Want a Gigantic Pile of Cookies in Your Home? 1,000 People Are Being Asked to Hoard Fortune Cookies as Part of an Ambitious Global Art Show

Craving snacks during the long months of self-isolation? A
never-ending pile of fortune cookies from the late Cuban
American artist Félix
González-Torres might be coming soon to a location near
you.

Most of the world’s art galleries are closed, but David Zwirner
and Andrea Rosen are forging ahead with an ambitious and
outside-the-box exhibition of González-Torres’s 1990 work “Untitled” (Fortune Cookie
Corner). It is the first work in the artist’s “Candy”
series—the rest feature wrapped candies—meant invoke both the
experience of loss and a sense of immortality.

There’s no telling where you might encounter the mound of
Chinese desserts, all free for the taking. Rosen, who is curating
the show, has asked 1,000 people around the world to install
the work in a location of their choosing—homes, art institutions,
and public spaces are all fair game.

This may sound unconventional, but González-Torres’s work
isn’t bound by the same restrictions as that of other artists. The
owner needs to follow specific but open-ended parameters in
manifesting the work, which can be installed in more than one place
at a time—making it perfect for our current moment, when much of
the world is under indefinite lockdown.

“This is one of the only works in the world that can travel and
be accessible right now,” Rosen told Artnet News. “There’s so many
people right now trying to do incredible online projects. Felix can
actually afford people a physical experience with an
artwork—and not just looking at it, but thinking about it, and
their involvement and what it means to them.”

There’s also an undeniable poignancy to staging the work right
now, given González-Torres’s activism against AIDS, the
disease that claimed his life in 1996. But perhaps more
importantly, sharing the experience of manifesting the work,
normally reserved for the owner and select curators, aims to help
combat the sense of loneliness and isolation that so many are
feeling at this time.

“What is important about this moment is how global it is,” Rosen
added. “It make people acknowledge that significant crises—whether
that be a war, a genocide, or the AIDS epidemic—have often been
depersonalized for those people who are not affected. This moment
is an opportunity to realize what it feels like to be one site, one
globe, one world—everything that’s happening affects us
all.”

In 2017, Rosen closed her gallery’s
physical space to focus on representing the
González-Torres estate—her very first show, back in 1990, featured
the artist’s work—teaming up with Zwirner to do so. The new
exhibition will open two days after the Félix González-Torres Foundation debuts
a new website.

Rosen has invited a diverse group of participants to take
part, including friends of González-Torres, artists, curators,
colleagues, and even the author of this piece. Each
participant has received a detailed set of instructions explaining
how to install the work, which is on loan from a private
collection. The piles are to feature between 240 and 1,000 fortune
cookies. (The original installation was approximately 10,000
cookies.) Each participant is responsible for sourcing their
own—you can buy 350 cookies on Amazon
for less than $30—and is asked to buy enough to completely
replenish the pile once during the duration of the show.

“One of the specific choices,” Rosen explained, “is that halfway
through, everyone has to regenerate it to the original size. So
everyone has the opportunity to experience both the potential loss
within the piece, and also the notions of rebuilding and
regeneration that is a very important part of the work.”

Some may find their pile unchanged over the course of the show.
For others, perhaps not a single cookie will remain. “There will be
very different representations of how it shifts and changes in size
and shape every day,” Rosen said. But regardless, at the
exhibition’s end, the cookies will cease to be considered a work of
art (and some participants will be left with an extremely large
supply of fortune cookies to munch on).

Participants are also instructed to document the manifestation
of the work in photo and video, from the installation process to
interactions with the work over the exhibition’s six-week run.

“The piece is never stagnant. It’s never in the past. It’s
always the present,” said Rosen. “It’s alive.”

“Félix González-Torres: Untitled (Fortune Cookie Corner)”
will be on view at 1,000 to-be-announced locations across the
world, May 25–July 5, 2020.

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People Are Being Asked to Hoard Fortune Cookies as Part of an
Ambitious Global Art Show appeared first on artnet
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