Perfect Lovers Felix Torres Analysis

Desiree Wollard
Contemporary Art
11/24/2015
Felix Gonzalez –Torres
Subtleness of Sentimentality:
Minimalism as Infiltration

Minimalism and subtleness should go hand in hand. Sometimes minimalism can be heroic, all encompassing, and most of all emotional. Something subtle can be life altering and impactful to a level as high as anything conspicuous. These are not contradictions, but rather the power of minimalism and why artists of the post-war 1960s latched onto the movement in order to make sense of their worlds: re-channeling how people interacted with art. This also changed how people gained emotional responses to art.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres is a continuation of that historical influence, only when he adopted the languages of minimalism

and conceptualism into his artwork; he also recognized the potential for sentimentality in his work. He understood that you could over sentimentalize something. Even though his work can sometimes be drowning in sentimentality, it is his approach that works as a life preserver, which prevents the work from being overpowered. Gonzalez-Torres wanted the work to stay with the person (both literally as he created work meant to be picked up and removed by the viewer, but also figuratively).
In an interview with artist Ross Bleckner for Bomb Magazine, Felix mentions this intention and his desires to make the viewer work for the experience of understanding the work but also making it inviting and beautiful. In the interview he tells Bleckner, “It is sentimental, but it’s also about infiltration. It’s beautiful; people get into it. But then, the title or something, if you look really closely at the work, gives out that it’s something else.”
It is this concept he speaks of, the idea of infiltration, which I am interested in. His works can engage you before you know there is a story. It is in their beautiful simplicity and minimalistic appearance. His work always has more going on than what they allude to, in first glance. Their minimalism is actually quite dazzling. For something so seemingly paired down, like a stack of candies lying on the floor, he manages to pack in so much visual enticement and tension. The viewer is given clues to the conceptual framework before ever getting to the title of the piece.
Take for example his piece titled Untitled (USA Today) 1990. This piece is a stack of candies against the wall of a gallery. There is only one element to the piece: the candy. Yet, as minimal as this seems, the sheer site of all the candies stack atop each other is something else quite entirely. There are a few reasons for this. For one, in this piece, the candy wrappers are in multiple colors of red what and blue, and have a sheen to them. The visual cue to the American flag is a conceptual cue, but the site of the wrappers is stimulating. The stack is also almost intimidating. The volume of it, the space it occupies but also the presence of its weight, it creates and experience of the story of the piece, even without backstory of the artist. There is also something exciting about the viewer not knowing how they are supposed to interact with the work. Can they touch it? Can they take one? Can they take five pieces? How about ten? This creates tension.
For this piece, learning about the concept of the weight, and the act of people removing the candies overtime and reducing the weight, this is the conceptual part of the infiltration and it is what will stick with the viewer as they reflect. But the viewer is able to gather much of this before they investigate the background, and that is part of the experience. That is the part of the experience that makes the impact of the work so memorable. In a different candy piece Untitled (Throat) 1991, he uses the same materials but to a much different effect. Here, he creates a small pile of candies, but placed neatly on top of a handkerchief. This unassuming pile is not quite as “in your face” as Untitled (USA Today) 1990, however its presence is strong just the same. The delicate nature of how the candies are placed on the handkerchief forces the viewer to examine the piece in a more close nature than the other work. It is during this examination that you see these are not candies, but rather cough drops. This conceptual choice plays together with the placement of the cough drops on top of the handkerchief. Now what seems so insignificant, some cough drops on the ground, turns into something very private.
The work can almost seem too private at times. It makes the viewer feel like a voyeur, peeking into a personal part of the artist’s life. This is why the participatory part of the work he creates becomes so important as it then implicates the viewer into the work. This is no longer private, because you are a part of the work. Gonzalez-Torres makes his audience his family. In a different series of work he has done, one with lights, he removes the participatory part of his work but still keeps it intimate nature.
In Untitled (Toronto) 1992, Gonzalez-Torres strings a row of connect white-bulb lights from the ceiling of the gallery down to the floor. The bulbs all lie in a pile and begin to encircle themselves. This work is striking and beautiful as a visual as well. When you walk into a room with these lights installed, they take your attention immediately. And yet they are soft. These are not Las Vegas strip neon beams; these are light, airy, and calming rays of white. This brings you in, but also connects you with them. You may think that you have not participated in the piece, and that there is nothing to take away, however he infiltrates you still later once you realize that these bulbs have a finite life span. You were witness to their slow demise and it causes you to reflect on the limited life span of the bulb. The focus comes to the ultimate demise of all things, and of death. This stays with you for a long time. You bring it with you when you leave.
Gonzalez-Torres did not have a studio. At first, as he says in interviews, this was not so much a choice of the artist but rather as a necessity of financial limitations. An artist is often changing their work based on necessity. Situations such as space, or money, or personal life all have a great impact on the work because the artist is always responding to their environment. The studio is itself a specific type of place, one that has a distinct separation from the personal. Although many artists speak of their studio as a highly personal environment (how could they not, as this is the place where they pour their innermost thoughts into things that will be publicly scrutinized); their studio is not a place where their “lives happen” or where they exist in a non-art producing way.
A mixture of lack of studio, but also the AIDS epidemic and the height of identity politics in art, all came together in the life of Felix during the 1980s. Almost as important, he also graduated from the Whitney Museum Independent Study program in 1983. The Whitney ISP is infamous in the art world for creating artists with conceptual and theoretical approaches. This is evident in many of the important influences that Gonzalez-Torres would cite often in interviews and discussions. Instead of hearing him speak about pop-culture, or appropriation (two large conversations in art during the 1980s) he spoke of philosophy and quoted Walter Benjamin and Freud.
This background information in the artists’ practice is to lay a foundation for why he had an affinity for the seemingly everyday object of many of his works. Simplicity is key in conceptualism, and so Gonzalez-Torres became a master of minimalism in order to pack into his objects as much loaded meaning as he could without muddling an idea. Again, infiltration is the key. If the artists wanted you to think of romance, or of sentimentalism, he didn’t want to hit you over the head with it, but rather give it to you in a slow whisper that kept appearing in your ear long after you viewed the piece.
In his piece Untitled (Perfect Lovers), 1991, the artist places two identical clocks on the wall.

