Perfect Lovers

Felix Gonzalez-Torres

“Above all else, it is about leaving a mark that I existed: I was here. I was hungry. I was defeated. I was happy. I was sad. I was in love. I was afraid. I was hopeful. I had an idea and I had a good purpose and that’s why I made works of art.” — Felix Gonzalez-Torres

The late American conceptual artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres (b. Cuba, 1957−1996) warned us about the resurgence of populism and threat of the far right; he was conscious of the way in which they had effectively rebranded and that their seductive strategies were an effective counterpoint to the easy-to-target, outmoded signs of revolution. Throughout his career he created work that ultimately evokes life, love and humanity — objects that act as symbols reflecting our relationships and desires, as well as exposing our inherent contradictions and complexities. United States institutions have been slow to recognise the importance of Latin American histories, of art and otherwise (Latino and Latina studies only began to emerge in the 1960s, while the first anthology of Latino artists in the US was published in 2012). Indeed the importance of Gonzalez-Torres’ work for new generations of artists from Spain and the Americas cannot be underestimated. Of course that is not to confine him to an over-determined idea of identity — he was, after all, very clear about subverting ideas of what the “Hispanic” artist should be (which encompassed the artist’s removal of diacritical accents from his name). It is significant that Gonzalez-Torres stayed in Spain as a child on his way from Cuba to Madrid, prior to settling with an uncle in Puerto Rico in 1971. An important facet of his work was an exploration and examination of authoritarianism and fascism, ideas of repression, in particular highlighting homophobia, whilst drawing on Spain’s dictatorship under General Franco (1939-75). These ideas are linked through the dialogue between militarism and homoeroticism, and through the artist’s engagement with the idea of the monument — that can be related to the histories of race, colonialism and fascism, thereby highlighting how Gonzalez-Torres’s work remains as politically pertinent today. This is especially so when one considers recent events; the removal of Franco’s body from the Valle de los Caidos in 2019, the rise of the populist right in Spain and the recent killing of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement. Gonzalez-Torres had a relatively short career, his life cut short by complications of AIDS, a pandemic which governments were then failing to address. Much like the current Covid-19 pandemic the artist noticed a repeated erasure and lack of empathy for those disproportionately affected by the disease. Indeed much of the artist’s work relates to the death of his long-time partner, Ross Laycock, from AIDS, just as he had started to make a name for himself in the art world.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled” (1988), framed photostat, 8 1/4 x 10 1/4 inches; published in Photostats, Siglio, 2020. (© Felix Gonzalez-Torres; courtesy Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation)

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled” (Perfect Lovers) (1991) (© Felix Gonzalez-Torres; courtesy Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation

In 1987 at the peak of the AIDS crisis, in a pre-internet era, Gonzalez-Torres created the Photostats series of fixed works, also known as “dateline” pieces, with white serif text on black fields. The works were framed behind glass so as to create a reflective surface — thus bringing the viewer into an intimate relationship with the work, as he or she might literally see themselves in it (reflecting too their own assumptions and pre-conceived notions). They are also evocative of the screens, first the television, then computer and now the phone, on which we are constantly bombarded by information, challenging us to differentiate substance and surface, i.e. what we choose to acknowledge, take on board and assimilate into our consciousness, and that which we outright reject. In a 1993 interview with American artist Tim Rollins (1955-2017), Gonzalez-Torres described his art-making as “a way of working out my position within this patriarchal culture”. Referencing a photograph he had recently seen of a Yugoslavian soldier kicking the bodies of two dead Muslim women, he said: “This soldier is a man who probably has a god, a man who performs his duty, a ‘family man,’ a hero … who has the kind of respect that I as a gay man will never have. How do I deal with a culture that will give him a medal of ‘honor’? In a way I’m trying to negotiate my position within this culture by making this artwork. What am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to feel? Who am I supposed to identify with? And finally, above all else, it is about leaving a mark that I existed: I was here. I was hungry. I was defeated. I was happy. I was sad. I was in love. I was afraid. I was hopeful. I had an idea and I had a good purpose and that’s why I made works of art …” The texts Gonzalez-Torres uses in Photostats, suggestive of cultural, social and political references in recent American and “Western” history, restrained, free of the polemical and didactic, are often interspersed with the minutia of individual lives — thus conflating “public” and “private” histories — which speaks of how the artist struggled towards clearings of love and life in the wake of so much death and hate.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “(Untitled)” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) (1991) (© Felix Gonzalez-Torres; courtesy Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation

