Disruption, Permeability, & Radical, Queer Togetherness
May 11, 2016
Installation view: Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Photo by Pierre Le Hors.
Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York. © The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation
As I opened the heavy steel doors to Andrea Rosen Gallery’s exhibition of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, I was anticipating the artist’s works of distinctive excess – overflowing mounds of candy, piles of strung lights, copious stacks of papers – while silently hoping for the sweaty bodies of hunky go-go dancers. Contrary to these expectations and desires, I encountered a space that was in large part empty, save for the faint presence of a frieze running along the top edge of the gallery’s white walls. I had to tilt my gaze upward and squint in order to see the subtle silver text overlaid on a baby blue banding atop the nearly thirty-foot walls. A stream of text unfurled in what can only be called jumbled chronological disorder; along the gallery walls above me is an assortment of names, locations, and events, each followed by a year. The series reads as follows:
Red Canoe 1987; Watercolors 1964; Paris 1965; Supreme Court; Blue Lake 1986; Our Own Apartment 1976; Rosa 1977; Guámaro 1957; New York City 1979; Pebbles and Biko 1985; Ross 1983; Civil Rights Act 1964; Mariel Boatlift 1980; White Shirt 1984; Julie 1987; An Easy Death 1991; Berlin Wall 1989; Great Society 1964; Venice 1985; Wawanaisa Lake 1987; U.N. 1945; Mother 1986; Myriam 1990; VCR 1978; Dad 1991; Bay of Pigs 1961; D-Day 1944; Interferon 1989; Jeff 1978; Silver Ocean 1990; H-Bomb 1954; The World I Knew Is Gone 1991; Bruno and Mary 1991; Madrid 1971; MTV 1981; Rafael 1992; May 1968; Andrea 1990; Twenty-fourth Street 1993; L.A. 1990; Placebo 1991; George Nelson Clock 1993; A view to remember 1995
Gonzalez-Torres’ Untitled (1989) testifies to the complexity of meaning that can be produced within an economy of form. A reimagining of the genre of self-portraiture, this work exclusively consists of a linear index of text and numbers, which art critic and critical theorist Adaire Rounthwaite notes “[create] a body as an accumulation of events.” [1] In this essay, I aim to illustrate the means by which Untitled queers binary distinctions between artist and curator, past and present, the personal and the political, and the individual and the collective to disrupt the notion of distinct, fixed categories and operates as a queer framework for radical togetherness.
Installation view: Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Photo by Pierre Le Hors.
Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York. © The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation
In his postmodern essay, The Death of the Author, Roland Barthes writes, “Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing.” [2] Gonzalez-Torres performs a gesture much like Barthes’ obituary to the textual Author in Untitled; in an apparent effort to disrupt the fixity of his work’s meaning and to open up the scope of the work’s historical relevance, Gonzalez-Torres instructs future handlers, himself included, to continually modify the piece, insisting that curators are to add to or subtract events from Untitled’s series as they deem fit. This explains the appearance of events in Untitled’s list that had not yet happened by the time of the piece’s production (e.g.,“The World I Knew Is Gone 1991,” which references the death of Gonzalez-Torres’ lover, his world, Ross Laycock; “Placebo 1991,” a work he would later make; and “Andrea 1990,” the year of his first exhibition at Andrea Rosen). The creation of this work through a collaborative exchange between the artist and Untitled’s subsequent owners/curators diffuses and displaces authorship into a liminal space which complicates any clear delineation between the artist and the owner/curator. This relinquishment of authorship consequently poses a critique of originality and authenticity: if the owner modifies the work, should their name be included alongside Gonzalez-Torres’? Or, as a self portrait, does its modification fuse the owner within Gonzalez-Torres’ subjectivity and thereby combine them as a collective entity? Does the proper date of the work change? In response to these questions specifically, the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation seems to think not, as it lists Felix Gonzalez-Torres as the sole artist and retains the date of its original creation; however, the questions that the work conjures loom more generally and beg for sustained reflection upon these fundamental notions of authorship, identity, and meaning. [3]
Time, as it is figured in Untitled, folds over and back on itself, and the piece therefore seems to suggest that the notion of a linear delineation of time is fallacious. The work is a continuous stream of text that wraps around the top of four walls and offers no definitive start or end point. Thus, the viewer finds themselves choosing a seemingly arbitrary “beginning” point, imitating the way in which we find ourselves arbitrarily placed within the infinitude of time. Moreover, the events and their accompanying dates, are not in chronological order – at one point, they jump from 1985 to 1987 to 1945, alluding to the way that circumstances of the past continuously reverberate in the present moment. The ability for events to be added and subtracted from Untitled grants the piece--and, transitively, the life of Gonzalez-Torres himself –a quality of continuous renewal and infinite regeneration of life beyond finite death. The inclusion of events that happen after 1989 stands in tension with the work’s date of production. Muddling the distinctions between the past, present, and future in these ways, Untitled suggests these temporal states are in constant flux and interpenetrate one another without rigid borders.
