Artist: Felix Gonzalez-Torres

Hauser & Wirth presents Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ “Untitled” (Go-Go Dancing Platform), 1991, one of the most significant works by an artist whose career spanned less than a decade yet continues to shape conversations about participation, intimacy and public space thirty years after his death from AIDS at the age of 38.

“Untitled” (Go-Go Dancing Platform) consists of a painted blue platform framed by 48 light bulbs. When the work is installed, a dancer may appear once a day, at unscheduled times—wearing silver lamé and listening to music of their own choosing through headphones—ascending the platform for brief unchoreographed performances in which they are only dancing for themselves. The dancer draws forth surprise, desire and projection. When unoccupied, the platform remains a sculpture defined by the possibility of activation, evoking art-historical precedents and ‘isms’—particularly minimalism—while subtly challenging them.

While the work is linked to a time of profound absence and grief, it radiates with joy, physicality and emotional openness, qualities that course through and reinforce the delicate complexities of Gonzalez-Torres’ practice. As Humberto Moro, Deputy Director of Program at Dia Art Foundation, said in a recent film on the work, ‘It reminds us that beauty can be ephemeral, that performance can be a private act, and that care, like memory, requires effort. “Untitled” (Go-Go Dancing Platform) still feels urgent because it deals with timeless questions. Who gets to be seen? Who is allowed to perform and for whom? What do we do with our desire, attention, waiting? Felix Gonzalez-Torres gives us art that doesn’t conclude but continues again and again in each encounter and he leaves space for us not just to look but to feel and to remember.’

Over the past three decades, “Untitled” (Go-Go Dancing Platform) has been realized in numerous institutional contexts, each presentation shaped by its particular time and place, allowing the work to unfold anew with every iteration.