Empty Bed
What's with the billboard of the rumpled bed off the High Line?
It's a 1991 artwork by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, writes High Line Blog, "best known for creating images that addressed his homosexuality and the painful loss of friends to AIDS."
W.M. Hunt wrote here about the empty bed project, "What was great about this piece is that as it was situated in the public domain without any explanatory text, everyone who saw it could interpret the piece differently... There was something incredibly sad about it. The implication to me was that now the bed doesn’t have two people in it. Something has happened. Something is missing. Something is absent. To me, I saw it as a testimonial to his lover, who had died."
But that was in the 1990s, when this image first appeared on city billboards.
the imagist
Today, in the High Line context, surrounded by glass condo towers and haute-couture, I'm not sure sadness, death, and AIDS would come to mind when you look at this empty bed.
It's more likely that you might imagine, as I did, that it's a stealth advertisement for Egyptian cotton sheets, or a luxury hotel, or Calvin Klein perfume.
It's a 1991 artwork by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, writes High Line Blog, "best known for creating images that addressed his homosexuality and the painful loss of friends to AIDS."
W.M. Hunt wrote here about the empty bed project, "What was great about this piece is that as it was situated in the public domain without any explanatory text, everyone who saw it could interpret the piece differently... There was something incredibly sad about it. The implication to me was that now the bed doesn’t have two people in it. Something has happened. Something is missing. Something is absent. To me, I saw it as a testimonial to his lover, who had died."
But that was in the 1990s, when this image first appeared on city billboards.
the imagist
Today, in the High Line context, surrounded by glass condo towers and haute-couture, I'm not sure sadness, death, and AIDS would come to mind when you look at this empty bed.
It's more likely that you might imagine, as I did, that it's a stealth advertisement for Egyptian cotton sheets, or a luxury hotel, or Calvin Klein perfume.
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