These clocks are very corporate, and generic. In fact, even the fact that they are next two each other is in it of itself not alarming to the viewer because the appear so commercial. We could easily assume these two clocks are hanging in an office and one is on New York City time while the other is set to Tokyo. It takes the further inspection to tell this is probably not the case. If nothing visual tips you off, then the title alone can step up as an explanation of the ideas behind the piece. Perfect Lovers tells us these are not clocks, but a representation of a relationship. Now we notice the relationship between the clocks—they are close to each other; in fact so close they touch. Is this touch a kiss or an embrace of each

other?
The time of these clocks was set by the gallery to be the same time for each.

This is done as detailed as possible. They are not just synched to one time, but they are synched to the exact second. Two lovers are perfect when they are in tune with each other, but we all know that relationships never quite stay fully in tune. Over time, people start to drift away from each other. Sometimes lovers are able to drift and come back together, but time has a way of making fools of us all and eventually our time will run out. Clocks demand to be re-tuned for their time to be correct, so we know it is only a matter of time before their perfect synchronization will drift apart. They may never be in synch again once this happens, but the memory of the time they were “perfect” can last

forever.
Mimicking the togetherness of the two clocks, another piece (Untitled), 1991, is a billboard created by the artist from a photograph taken of the bed he shared with his lover and partner, Ross. The image is rather mono-chromatic, with gray walls, white pillows and white sheets, cropped in closely so you can see mostly just the two pillows and some of the sheet slightly pulled down. The sheets lay ruffled away from the pillows indicating this is the morning and the people occupying the bed have awakened and are no longer there. Further evidence of this is the imprint of the shapes of a head in both pillows. We know this is the imprint of his lover on one side. The intimate nature of the photograph shown, the personal space of his unmade bed, would be enough to cause pause. What becomes curious about this piece though is the format used to present it, that of the billboard. A billboard is one of the most public forms of photography imaginable, and one that is usually reserved for the purpose of advertising. This tells us that what we are looking at here is not just a photograph, but is a form of public engagement. This image is a public monument for Ross. The space in that pillow represents what is missing from Felix’s life and will never appear next to him in that bed again.