APPROXIMATELY 1980 SQUARE FEET...
Approximately 1980 Square FeetLIST OF PAINTINGS
Sandro Botticelli, Birth of Venus
Jan Vermeer, The Art of Painting
Eugene Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People
Goya, Saturn Devouring One of his children
Goya, The Executions of the Third of May
John Constable, Hay Wain
William Turner, Rain, Steam and Speed: the Great Western Railway
Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Mist
Horore Daumier, Third-Class Carriage
Eduard Manet, Olympia
George Seurat, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte
Vincent Van Gogh, Starry Night
Paul Cezanne, Basket of Apples
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, At the Moulin Rouge
Giorgio de Chirico, The Melancholy and Mystery of the street
Salvador Dali, The persistence of Memory
Roy Lichtenstein, Little Big Painting
Rembrandt, Self-Portrait
Edgar Degas, The dancing class
Leonardo Da Vinci, Mona Lisa
Rembrandt, Portrait of the Artist at his easel
Ingres, La Grande Odalisque
Diego Velazquez, Las Meninas
Eduard Manet, Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe
Gustave Courbet, The stonebreakers
Andy Warhol, Gold Marilyn Monroe
Tom Wesselmann, Great American Nude #57
Yves Klein, Anthorpemetrie de L’epoque bleue
Grant Wood, American Gothic
Rene Magritte, Time transfixed
Vincent Van Gogh, The Bedroom
Pablo Picasso, The Old Guitarist
Edvard Munch, The Scream
Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
Franz Marc, The great Blue Horses
Paul Gauguin, The Vision After the Sermon
Vincent Van Gogh, Sunflowers
Pierre Auguste Renoir, Two sisters (on the Terrace)
Botticelli, Primavera
Caravaggio, Bacchus
William Turner, Snowstorm at Sea
Paul Gauguin, Nevermore
Gustav Klimt, The kiss
Rene Magritte, The treachery of images
Marchel Duchamp, LHOOQ
Henri Matisse, The red studio
Chuck close, Self-Portrait
Henri Matisse, Dance
Piet Mondrian, Broadway Boogie Woogie
Jasper Johns, Flag
Arshile Gorky, The artist and his mother
Willem De Kooning, Woman and bicycle
Willem De Kooning, Excavation
Jackson Pollock, Blue Poles
Jasper Johns, Three Flags
David Hockney, A diver
Andy Warhol, Two hundred Campell’s soup Cans
Andy Warhol, 210 coca-cola bottles
Mark Rothko, Untitled
Gerhard Richter, Abstract paintings
Renoir, The Moulin de la Galette
Edgar Degas, The Millinery Shop
Jacques-Louis David, The death of Marat
Chuck close, Phil
El Greco, Feast in the House of Simon
Paul Gauguin, The Day of the God
Edouard Manet, The Mocking of Christ
David Hockney, American Collectors
Mary Cassatt, The Bath
Paolo Uccello, Battle of Saint Romano
Piero Della Francesca, Resurrection
(A few paintings were not included in the final piece due to composition of the web on site.)
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Untitled [Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) 1991] 2003
Georgia Kotretsos
1133 N. Dearborn #2510
Chicago, Il, 60610
Tel. No.: 312 255 0454
Email: portfolio2000@mailbox.co.za
15th May 2003
James Rondeau
Department Head Modern and Contemporary Art
Museum of the Art Institute of Chicago
125 East Monroe
Chicago, IL, 60603
Tel. No.: 312 443 3678
Dear James Rondeau
Everyday over the past few months some of my fellow graduate students and I visited the Museum of the Art Institute of Chicago to collect pieces of candy from the Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) 1991 (endless supply) piece, by Felix Gonzalez-Torres. I currently have 8741 pieces of candy.
Sincerely,
Georgia Kotretsos
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UNTITLED [Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) 1991] 2003
Text by Khwezi Gule
A work of art acts as a focal point for intersecting webs of explicit and implicit dialogues. Art is not the creation of one individual. It is a social product. It is social in its conception; in its commission and in its reception. The artist, informed by intuition and experience brings into sharp focus these dialogues through his/her labor.
However, from Renaissance times onwards the artist became a hero: his/her product a rarefied object. A work of art was regarded as being unique, self-contained and permanent. The advent of printmaking marked a shift in this trend because, by definition, the print has editions and can be reproduced. The idea of the multiple democratized the reception of art. In the sixties the idea of art that is “not for sale” regained popularity. In installations the context became as much a part of the artwork itself. Modernist innovations like Picasso’s “Still Life with Chair Caning”, Duchamp’s “Fountain”, and later Pop Art elevated the banal every-day object to the status of an artwork. Performance art made audience participation an essential dimension of art making and introduced the idea that art can be transient.
