FELIX GONZALEZ-TORRES, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, A.R.T. Press, New York, 1993

The first monograph devoted to Felix Gonzalez-Torres, published in 1993 by A.R.T. Press, while many of the works now central to his reputation — stacks, candy pieces, curtains, billboards and photographic works — were still part of an unfolding contemporary practice rather than an established historical one. The book contains extensive colour and black-and-white documentation together with a poster made for the publication.

Tim Rollins interviewed Gonzalez-Torres in his New York apartment on 16 April and 12 June 1993. Rollins was not simply an outside critic: he had been a core member of Group Material and had developed his own radical collaborative practice with K.O.S. Gonzalez-Torres himself had been a member of Group Material from 1987 to 1991. The conversation therefore reads as an exchange between artists formed within overlapping ideas about collective action, political responsibility, pedagogy and the circulation of art.

It is also unusually direct. Gonzalez-Torres discusses disappearance, generosity and his refusal of the static art object — describing works designed to diminish, change or leave the exhibition altogether. Read thirty-three years later, these aren't retrospective explanations of a canonised artist. Rollins is speaking to Gonzalez-Torres while the language of the work is still being worked out.

And the publication itself quietly participates in that logic: a book accompanied by a separate folded image, something intended to be removed, unfolded and potentially placed elsewhere.

ISBN 0-923183-12-4.