Robert Hobbs
Norfolk, CT, USA
Sent via email on May 30, 2020: "Felix Gonzalez-Torres understood the need to focus his energies within established art discourses rather than mounting attacks from the outside. As he told Andrea Rosen, “I want to work within the system.” But he qualified this by saying to fellow artist Tim Rollins, “I love the idea of being an infiltrator.” In Fortune Cookie Corner Felix infiltrates and appropriates Robert Smithson’s corner mirror pieces; he does so by inscribing within this type of art a pile of Chinese wafers whose chief purpose is forecasting the future.
During this pandemic, the idea of hundreds of piles of fortune cookies across the planet looking beyond our currently overwhelming tragedies to more hopeful futures is a timely and much needed metaphor. Working in accord with Felix’s piece is the Smithson’s map collage placed above it, which forms another type of corner by following the map’s lines of longitude and latitude. Next to these two works is Mark Lombardi’s drawing The Arming of Iraq that might be considered an inversion of Felix’s process as it uses the very traditional medium of graphite on paper in order to infiltrate and then diagram the system of US agricultural loans, which were redirected by Saddam Hussein in order to acquire weapons of mass destruction.
While the Smithson and Lombardi look at specific geographic and political situations, Felix’s work looks outward to the present and future as people are invited to take and internalize the fortunes offered by these cookies."
