Felix Gonzalez-Torres Never Saw This Work Either

Nearly 30 years after the artist's death, David Zwirner stages two pieces that were never manifested during his lifetime. How should we think about them?

- Madeline Leung Coleman

FELIX GONZALEZ-TORRES did it live. Instead of keeping a studio he said that was for artists who needed to "rehearse"-he often wanted to find out what his ideas for billboards, light strings, and candy piles would look like at the same time everyone else did: while they were being installed. "When you don't have a studio, you take risks, you change your underwear in public," he told an interviewer in 1993. "I'm not afraid of making mistakes; I'm afraid of keeping them." ¶ He died of AIDS three years later, at 38, and the thing about dying young and famous is that everything you did gets kept. Drafts become archive. Mistakes turn oeuvre. This month, power gallery David Zwirner filled its wide, multiaddress building on West 19th Street with a show dedicated to four of the artist's monumental installations, including two never manifested during his lifetime. Gonzalez-Torres is often called a conceptual artist, meaning a lot of his work takes the shape of an idea; because the art market runs on fairy-dust, magic-bean logic, these ideas can be bought and sold even if they're not carried out. At Zwirner, the never-before-seen works bookend the space: In a stark room at one end, there's "Untitled" (Sagitario) (1994-95), a pair of perfectly round, filled-to-the-brim reflecting pools sunk into the gallery's concrete floor, close together enough that a breeze generated by the sweep of an overcoat could blow water from one to the other. At the other end, there's "Untitled" (1994-95), a pair of massive billboards mounted in the center of a room and facing in opposite directions. The overhead light suddenly drops to black to a soundtrack of loud and startling applause.