Gonzalez-Torres’ work is characterized by a sense of quiet elegy. Through his landmark installations he had an uncanny ability to transform humble, common objects into solemn meditations on death and intimacy. “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) (1991) (also known as “the candy spill”) consists of a pile of commercially available confections, individually wrapped in multi-coloured cellophane. These candy pieces, whilst in part evoking ideas of Catholic transubstantiation, are far more subversive. Gonzalez-Torres’ partner died of AIDS the same year the work was created, and it serves as an “allegorical portrait” of Laycock’s life. The physical form and dimensions of the work change depending on the way it is installed, however it ideally weighs 175 pounds, which corresponds to Laycock’s healthy bodyweight. Visitors are encouraged to take a piece of candy from the work and as they do the volume and weight of the work decreases. Jennifer Tucker of Sartle described it as “cannibalistic” and “religious”, noting that “By taking a piece, you are taking Ross with you, thus making him omnipresent”. Others like Lauren Weinberg of Time Out Chicago interpreted it similarly: “the diminishment recalls how he wasted away before dying”. The Art Story Foundation viewed the candy eating aspect as “[one becoming] complicit in the disappearing process — akin to the years-long public health crisis of HIV/AIDS”. While there has been much development and change since the 1980s and 1990s there has still been no cure for HIV/AIDS, and as such there is still a need for unstigmatized conversation — indeed it is only after the COVID-19 pandemic, an event affecting the entire global populous, not just a minority, that the scientific community developed the RNA (mRNA) technologies for use in the Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech coronavirus vaccines, which are now being used to design a similar mRNA vaccine for HIV.

In another of Gonzalez-Torres’ “candy spills” “Untitled” (Placebo) (1991), the artist arranged nearly 40,000 pieces of silver-wrapped candy as a large rectangular carpet. Again, visitors are invited to take a candy and in so doing, contribute to the slow disappearance of the sculpture over the course of the exhibition. Each candy is essentially a kind of host, a surrogate for a body that’s not there — in a climate of ignorance and hysteria Gonzalez-Torres was offering up the AIDS patient as a sacrificial martyr. As it was depleted the candy was regularly replenished, and so the work also offers up ideas about renewal and resurrection. At the time of its creation the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) was under constant political threat as a body funding artists like Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989), who were openly embracing “transgressive” themes relating to sexuality and sexual identity. Rather than deploying aggressive tactics and attempting to shock, Gonzalez-Torres chose to create works that engaged, rather than repelled the viewer; using powerful metaphors, often in oblique ways, to shine a light on important social issues, from AIDS to gun culture and poverty (for e.g. the stack of posters “Untitled” (Death by Gun) (1990) reproduces a composite image of 460 individuals killed by gun in the United States during the week of May 1–7, 1989, cited by name and age, with a brief description of the circumstances of their deaths and, in most cases, a photograph of the deceased). Gonzalez-Torres fought against giving a straight, conservative society what it expected of a gay male artist as elucidated in a conversation with artist Ross Bleckner (b. 1949): “What I’m trying to say is that we cannot give the powers that be what they want, what they expect from us. Some homophobic senator is going to have a very hard time trying to explain to his constituency that my work is homoerotic or pornographic, but if I were to do a performance with HIV blood [alluding to the notorious performance by artist Ron Athey (b. 1961), in which he soaked pieces of cloth with the freshly drawn HIV-infected blood of a fellow artist and floated them above the heads of a panicked audience] — that’s what he wants, that’s what the rags expect because they can sensationalize that, and that’s what’s disappointing.” Unlike many of his contemporaries, Gonzalez-Torres didn’t see the need to employ aggressive, shock tactics in the culture wars and so instead created powerful metaphors and the deployment of inexplicit, seductive works that manage to embroil even the most hostile viewer.

