The Heartbreaking Simplicity of Felix Gonzalez-Torres

Last year while visiting my brothers in Hannover, I dragged them to visit the Sprengel Museum with me in one of our attempts to escape the bitter cold of Germany in early February. While wandering through the galleries we stumbled upon the work "Untitled" (Republican Years) by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and I excitedly urged my brother to pick up one of the sheets of paper to take home with him to hang up in his room.  

What I have always loved about Torres’ work are his sculptures and installations that unapologetically invite the viewer to get actively involved in the art-making process and the almost unsettling feeling that you get from touching and handling one of his works. It feels as if you are doing something forbidden; as if one of the guards is going to scream at you to back away from the work as soon as you get close enough to touch it. My brother was skeptical at first but did as I said, and a few months later I received a very cringe-worthy photo as his girlfriend, unaware of the significance of the work, had turned it into a frame for at least a dozen photos of them together. While I may have laughed at what the work had now inevitably become: a simple frame for them to fill with their memories, I came to realize that it is something that Torres would have wholeheartedly approved of, if we consider the very nature of his artistic practice and how his own relationship with his partner influenced his entire career. 

Born in Guáimaro, Cuba in 1957, he was an artist that referred to himself as American, moving to New York City in 1979 where he lived and worked until 1995. He graduated from Pratt Institute of Art with a BFA in Photography and subsequently become an adjunct instructor at New York University in 1987. As an openly gay man, he was actively involved in the political and social scene of the city and was especially involved in activism related to the AIDS epidemic, of which he suffered and inevitably died from in 1996 at just 38 years old. 

His work is reminiscent of the minimalist and conceptual art traditions, while it is often referred to as process art, a category of minimalism where the materials used and their construction or arrangement takes precedence over the finished product. Perhaps he is most well known for his installations and sculptures that he created using common materials and found objects, such as clocks, stacks of paper, and giant piles of candy. It is for his ‘simplistic’ use of these materials that he may be often dismissed, or accompanied by the phrase: “It’s so easy! I could have done that!”, that can be commonly heard throughout various contemporary art galleries.  But it is precisely the way in which he elicits such visceral and significant responses from his use of mundane materials that reflects the true brilliance of his practice. 

“Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.)

In his work, he addresses often contradictory themes of love and loss, illness and recovery, death and celebration, through an engagement with the viewer that contributes to the creation of meaning. Some of his most famous sculptures are colorful piles of candy stacked upon the walls that spill over the floor and invite the viewer to take and consume them. One such piece, “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) from 1991 is made up of around 175 pounds of candy, representing the bodyweight of Torres’ partner Ross Laycock, who died from AIDS that very year. As the pile is depleted by people taking pieces of candy, it acts as a representation of the way in which the disease ravaged his body until there was nothing left;  something sweet that is often tied to affection and love juxtaposed with the premature loss of his partner.  But it is also an act of immortalization of his beloved, as the pile is intended to be refilled by museum staff in a way that metaphorically grants him eternal life. 

His piece “Untitled” (Perfect Lovers) mediates upon a similar matter, this time with two identical analog clocks that start at the exact same time but inevitably fall out of sync or stop entirely. Tracking the relentless passage of time, its metaphor of lovers is all the more heartbreaking if we consider how Torres died 5 years after his lover; his clock ‘stopped’ just before his Torres’ did. But as the title suggests, they remain perfect lovers even after falling out of time, even after death. 

“Untitled” (Perfect Lovers)

Torres’ work was always heavily political, and he believed that all art was political in one way or another, regardless of whether it was loudly declaring itself to be so. He installed 24 billboards in New York depicting a black and white photograph of an empty, unmade bed. As well as a celebration of his own partner’s life and his sexuality, it was a monument to public scrutiny of private behavior; bringing an intimate reality to the public for everyone to see in a time where direct representations of homosexuality were absent from the public media. 

His piece "Untitled" (Death by Gun) from 1990 is just another example, a simple stack of papers where each sheet is printed with the names of 460 people killed by gun violence in the United States during the first week of May in 1989, including their age, city, state, along with a photo or a description of the circumstances of their deaths. Just like the viewer’s first reaction to the work may be of uncertainty and discomfort as to how to respond to the work itself — admired from afar or picked up and examined— once the viewer interacts with the work and takes it home, shares it or distributes it, there is a physicality to the experience of remembering this tragedy and the continuation of an ongoing struggle that is as relevant now as it was when the work was created.

Torres’s work resonates with meaning, one that draws from the participation of the viewer in the creative process in a way that spans time and physical space. Through the creation of these spaces for collaboration, his pieces acquire an almost atemporal quality. It is as if they are not yet completed without the aid from the viewer, which in turn brings his or her own experiences and feelings to the creation of a completely unique work; an ongoing process that exists in perpetuity. Just like the piles of candy are continuously replenished and the sheets of paper re-stacked, his work can continue to reach thousands even outside the confines of a museum and in various different forms, and perhaps even covered in photos that bring joy to those who have created this work with him.