The inclusion of names, locations, and events of varying personal/particular and cultural/general relevance in the text of Untitled constitutes the piece as a self-portrait that embeds an individualized account of Gonzalez-Torres’ life within a larger socio-historical context. For many, the ‘events’ may appear as an arbitrary listing of words followed by a date; however, for those knowledgeable about his life, the significance of each historical ‘event’ is readily read in relation to Gonzalez-Torres’ own personal history. Some events are a listing of personal milestones: “Guámaro 1957,” “Ross 1983,” and “Our Own Apartment 1976,” which respectively refer to the town in Cuba and year he was born in, the first name of his longtime lover and year they met, and the year he and his sister, Gloria, moved in together.[4] These senses of individuality and intimacy are further conjured through the use of first-person in “Our Own Apartment” and “The World I Knew Is Gone.” Every event in the work correlates with a significant event in his life and as such, these events comprise a unique portrait of his life. These personal events do not, however, stand alone; they are interspersed amongst events of broader political-historical import: “Bay of Pigs 1961,” “Civil Rights Act 1964,” and “Supreme Court 1986.” Yet, Untitled does not privilege one type of event over another. The capitalization of the first letter of every word elevates every event to the status of a proper noun such that no one event is distinguished over and above another, thereby suggesting that they are all integral components in Gonzalez-Torres’ identity. Unlike the more immediately personal events laid out above, these events entail significant and widespread consequences for millions of people, events which are included in the timelines of history books. Historical accounts of the Bay of Pigs, the failed military invasion of Cuba by a CIA-sponsored militancy in 1961, necessarily consider it from macroscopic lens; however, in doing so, the voices of individuals are lost in abstraction. On the other hand, autobiographies are overwhelmingly self-involved, and so fail to consider the dramatic impact of broad historical events in their personal lives.
Installation view: Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Photo by Pierre Le Hors.
Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York. © The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation
Untitled complicates the categorical division between the personal and the political by including both forms of historical events as constitutive elements of Gonzalez-Torres’ textual self-portrait. In doing so, this piece illuminates the ways in which the public, political (in)action spills into individual, personal histories. His desire to subvert this opposition is unsurprising given the repeated ways in which decisions made within the political sphere invaded his personal life. Though born in Guámaro, Cuba in 1957, he had been sent to an orphanage in Madrid the same year, and so was spared of the immediate experience of the Bay of Pigs. However, as a Cuban-American, the Bay of Pigs was necessarily more than a political and historical event for him; it meant the invasion of his home country, violence against his people, and his own tenuousness affective relation to citizenship in the United States. Similarly, the 1986 Supreme Court case, Bowers v. Hardwick, which made sex between two consenting adults of the same sex illegal, was in itself a rupture of the division between the personal and the political. On the one hand, as a gay man, this political and legal ruling infringed upon his personal life, and on the other, his private and personal act of having sex with another man was made to be a political action with legal ramifications. Speaking to this case, Gonzalez-Torres notes, “what we regard as the ‘private’ sphere has never been private. It has always been public.” [5] As a Cuban-American and a gay man, the personal and the political were constantly and overtly overlapping realms for Gonzalez-Torres and the ways in which this reality is reflected in his Unitled self-portrait allow us to imagine how large socio-economic histories directly shape our own personal histories.
Gonzalez-Torres’ intimate and intertwined relation to the AIDS Crisis constitutes another such convergence of the personal/particular with the political/general. The failure to situate and critically analyze Untitled in the context of the AIDS Crisis would be, in the words of Craig Owens, “an act of gross critical negligence.” [7] While HIV/AIDS was first diagnosed in 1981 in just a few gay men, by 1989, due in large part to the United State government’s silence and inaction, the reported number of AIDS cases in the United States had reached 100,000. The fear of contracting HIV/AIDS haunted the entire nation; however, HIV/AIDS immediately threatened the existence of the gay community, which had been asymmetrically impacted by the epidemic, including both Gonzalez-Torres and his lover, Ross Laycock, who were among the thousands who died from AIDS.[8] Through the ‘events’: “Inferon 1989” (a reference to the proteins which cause cells to heighten their anti-viral defense); “An Easy Death 1991” and “The World I Knew Is Gone 1991” (which refer to the death of Ross due to AIDS), Untitled establishes the impact of AIDS as immediately situated in Gonzalez-Torres’ life.
