キューバ人アーティスト、フェリックス・ゴンザレス＝トレス（Felix Gonzalez-Torres）の作品集。山積みのキャンディーや電球、2つの並んだ時計などのインスタレーション作品で知られる作家は、作品を通して鑑賞者が自身の推論、視点、想像、行動で作品を完成させ、協力するよう促してきた。その中でも本作は、黒地に白のテキストが印刷された作品がガラスフレームに収められ、作品を覗き込む鑑賞者が反射で画角内に映りこむ仕組みとなっている。インターネットが普及する前の時代に制作されたにもかかわらず、テレビやPC、スマートフォンの画面を想起させ、情報の階層を破壊し、我々がどのように情報を受け取り、優先順位をつけるのか、どのように記憶し、忘れるのか、そしてどのように絶えず新しい意味を創造するのかを問いかけている。本書は両面から開く仕様となっており、一方では額装された作品がギャラリーで出会うようなオブジェクトとして再現され、もう一方では黒い背景にテキストが印刷されており、文章として読むことができる。

Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ text reveries on the intersections of the historical and the personal, gathered for the first time in this elegant clothbound volume

Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957-96) is one of the most significant artists to have emerged in the 1980s. An artist whose beautiful, restrained and often mutable works are abundant in compelling contradictions, Gonzalez-Torres was committed to a democratic form of art informed as much by the aesthetic and conceptual as by politics. His work challenges authority and our obeisance to it, dissolves the delineations between public and private, and creates a rich, open field into which the viewer is invited to complete works with her own inferences, imagination, and actions.

The photostats are a series of fixed works with white text on black fields framed behind glass to create a reflective surface bringing the viewers' reflection into the work. Made at the height of the AIDS crisis, these profoundly suggestive lists of political, cultural, and historical references disrupt hierarchies of information and linear chronology, asking how we receive and prioritize information, how we remember and forget, and how we continuously create new meaning. The photostats also recall the screens (the television, and now the computer) which furiously deliver information from which we must parse substance from surface and choose what to assimilate and what to reject.

This elegant volume is a discrete space in which to closely read the photostats with sustained attention: it opens from both sides, reproducing the framed photostats as objects on one, and from the other, details of the texts can be read as writing. In between the two, original writings by Mónica de la Torre and Ann Lauterbach, explore adjacent territories, signaling the multiple entry points for understanding the works.