same as all the billboards outdoors, came into play. The Projects gallery location has since changed at the museum, but at the time it was just off a corridor that faced the Sculpture Garden with floor-to-ceiling windows, and one of the things Felix loved about that corridor was it was en route to the cafeteria!

OC: What were the conversations around the locations for the billboards across the city? And what was taken into consideration about those locations?

AU: Felix had worked with Seaboard before and they were sympathetic to the arts. And I think the idea going into it was the hope that they would give us a heavily discounted price because we had a budget and commercial advertising space is expensive! So even though those billboards are out in the public realm, the space they occupy is commercial and private and you pay for it. Many of Felix’s projects engaged with the notion of the responsibility of the owner, the producer, the custodian to make something happen. In this case, MoMA’s role was to find the money to rent those billboards. We began with Felix wanting billboards in all five boroughs—he wanted to be sure that his billboards were not just in Soho.

OC: Where one might expect to see art.

AU: We ended up with four boroughs: Queens, Manhattan, the Bronx, and Brooklyn, which had to do in part with what Seaboard had available.

OC: One of the ideas that comes out in your essay, and I wondered if this was also coming from conversations with Felix, is around passage. In these moments of transition, crossing a bridge, moving through the city and encountering the billboards in different locations, on your way to the grocery store or the subway. How did these ideas about passage or transition come up in your conversations?

AU: I remember that Felix spoke specifically about the idea of seeing things in transit, coming or going. When it came to writing the essay, and when I look back now and reflect on that 32 years later, I can see it is consistent with how I’ve continued to approach writing about art and artists, which is to start with the work. And it did seem to me that the work Felix conceived for his Projects exhibition made me reflect on how meanings of things are never static. They’re never fixed. They always change.

OC: And in the essay you also reflect about the multiple associations of the bed itself.

AU: That image—for all that Felix didn’t want us to spend too much time staring at it—is nonetheless unforgettable. It continues to capture attention because it is so open-ended, or because you can bring so many different associations to it, from sexual or erotic to loss. And coupling, doubling: I was thinking of couples and repetition, how that’s another strategy with Felix’s work.

There were a lot of different responses to this show. I hadn’t remembered that until I went back to the archives. Two of the most beautiful were in the Village Voice and the New Yorker. Vince Alletti, in the Village Voice from September 1992, writes, “His photograph of a rumpled, conspicuously empty double bed is one of the year’s most striking and resonant images. Displayed around the city on billboards, which originally tied into a MoMA Projects piece, the beds are effective on so many levels. As symbols of absence, passion, loss, frustration, AIDS, privacy, or the lack of it. They should be permanent fixtures of the landscape. As it is, they remain up at nearly 20 locations only until the billboards are rented again. Keep your eyes open.” I just love that. I feel like that’s the project! I love that the billboards could be semipermanent features of the New York City landscape. In writing the brochure, I was thinking about how nothing is ever permanent. The billboards are going to come down, but also they will go up again. So the brochure concludes on a hopeful note.

OC: Yes, so powerful.

AU: I think one of the hopes, back in 1992, was that when the billboards went up again, the supreme court ruling in Bowers vs. Hardwick, which criminalized private sexual acts between same sex partners, would have been overruled, which it has. However, what I didn’t anticipate was that the first time I saw the bed billboard up again, Felix had died. This profoundly changed its meaning for me, because now the absence represented was the absence of him.

OC: I often think about the image of the bed as representing a convergence of tenses, in that he’s documenting the impression, the presence of he and his partner occupying that bed together. And then putting this out in public when his partner is no longer there with him in this realm, and then perhaps imagining a time when he, too, will no longer be.

AU: But the image will.

OC: The image will, and the impressions will be there, like a palimpsest. Yes. They’re always there. And I think that is part of the poetic power of this work of art, this metaphor, this embodiment, this provocation, is that whenever it’s introduced anew to audiences, it reinvents itself and its significance. What did you learn from working with Felix, at this early stage in your career, and how did this inform your work over the years with art, with artists, and with the public?

AU: That’s such a big question, Ondine! I learned to always listen to the artist. Listen hard. Whether working on a classic modern artist where you’re trying to “listen” to the artist through reading correspondence, or looking at the works, or trying to understand studio practice. That’s so key to what we do or what I believe we should do. Be open minded. Be really flexible, but have an opinion. Learn how to collaborate.

OC: And I think one of the crucial things I learned from our conversations is that this was also a collaboration that was happening within a particular institutional framework. So it was about learning how to work within and operate within those institutional frameworks and to enable an artist to work within those institutional frameworks, but also to challenge those institutional frameworks at different moments.

AU: Yes, which I think Felix’s work always does. There’s that hyper-awareness of structure and stricture and it’s both. Something you can work with and something you push against.

OC: Reflecting back on the last 30 years since this exhibition, what comes into focus for you now about this project, about Felix’s work and its significance today?

AU: For years, I had a quote from Felix on my bulletin board. I kept it up there because it encapsulated one of the key things that I took away from working with him. Felix said in 1993, “I hope that everything I make is needed by my culture. I always think that when culture foregrounds something, it is because it is needed. It could be an idea, an object, whatever. It could have been there for a long, long time, but it is only when culture feels that it is ready, that this object or idea becomes important.” I think that is something any cultural producer, including curators, should be thinking about all the time. Who needs this and why are we doing it and what’s the message and, why is it important to do this now?

Felix’s art, in all its manifest modes, including the bed billboard project, is one that, for me, models so many different things that I think are important for being a citizen of the United States today. It models participation, it models generosity, accessibility, transience, ephemerality, how to celebrate, how to mourn. It also brings in the age-old Vanitas theme with the candy pieces, the paper pieces, and at the same time they touch on aspects of US culture, like consumption, consumerism. I think it’s an art that speaks to our interdependence in this moment.

You can take action as an individual and you can model the way that you would like the world to be through your own actions. I think Felix’s art does that so beautifully. I’m very glad that there’s going to be an exhibition of his work in Washington, DC, right before the presidential election. I wish he were here.

OC: I wish I could have met him. I wish I could have known him. I wish I could have had this type of conversation with him. Which is to say, I wish he were here, too.