Recently other artists have challenged the sanctity of the artist’s individual creativity by parodying the work of other artists. Yinka Shonibare has appropriated the images of 18th Century painters and re-inscribed them with new meaning or rather exposed their hidden meanings. But seldom has an artist appropriated the work itself or parts of it in order to make something similar and yet so completely different. Such is Georgia’s work in relation to the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres.
American artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres conceived of the original work when his lover, having contracted HIV began to lose weight. In trying to conceptualize how this gradual process could be brought home to his audience, he came up with a novel idea: to put a pile of sweets equivalent in weight to the body of his lover, to be “consumed” by the gallery audience. Georgia’s own symbiotic/parasitic engagement with the work of Gonzalez-Torres began when she started removing sweets, one at a time, from his installation.
As Georgia says she produces “not site-specific work but audience-specific work”. In this regard the audience is no longer passive observers but active participants, physically and emotionally, in the making of the artwork. Similarly the gallery space no longer constitutes the four walls that contain the artwork but is pas of the work itself, par of the dialogue. By extension the histories hidden and overt that the viewer brings along also become part of the texture of the work-in progress. What is so important about this in the context of the disease, of globalization and the art world? How do these dialogues come together?
In answering these questions, it is necessary to think back to the recent pas. In the 80’s and early 90’s many images produced to create public awareness of HIV/AIDS featured disturbing images. Skull and cross bones, tombstones and other images evocative of death became a familiar sight. These images were supposed to the “Fear of God” in us. That, they were able to achieve, but to disastrous effect. These images, it has been argued, aroused in the general public a fear of HIV positive people rather than inducing a change in behavior; a fear that caused discrimination against people with HIV. We have seen people shunned by friends and family, viciously attacked, denied social services like medical care because of their HIV status. Now, it would be quite a leap of reasoning to suggest that images have the power to kill. But, in so far as a certain cultural consciousness can lead to stigmatization of people, image-makers have to take their share or responsibility for that culture.
One of the issues that HIV positive people have fought against is the equation of HIV and immorality. There is now a recognition that AIDS is a medical problem not one of morality. As the social and economic implications of the virus begin to be felt the issue of HIV/AIDS is being recognized as a human rights issue. In most countries there is a distinction between first generation rights and second-generation rights. First generation rights include the right to vote, right to free speech, etc., which it is considered the State’s duty to uphold and provide. Then there are second-generation rights, which are things like the right to education, to medical care etc. which the state provides but cannot (or doesn’t want to) guarantee. The campaigns of the Treatment Action Campaign (YAC) and other HIV/AIDS lobby groups have challenged this logic. They have also challenged the international property rights of pharmaceutical companies by advocating the manufacture of generic medicines. With the shift in emphasis from purely cautionary messages are being heard. These organizations have also challenged patriarchal relationships between men and women as a way of arresting the spread of the disease.
The work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres is a subtle and more intimate manner of talking about the effects of HIV/AIDS and is born out the need to put a human face to the disease. While Gonzales-Torres locates his work strictly within the cause of HIV, Georgia wants to expand the original parameters of the piece on many fronts. She challenges the authorship implied by copyright laws, she like the TAC wishes to test the boundaries between ownership and public responsibility. On the other hand Georgia’s involvement of fellow students in this act of appropriation, reinforces the social and collaborative aspects of her work.
There is even a wider influence in that the piece now exists in different forms across continents. The dislocation that comes with migrancy form one country to another has given her an international insight as to how culture infects other cultures, not unlike the virus itself. Similarly, Georgia’s intervention challenges the limits of art making: aesthetics, the conceptual dimensions of space like galleries as well as audience engagement. There is also a playful yet obsessive dimension to the piece. The act of collecting pieces of candy, in addition to the act of presenting the correspondence between the owners and herself recording the contributions of her accomplices, the writing of the number of each specific piece of candy, all 8741 of them, requires some singly-minded diligence.
If art is to contribute positively rather than negatively to how people perceive and respond to the disease and its effects, a different language needs to be employed. Like the HIV/AIDS awareness images mentioned above, much of contemporary art practice suggests that if a work of art is to be effective it must have impact. Impact by any means necessary. It must be either enormous, or shocking/unsettling or made with the most latest-of-the-art gadgetry. Rarely is a work of art made with sensitivity and subtlety.
There is nothing more disarming than a pile of sweets. Further investigation would reveal however, that beneath this apparent sweetness lies a more ominous tale. As Georgia herself state: “I believe and still do to the metaphor of the body to the point; I cannot bring myself to eat the candy.” In an industry where being on the cutting edge is more valued, artworks that deal with emotions such as empathy are marginal. Our engagement with the piece cannot be distant and disinterested. We have to participate, physically and emotionally. It’s a profound message that does not seek to influence us through impressive display but through that part of ourselves that enables us to feel and gives us a sense of community. Georgia’s piece is not intended to leave you shaken but touched.