Everybody Wants Some!
On Felix Gonzalez-Torres's “Untitled” (Public Opinion) and what participatory art feels like right now
I don’t want to eat the hard candy you left for me and others to unwrap, one of several thousand arranged in a square pile that could be raked as a monk’s garden, for your untitled work. I realize that’s a “me” problem. I’m a lousy narrativist, but the pile of black candy, which has a timeless quality (does hard candy expire? Does expiring mean as much in the case of hard candy, which wasn’t quite alive to begin with?) is unmoving, and I’m mostly unmoved.
It was thoughtful of you to invite me in to move around, to do the moving. But I move around already, from job to job (you were also an adjunct, so you understand); because my work itself is stationary, I move around for exercise. I moved here, to this city, so that I could keep moving (movement was even more compulsory for you; a New York Times critic says you were “shipped off” to “unwelcoming relatives”; eventually, you “landed” here). When I visited your retrospective last month, I was mentally readying myself to move apartments again, an absorbing process I’ve undergone nearly every year for a decade, often by choice, sometimes not. As the pop-feminist said, I’m not lazy, I’m burned out. (The problem with burnout, the word: it does too much of the work (it’s all it knows!); it is forceful, and incomplete; there’s not enough space for movement, for participation.)
I realize I’m making this about me. Is that what you would’ve wanted?
You said that you needed an audience; without an audience, your work was impossible. You liked Brecht’s idea of epic theatre, that each viewer might draw their own interpretations from the work was what kept it alive (I like this idea too). Staying alive was active for you; your partner, Ross Laycock, was dying of AIDS, and you would be dying soon, too.
Your most famous work: an identical pair of clocks, clicking in time, until one or both breaks down, at which point your instruction was that the broken clock be repaired, and the clocks’ synchronization reset. A fantasy of infinitude made possible by your felt experience of certain finitude, also by your trust in maintenance workers you had never met, some of whom, in the year of your death, must’ve been too young and unskilled to carry out the task yet. You described the making of this piece as, “the scariest thing I have ever done.” “I wanted to face it,” you went on. “I wanted those two clocks right in front of me, ticking.” And you wrote to Ross, with a static illustration of your work, a doodle: “Don’t be afraid of the clocks.”
Reading about “Untitled” (Perfect Lovers) (originally titled more simply, “Untitled” (Lovers))— which is permanently installed at the Dallas Museum of Art, so it’s likely I’ve seen it before and don’t remember—I’m deeply moved. I’m sitting still, on my couch, wondering how exactly it must’ve felt in your body to be tasked (yourself the task-master) with making art while existing with the knowledge that you would die, not eventually, but in a few years. The result was a reach for what’s timeless, both thematically (clocks and hard candy might make up a 90s vanitas) and in your direct communication with future viewers and museum workers.
Your work is described both as “unabashedly political” and intentionally interpretable; it’s minimalist and conceptual, two modes that ought to contradict each other, one an absence, the other a clear, decided force. In your case, though, absence is the force. Viewers take what they want, from stacks of magazines or piles of candy, and your work is diminished, by their desire or by the wear of time. Because you knew for sure your art would outlive you, and more generally that a work exists beyond whatever frames it, you instructed that the depleted work be replenished if the exhibitor chooses. Your piles of candy are to be maintained at “ideal weights”; in some cases, the weight of an adult man; in some cases, the weight of two adult men. If enough candy is eaten, more candy can be provided, infinitely. (Unfortunately your request that this candy be sourced from Peerless Confection Company is impossible to fulfill now; it shuttered in 2006).
Your works are quote-unquote “Untitled,” usually with a parenthetical telling more of the story. “Untitled” (Death by Gun). “Untitled” (Public Opinion). “Untitled” (USA Today). “Untitled” (Portrait of Dad). Did you want, at first glance, for viewers to bring themselves to your work, and then, on closer looking, to understand what you brought to your work, to meet you there? Was this choice—the no-title, the parenthetical following like an unconscious and consequently very pure thought—shaped by a climate of censorship? Was there more to it than that? (Your work lends itself beautifully to questioning!)
There’s been some controversy since you died about what to make of all this. Should your work be presented alongside information about its historical moment? (“Meaning can only be formulated when we compare,” you said. “Otherwise information just goes by.”) Should the story of your love for Ross, an interpretation so heart-wrenching and recognizable it doesn’t leave much space for the viewer, be written on the wall beside “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), or does your un-title say just enough? At the Art Institute of Chicago, a caption placing the work in the context of AIDS was removed, an attempt to hew closer to one of your many intentions, to invite the viewer in. On Twitter, there were outcries.
I hadn’t known about this history of controversy when I stood in front of “Untitled (Public Opinion),” what felt like a garden of identical sweets, last month. I had wandered into your retrospective on my way to a different exhibit, and had seen nothing on the walls but QR codes guiding me to digital captions. I figured I’d use what was left of my battery life to take a couple pictures, not to learn about the work’s context. (My battery is often low, so I sometimes find myself faced with the choice of reading versus sharing; there isn’t always time for both.) In this case, sharing felt natural. Two wide, circular pools lay flat, like Michael Heizer’s steel voids. I figured your work was meant for meditation, not “Untitled,” but truly untitled, blank monuments. (Now I see that your voids were full if clear, and nearly touching.)
In another room, two billboards filled the tall space, facing in opposite directions, each advertising a grainy image of a bird on an overcast day. I made my way there after breezing by “Untitled" (Public Opinion), barely interested in this exhibit’s only candy installation. There was a kid having fun, crawling the perimeter; there was a woman holding up a single piece, which contrasted her red nails; pretty much everyone who stayed a while seemed to do it for the sake of the picture, squatting, getting the angles right. I’m sure engagement with these works looked different in the 90s. I imagine participation then, like movement, was less compulsory. It must’ve felt dangerous to touch a work in a quiet space, to bring oneself to it. At least, it would’ve been an opportunity for different kinds of questioning: what am I affecting by involving myself? What am I becoming by consuming?
By now, these questions are oppressively present in my daily life; to join in feels expected; to sit still, to learn the context first, is what’s challenging. (It’s not just me; “Untitled" (Public Opinion), though inviting, was no more popular than your billboards and your circular pools.) Like a kid throwing a tantrum, I refused to eat the candy. But if I had known more about the particulars, I’d have been more likely to participate how I think you wanted me to, to meet you in the space of your work.