The component textual elements of Untitled converge as the self-portrait of an individual, of Gonzalez-Torres; however, the distinctly individual and collective socio-historical events, operate as entry-points through which the viewer’s contingent relationship to each event becomes embedded within Gonzalez-Torres. In other words, while events like, “Watercolors 1964” – which refers to the year his dad gave him his first watercolor set – are immediately meaningful only to Gonzalez-Torres, many others, like “Berlin Wall 1989” are variously meaningful to many. Thus, while the fall of the Berlin Wall had a particular impact on Gonzalez-Torres’ life individually, the inclusion of the event retains the potential for different relations to each viewer, which these viewers subsequently utilize in order to interpret and engage with the work. Untitled thus invites viewers to produce meaning contingent upon their own socio-historical relation to each event. This produces a fusing of viewer’s particular histories in relation to the collective histories embedded within Gonzalez-Torres’ self-portrait. Given how meaning and collectivity are contingently produced, this work couches itself in a postmodernist “[attempt] to upset the reassuring stability of [a singular] master position.” [6] Rather than positing a single, fixed, correct meaning to be arrived at in an encounter with this work, its meaning changes according to each viewer and to collective relations to the work.
Utilizing Nicolas Bourriaud’s criteria for relational aesthetics, we might understand Untitled as a framework for radical togetherness. As such, it is a realization of relational aesthetics par excellence. Bourriaud posits the criteria for relational aesthetics as:
(1) “seeking to establish intersubjective encounters in which meaning is elaborated collectively,”
(2) “beholden to the contingencies of its environment and audience,”
(3) addresses viewers not just “as a collective, social entity, but are actually given the wherewithal to create a community, however temporary or utopian this may be.” [9]
Though Untitled does not generate explicitly interactive relations amongst viewers, it has meaning only in and through viewers’ interchange with the individual and collective events therein represented as constitutive of Gonzalez-Torres’ life; meaning in the case of this work is decidedly “elaborated collectively.” As the work’s owner is instructed to add and remove events listed in Untitled to maintain socio-cultural-historical relevancy, this work is intrinsically “beholden to the contingencies of its environment and audience.” Preserving individuality through listing distinctly personal ‘events’ within its timeline and sustaining viewer’s autonomous relation to each ‘event’; while simultaneously forming a collective by means of folding individual identifications within a shared socio-political history, Untitled is a framework for generating a sense of community.
In unsettling fixed divisions -- between artist, curator, and viewer, past and present, personal and political, individual and collective -- and articulating boundaries and meaning as contingent, overlapping, intermingling, and interconnected, Untitled posits a distinctly queer framework for radical togetherness. As a virus which attacks the immune system, AIDS fundamentally renders urgently intelligible the reality that the human body is as an utterly permeable entity, exposing it as sensitively susceptible to its surrounding environment. Though I may risk setting back the work identity politics has done to separate HIV/AIDS from the LGBTQ community, I find this framework for togetherness as radically queer precisely because it utilizes the very strategy by which the virus which sought to kill – to bring us together. And what is queerer than that?
[1] Adaire Rounthwaite, “Split Witness: Metaphorical Extensions of Life in the Art of Felix Gonzalez-Torres,”Representations 109 (2010): 45.
[2] Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” Aspen (1967): 147.
[3] “Biography,” Félix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation, http://felixgonzalez-torresfoundation.org/?page_id=64.
[4] “Felix Gonzalez-Torres,” Queer Cultural Center, http://www.queerculturalcenter.org/Pages/FelixGT/FelixBio.html.
[5] Nancy Spector, Felix Gonzalez-Torres: The Body (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2007), 158.
[6] Craig Owens, The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 168.
[7] Owens, The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism, 170.
[8] “History of HIV and AIDS Overview,” AVERT, http://www.avert.org/professionals/history-hiv-aids/overview.
[9] Claire Bishop, Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics (Massachussets: MIT Press, 2004), 54.