Theodore Roosevelt

"All the ideological apparatuses are, in other words, replicating themselves, because that’s the way the culture works. So if I function as a virus, an imposter, an infiltrator, I will always replicate myself together with those institutions."

In 1967, the National Portrait Gallery commissioned this portrait of Theodore Roosevelt, one of five copies after an original painting of 1908. The museum’s then-director wanted “a good likeness taken from life during the Presidential years,” expressing a desire for portraiture to convey authenticity and immediacy.

Across the room is Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s photograph of the word PATRIOT. It belongs to a photographic series taken at the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, home to the original 1908 portrait of Roosevelt. Gonzalez-Torres uses photography, a medium capable of producing endless copies, to question ideas and assumptions around value and originality. In contrast to his candy and paper stack works, photographs were some of the only artworks the artist made by hand, in small editions.