January 18–May 4, 2008

 

F E L I X   G O N Z A L E Z - T O R R E S   b. Güaimaro, Cuba, 1957

Felix Gonzalez-Torres's Untitled (Death by Gun) (1990) is a stark index of the face of pure violence. The images are drawn from a set of grainy black-and-white photographs of 464 people who died from gunshots during a one-week period, from May 1 to May 7, 1989, across the cities of America. The original report from whic the images were culled was published in a July 17, 1989, Time magazine exposé on gun violence. Like all of the artist's stacked offset pieces, Untitled consists of several hundred sheets of printed paper endlessly available for viewers to take away and endlessly replenished to maintain an ideal height. The work's somber content—images of the dead stare back at the viewer, with numbing silence—transforms its structure from archival printed sheet to sculptural monument. In this collation of obituaries, a wound is exposed as the sign of shocking collective trauma; the seeming randomness of relationships between victims coalesces into a unity through the time frame of their deaths. This running tally illuminates the images within the reportorial or documentary boundary specific to the account of each victim. The photographs are organized on the white sheet of paper in no apparent order or hierarchical arrangement, without regard for race, gender, class, age, or circumstance of death (suicides and homicides). The democracy of death is spotlighted here, irrespective of victim.

 

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