Originally published in:
L'Architecture D'Aujour'hui
September 1996
By: Lewis Baltz
Pages 12-15

"All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking." Robert Hass, "Meditations at Lagunitos, Praise. In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Redux: The Artists' Voice after Death of the Author, David Hickey quoted a colleague of artist Ray Johnson, learning of Johnson's suicide, "A smart career move." Hickey explained this cynical not entirely original remark. ( it was also attributed to Gore Vidal about Truman Capote's death) with the argument that death, and only death, provides the necessary closure for an objective assessment of an artist's contribution. Hickey is probably right in the long term, but the short term is more problematic. When artists die prematurely their work is often seen only through the prism of a truncated mortality; criticism collapses into anecdote, or worse, hagiography. For artists like Diane Arbus or Robert Mapplethorpe, death confers an irrefutable authenticity to their vision: "they weren't tourists in the world that they moved through; they shared the ultimate complicity with their subjects. They died as they lived; they died for their art". And so on.

For Felix-Torres, whose work thematized the ephemerality and fragility of life, an early death compounds the risk that unwanted sentimentality might infect the elegiac with the mawkish, which is contrary to what his art demanded. Gonzalez-Torres was many things: Cuban immigrant, gay man, post-studio artist, mourning lover, a person with AIDS, and an articulate and sympathetic spokesman for all these facets of his identity. He also possessed the finest artistic intelligence to emerge in American art in the past decade. His work has been exposed in solo exhibitions in America¹s most important museums. His position on art and social activism, delivered in conferences, lectures and interviews, transformed oppositional art discourse. There was nothing in his art, his social engagement, or his statements that suggests that he perceived himself as a victim. His death last January left a relatively small but highly influential body of works in a variety of mediums and a deep lacuna in the landscape of contemporary American art.

The artistic milieu that Gonzalez-Torres entered, New York in the late Eighties, was a drastically impoverished one for a thoughtful artist. The waves of innovation that had swept the New York art world since 1945 had subsided, leaving behind a monolithic commercial ediface purpose-built for marketing reactionary paintings to a newly created class of speculators who demanded, and of course received, a traditional and easily comprehensible art. Oppositional practice mirrored the sterility of the market: Feminist discourse devolved from the complexities of Eva Hesse into the polemics of Barbara Kruger. Gay art, in the previous decades defined by artists like Johns, Rauschenburg and Warhol, was replaced by a dominant practice of homoerotic pin-ups.

Gonzalez-Torres refused this (and every other) gay stereotype as repressive and, moreover, as playing directly into the hands of the homophobic ultra-right. Instead, he adopted a strategy of subverting received forms of high culture, i.e. Minimalism, Conceptualism, et al., for his own purpose. Appropriating the idiom of the "master narrative." Gonzalez-Torres proposed an art with multiple and conflicting readings. He mainstreamed the gay agenda, or his gay agenda, by addressing both gay and straight audiences, with of works that were not personally or politically charged but offered a meditation on the conditions and possibilities of art. The themes of time (as the instrument and arbiter of mortality) and of generosity (as an engine to defeat, or forestall mortality) are pervasive in Gonzalez-Torres' work. His allusions to mortality are sometimes blandly literal, as in Untitled (Perfect Lovers) 1987-90, two synchronous battery-powered wall clocks placed side-by-side, marking the passage of time until one or the other falls out of sync, slows and stops. His portraits invert the received idea of portraiture, "immortalizing the sitter". Time lines, installed as friezes, melting significant moments in his subjects' lives with dates of contemporary historical events, imbedding them in the passage of time and the corruption of the flesh, an homage of sorts to the best known unexecuted portrait of the last century, that of Dorian Gray.

In a much-published interview Tim Rollins asked Gonzalez-Torres what he would like from his students. He replied that he would like them to be generous. It was a revealing answer from an artist who placed a high priority on generosity in his own work. The celebrated paper stacks and the arrangements of candy, from which the visitor was invited to take one (or more) elements, are described by the artists as having an "ideal" height or weight, to be replenished as necessary from and "endless" supply, function as symbolic generosity while alluding to another, impossible, generosity; the hope of the endless renewal, like divine grace. This is the language of prayer, and the gesture of trans-substantiation, but, like the wily priest, Gonzalez-Torres' gifts create obligations. The "gift" works seem to fulfill an unkept promise of the Sixties, the de-commodification of art, but they are not precisely that. Gonzalez-Torres proposes a transaction as old as the ritual of gift-giving: to accept an element of his work is to be implicated its realization, and its future.

In 1992 Gonzalez-Torres started his most eloquent works, twenty-four light sculptures each consisting of forty-two, fifteen or twenty-five watt white light bulbs distributed evenly over eleven meters of electrical cord. The works are identical, varying only in their titles and their installation, which is left to the discretion of the installer. Sublimely beautiful, yet so commonplace that outside a museum or gallery they resist identification as art, the light strings are Gonzalez-Torres' ultimate gesture of implicating of the perceiver in the construction of meaning. "I didn't know how these pieces are best displayed. I don¹t have all the answers - you decide how you want it done. Whatever you want to do, try it. This is not some Minimalist artwork that has to be exactly two inches to the left and six inches down. Play with it, please. Have fun. Give yourself freedom. Put my creativity into question, minimize the preciousness of the pieceŠ."

In 1995 the Guggenheim Museum organized a retrospective exhibition of Gonzalez-Torres' works, which was exhibited at the musee d'Art moderne in Paris last April-June. The installation of Gonzalez-Torres retrospective was unusually affecting. Exhibitions in l¹ARC are most often installed to exploit the building¹s finest qualities, its unbroken circular flow of space. Gonzalez-Torres' exhibition ended abruptly in a cul-de-sac at the point where one would usually continue into the connecting galleries. The installation recalled Dani Karavan's Environment for Walter Benjamin at Port-Bou, Spain where the visitor descends a steep staircase incised into a cliff facing the sea (Someplace better than this place) only to find his progress blocked by a wall of glass. Like Benjamin, he must then retrace his steps, up the stairs and back to the world (No place better than this place). LB