Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Public Privates, and Transactional Intimacy
The work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres might look a little austere and inaccessible at first glance, geometric arrangements and simple strings of lights in otherwise white-walled rooms. But these are just the photos of his work; entering into the same space as his work is something else altogether. Committed to shaking and breaking the reinforced/reinforceable line between public and private, his pieces took on the politics and repercussions of that construction. To enter into one of his works was often to alter it, or to bear witness to its alteration, as in the case of “Untitled” (Perfect Lovers), where two initially synchronized clocks begin to click out of time (with each other). He wanted his work reproduced and disseminated, like the stack of prints to be taken out of the gallery one by one into the lives of attendees.
In his works there are also incursions of loss. “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) reflects on the decline and eventual death to AIDS of Gonzalez-Torres’ lover, Ross Laycock. A pile of wrapped candy sits in the corner of the gallery. Its initial weight is 175 pounds, the supposed ideal composition of the male body. Participants are invited to come in, look, and take candy. As the candy stock is depleted, the weight of the pile drops; the body wastes away. This is life with AIDS, Gonzalez-Torres suggests. Most intriguing is the way the spectator is made party to the candy’s depletion/Ross’ weakening. They watch and participate; the candy probably tastes good. His work rips the AIDS crisis out of private bedrooms and discreet clinics and places it square in the public, or at least as ‘public’ as a gallery can be. More than critique complicity and complacency, this kind of work also speaks to the artist’s grief and works as a declaration of queer affect. The personal is political, the political public, and so Gonzalez-Torres’ personal is public.
The losses depicted are not reducible to biography, though the artist’s life is useful context. In 1991 as part of his Print/Out series, Gonzalez-Torres rented space on a series of billboards in New York City, displaying the same bedroom photo on each. An empty double bed with white sheets and two white pillows is shown from an oblique angle — as if the viewer were seeing it (through the windshield, through the car window, from the opposite sidewalk) while standing over the far corner. It makes for an unusual presence in the middle of the city. It dislocates/re-locates the viewer by recalling the intimate space of the bedroom in the middle of ‘public space.’ More than that, though, it calls attention to the way bedrooms have become legislated and disciplined spaces, especially for queer people. In an excerpt from Queer: Documents of Contemporary Art, the artist cites Bowers v. Hardwick (1986), the U.S. Supreme Court case that “ruled that the bed is a site where we are not only born, where we die, where we make love, but it is also a place where the state has a pressing interest, a public interest…to declare illegal certain sexual practices, even among consenting adults” (90). In conversation with federal denial of the seriousness of AIDS and the medicalization of homosexuality, this ‘power to queer/power over queer’ turned lethal.
Born in 1957 in Cuba and having lived in Puerto Rico and Spain, Felix Gonzalez-Torres came to New York City in 1979 to study photography. There he got into critical theory and met up with a few other artists with similar political orientations, forming Group Material. They touched on topics Gonzalez-Torres like democracy, the politics of public/private, consumerism and consumption, and the relationship between artist, art, and spectator.
Their tactic was often to make their work public, and to stage participatory and political events in common spaces in the city. The same sort of spirit carried over into the artist’s later solo work. In his bio for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Gonzalez-Torres admits that “without the public these works are nothing. I need the public to complete the work.” His “Untitled” (Death by Gun) encourages viewers to take prints from a stack on the floor, which are replenished as more prints are taken.
Seen and felt in person, sometimes replicated and literally taken with the audience, the art of Gonzalez-Torres could be spread and incorporated in all sorts of contexts as a unique political medium. Aware that because of realities of economy and technology art was already reproducible and reproduced for circuits of consumption, he figured out a way to make that reproduction or transaction something personal, perhaps more intimately meaningful. Gonzalez-Torres performed replication on terms he set, even though he still had to work in a context (the political economy of the art world and the greater hegemony it inhabited) that demanded commodities.
Gonzalez-Torres showed the political in everyday objects and the possibility of art in interaction. Though he died of AIDS in 1996, his work continued to be shown and was selected to be shown in the 2007 iteration of the prestigious Venice Biennale. From his self-authored biography for the Queer Cultural Center:
1992 the forces of hate and ignorance are alive and well in Oregon and Colorado, among other places 1993 Sam Nunn is such a sissy, peace might be possible in the Middle East 1992 started to collect George Nelson clocks and furniture 1993 three years since Ross died, painted kitchen floor bright orange, this book
Sources:
“Felix Gonzalez-Torres” in the Encyclopaedia Brittanica, Lisa S. Wainwright, 2011.
“Felix Gonzalez-Torres, 1957–1996” in Visual AIDS.
“Print/Out: Felix Gonzalez-Torres” by Kim Conaty for the Museum of Modern Art, April 4, 2012.
“Felix Gonzalez-Torres Biography” for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
“Felix Gonzalez-Torres,” autobiography for the Queer Cultural Center.
