Setting traps for the mind and heart - Felix Gonzalez-Torres, two traveling exhibitions - Cover Story

Art in America, Jan, 1996 by Robert Storr

A shimmering silver carpet stretches along the institutionally white floor. It measures some 6 by 12 feet and is made of hundreds upon hundreds of foil-wrapped candies. Entering the room under the watchful eye of their mother, two young boys race toward the rectangular mirage and fill their pockets without restraint. From beside the door through which they have come, a uniformed guard steps forward and admonishes them to take only one. Just as they are about to surrender their next to last pieces of treasure she winks, letting them know that it's all right to hold on to an extra few.

At this point the guard turns to the mother, who tensely awaits a reproving look or comment, and delivers instead a detailed explanation of how the amount of candy spread out at their feet represents the combined weight of the artist - about whom she speaks with familiarity - and his dead lover. The pieces, she informs the mother, is called Untitled (Placebo), and it refers to the AIDS epidemic and the lack of a cure or even care that so many suffering from the disease must face. Thus one morning at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., within walking distance of the House and Senate chambers where hysterical condemnations of "obscene" art are a routine spectacle, a black civil servant and a white mother of two preadolescent males entered comfortably into a conversation about art, and death, and public policy.

The floor sculpture they discussed was part of the first of two major museum exhibitions recently devoted to the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, the second of which closed last May at the Guggenheim Museum in New York preceding its current international tour. Together, these exhibitions focused considerable attention on an artist whose solo career, apart from his ongoing association with the collective Group Material, extends a scant nine years. The attention is well deserved, however - not least for the fact that Gonzalez-Torres's spare, elliptical art could have provoked the kind of exchange just described.

Gonzalez-Torres's aim, in essence, is a classical one, to please and instruct; but it is barbed by the Brechtian notion that art, rather than dramatically resolving contradictions, should isolate and accentuate them, leaving the viewer with a set of conflicting choices phrased in the present tense. Thus each of Gonzalez-Torres's works provides anomalous information for the consideration of the audience, while refraining from the kind of sloganeering found in so much recent art. This tactic reflects a close reading of the current scene and a sharp critique of the self-righteously "transgressive" art that is currently a staple of the culture wars. And so, when a right-wing congressman, tipped off that there was "homosexual art" at the Hirshhorn, headed down the Mar in search of the next Mapplethorpian outrage, he only found rooms full of lights, serial grid drawings, paired mirrors and two possibly but not certainly "same-sex" wall clocks labeled Untitled (Perfect Lovers)(1991), ticking away in unison. Bewildered, he left without uttering a word of protest.

The fact that neither the mirrors, nor the clocks, nor the two body-molded pillows that appeared on 24 billboards around New York in 1991 immediately declare their meaning is characteristic of Gonzalez-Torres's refusal to play to type. In an art world too often obsessed with simplistic affirmations of origin or essence, Gonzalez-Torres eschews the role of Latin artist or queer artist or even activist artist, while using everything that his experience as a Cuban-born, politically committed gay man has taught him. What he has learned is that in America's presently chauvinist climate, loudly declaiming who you are frequently preempts showing an audience what you see. Hence, "them" and "us" oppositions interest him only insofar as they are ambiguous and open to question.

For example, the twin full-length mirrors, Untitled (Orpheus, Twice) (1991), allude to Jean Cocteau's cinematic rendition of the Orpheus myth, in which the poet passes through a mirror in a futile attempt to retrieve his lover from the underworld. The second mirror complicates matters by implying that a modern Orpheus might fall victim to the same fate, doubling the suggested corporeal reflections and dissolves. The piece loses its purely symbolic quality, however, when members of the public literally enter the image. Standing to either side and studying their own reflection perfect strangers of every description take their place in tandem. Every move made changes not just the viewer's physical orientation in front of a static work of art but also the nature of his or her psychological involvement with it and and the others that its shining surface gathers in. Taking E.M. Forster's admonition "only connect" to a point of maximum obliqueness - in the process mixing democratic tact with the nagging insistence of a well-planned riddle - Gonzalez-Torres prepares traps for the mind and heart.

A user-friendly Duchampian to this extent - his work encompasses both Duchamp's elegant semiotic play and the use of mundane readymades - Gonzalez-Torres nonetheless insists on introducing spectators to the hard facts of life. His works lead them stop by self-effacing step through a maze of images that describe a society in crisis, at the same time that they evoke the bittersweet epiphanies of temporary communion and ultimate solitude.