“The thing that I want to do sometimes with some of the pieces about homosexual desire is to be more inclusive,” he said. So for e.g. a work like “(Untitled)” Golden (1995), with its diaphanous and ephemeral curtain of shimmering faux-gilded beads, is evocative of an esoteric sexual practice without shocking the audience. During the years 1991 to 1995, Torres created five beaded curtain works, which viewers are required to pass through in order to reach the other side. “Untitled” water rendered in vibrant blue plastic beads is redolent of travel, escape and freedom of mind — suggesting a sense of meditation and liberation — whereas “Untitled” (Blood) and “Untitled (Chemo)” reverse such benignly positive experiences and affect their participants in a completely unique way: through awkward confrontation we are forced to face the reality of an artist dying of AIDS after losing his partner to the same disease — the story of someone else defined, just as we all are, by love and loss. Pointed and direct, they deliver encounters that we would likely resist if it were not for the artist’s powerful invitation. Indeed in their profound dignity and difference these works infect us with a renewed empathy. In his quiet way Gonzalez-Torres forces us to recognize our own fragility. Facing chemotherapy is not the solitary challenge of an AIDS patient struggling to understand his disease and survive the painfully slow efforts of the medical community, but nor is it the fate of someone with a terminal cancer diagnosis.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled” (Chemo) (1991) (© Felix Gonzalez-Torres; courtesy Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation

One of his post powerful works “Untiled” (Perfect Lovers) (1991) is an installation of two identical battery-operated clocks, synchronized and displayed side by side. Gonzalez-Torres created the work while Laycock was dying of AIDS. The artist acknowledged that the clocks would fall out of synch, one eventually stopping first. “Time is something that scares me … or used to. This piece I made with the two clocks was the scariest thing I have ever done. I wanted to face it. I wanted those two clocks right in front of me, ticking”. Although the clocks obviously reflect Gonzalez-Torres’ own relationship, the work is emblematic of the artist’s desire to create works with multiple possible meanings; the abstract nature of the clocks’ substitution for bodies allows it to be read generally as a metaphor for love. Gonzalez-Torres often produced multiple versions of his installations, and his detailed instructions for their display became an important element of the piece itself. For "Untitled" (Perfect Lovers), the instructions require the commercial clocks to be of exact dimensions and design and that they touch; before the exhibition opens the hands are set to the same time; an essential part of the work is that the clocks can be perpetually reset and, therefore, the work is infinite. A rule around the work is that the clocks can fall out of sync but if one of the clocks stop, they are fixed or replaced, as the case may be.

To begin his 2006 essay on Torres, Robert Storr offers a vignette: at the Hirschhorn Museum in Washington D.C. in 1994, two young boys pick foil-wrapped sweets out of the artist’s “Untitled” (Placebo) — an African-American guard explains to their mother that the quantity of sweets in the piece weighs the same as the bodies of the artist and his dead lover. Thus, Storr observes, within proximity of congressional debates over the definition of “obscenity” and “indecent” in art, and in the wake of tens of thousands of US deaths from AIDS (including Laycock’s), “a black civil servant and a prosperous looking white mother of two pre-adolescent males entered comfortably into a conversation centred on art and sex and death and public policy”. The fact that Gonzalez-Torres’ work remains so relevant is perhaps in part down to the fact that the societal and historical time in which he worked so closely mirrors the present; in the wake of Brexit, Trump, the Orlando nightclub massacre, the Black Lives Matter protests and the conviction of Derek Chavin, the conservative backlash of the 1990s feels eerily familiar.

Through his work Gonzalez-Torres was able to conjure the vocabulary of minimalism while at the same time re-invigorating it through open-ended content, alluding only in part to the autobiographical or incendiary and leaving the construction of meaning to the viewer. The artist’s subtle use of language and carefully constructed titles mean the work is deliberately multivalent — their meaning shifting so they become a password that indicates the identification or belonging within one group or another. In turn, he entirely recast the vocabulary of Minimalism and Conceptual art as a vehicle for affective content, thus allowing him to speak about homosexuality, specifically with a view to addressing love, desire and vulnerability, while eluding the efforts of far right conservatives to censor such content. Like many artists associated with the movement, Gonzalez-Torres invites participation from his audience — but such modes of engagement are only one of the multiple layers of references and allusions within his work — whereby the participatory element is a means and not an end. For that reason his works offer more than merely a fresh reorientation of the gallery as a public space, they are something far more tender and human, breaking down boundaries between “us” and “them”. “I would say that when he was becoming less of a person I was loving him more,” Gonzalez-Torres said of the Aids-related death of his partner Laycock in a 1995 interview with American Art Journal Bomb. “Every lesion he got I loved him more. Until the last second, I told him ‘I want to be there until your last breath,’ and I was there to his last breath.” Less than a year after the interview, Gonzalez-Torres himself succumbed to the disease. He was 38.

Ben Weaver

References

Richard Bolton, Culture Wars: Documents from the Recent Controversies in the Arts (New York: New Press, 1992).

Matthew Mclean, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Frieze.com 119 (22 July 2016).