The Venice Biennale: A Spoonful of Sugar
by Aemilia Scott
Aemilia Scott has attended the Venice Biennale for numerous years. In this two-part series, she explores the festival's 52nd incarnation. Read part one here.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres is only the second artist to be represented posthumously at the American Pavilion of the Venice Biennale. Gonzalez-Torres was a gay Latin American man. He and his partner were HIV positive, and eventually his partner, and then he, succumbed to AIDS. Not even two sentences into the essay, the critic has already opened up that trusty old can of biographical information and is scooping the stuff up and thickly spackling it over her subject and his work. Biography makes theory easy, smoothing out crevasses and dark spots and lending itself to elegant lines. But the thicker the biography, the more the subject becomes obscured.
Theorists love to get their hands on that theoretical spackle, romanticizing the death of the author, writing their own poetry on the wet plaster covering their subjects. Such grandstanding never takes into account the real, human life of the artist who surely left behind people who couldn't give two shits about Jacques Derrida or Roland Barthes, and would have surely preferred a living artist to a dead one. Having said that, in the case of Felix Gonzalez Torres, death is the lens that brings his artwork into perfect focus, and his absence is the unlikely frame that shows you where to look.
Gonzalez-Torres' pieces, unlike many contemporary artists, don't require biography or theory in order to be appreciated. The inclusion of Gonzalez-Torres' biographical information is not meant to inspire a Hendrixism or a Morrisonism: Gonzalez died, you see? Died before his time, man. It serves a more crucial purpose than that. It is like a decoder ring, unlocking the work's personal and political messages.
Gonzalez-Torres could be called a pop-minimalist. Traditional mid-century minimalism employed the materials and processes associated with non-art, such as Dan Flavin's neon, Donald Judd's acrylic, and Joseph Kosuth's pencil lines. By reducing materials to their most elemental and presenting them in the context of art-space, these pieces gained a formal meaning apart from their quotidian meaning, and a sacred purposelessness apart from their quotidian purpose. Dan Flavin took the neon tube, the symbol of currency exchanges and office buildings and porno theatres, and used it as the raw material for abstract sculptures.
Gonzalez-Torres is minimalism for the post-Warhol world. The materials he uses — wrapped pieces of candy, light bulbs, bead curtains — are the raw materials of popular culture. And like the minimalists, he reduces them to their elemental forms. In "Untitled (Public Opinion)," featured in the Left Gallery of the American Pavilion, he lays out thousands of pieces of hard candy on the floor, in a large rectangle. In "Untitled (Perfect Lovers)," featured at the Italian Pavilion, he puts two office clocks right next to each other, synchronizes them at midnight, and sets them ticking. In "Untitled (America)," in the rotunda of the American Pavilion, he drops simple light bulbs on a chord from the ceiling to the floor.
In all of Gonzalez' work there is absence. At first glance, it seems that Gonzalez removes himself from the work in the same way that minimalists did. Still, with a little knowledge, the viewer sees that Gonzalez built absence into his own work in the form of desire and loss. He merely uses the tools of minimalism to code the meaning.
In "Untitled (America)," 12 runs of lights hang down from the central rotunda and gather at the floor in a circle. Is it a warm and glowing invitation to enter the American Pavilion, a little outpost representing the country where many individual lights melt into one? Yes. Is it a ring of light framing nothing, a marquee without a show? Yes. Is it a self-portrait as an anus? Yes. Is it a bunch of light bulbs? You bet.
Looking at his work is like watching the film Pillow Talk featuring Rock Hudson and Doris Day. At first glance it's a good old time, fun for the whole family. Then comes the second layer of understanding. Sweet Jesus, you say, moms and dads, teens and teenie-boppers, upstanding citizens of all ages loved a film that is obviously an ode to premarital sex. How did this get made? In eras of social conservatism like post-war America, coding was used widely in art and in films to allow ideas to permeate into popular culture and still get by the censors. Gonzalez-Torres was no stranger to this language.
In the late '80s and early '90s, openly gay artists like Robert Mapplethorpe were the first victims of an increasingly socially conservative American political climate. So while Mapplethorpe's photographs with their sacrilegious content and blatant homosexual/deviant imagery were crushed in the Christ-like embrace of Newt Gingrich, Gonzalez-Torres' work flew largely under the radar.
Gonzalez-Torres' pieces were also subversive, and were also super gay. Many of his works feature doubles or twin objects, such as Perfect Lovers, in which two identical clocks hang together in harmony, and "Untitled (Saggitario)," in which two large marble slabs are carved into identical, round reflecting pools touching each other at the Pavilion's entrance. Both pieces evoke, with the elegance and serenity of an unopened book of subversive thoughts, the beauty and symmetry of homosexual love.
Beyond being coded to evoke theoretical meaning, his work is also radically, and very literally, political. On the descriptive card for "Untitled (Public Opinion)," the candy spill of black licorice in the left gallery, Gonzalez-Torres states that the ideal weight of the piece is 700 pounds. The viewer is invited to take a piece or more of candy, and as the piece is seen, it disappears. Although the candy spill is beautiful and sweet, when seen in that quantity the clear-wrapped licorice look at first glance like an oil slick, and at second glance like tiny pieces of shrapnel.
With "Public Opinion" Gonzalez-Torres was clear about his intention to inspire fear and dissent about the Gulf War, which is contemporary to the piece. The shrinking and swelling of the piece's size as the candy is removed and replaced evokes the forceful tide of public opinion in relationship to the war.
If "Public Opinion" uses minimalism to code a political message, than the similar piece "Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.)" uses minimalism to code a deeply personal one. This piece is an elegiac portrait of his partner Ross, who died in 1991. 175 pounds of multicolored candies are spilled on the gallery floor, representing Ross' ideal weight. Here we are also invited to take some candy, and here too we are responsible for the piece getting smaller. As the pile shrinks and we fill our pockets, we recreate the withering and disappearance of his lover. But when this message becomes clear, you've got a sweet candy dissolving in your mouth, a sense memory of love's sweetness.
That is the dance of joy and sadness in Gonzalez Torres' work. Plenty of contemporary art plays with the idea of the viewer somehow destroying the art, or being complicit in its destruction, or standing by as entropy slowly takes the art away. Damien Hirst deals with decay and Chris Burden deals with the viewer's footprint on the work of art, but those two artists both treat the relationship between artwork and viewer as a violent or destructive inevitability. Gonzalez-Torres asks you to take of his artwork, and that slow shrinking and disappearance does evoke great sadness, but at the same time you feel as though the thing is a gift. It's like the Giving Tree. Yes, you are selfish and desirous, but yes, the artwork was created to give itself up for you.
This is why the biological absence of Gonzales-Torres at his own show is particularly poignant. Because his work so elegantly mixes the widely understood symbols of popular culture with the most problematic issues of his personal and political life, a little biography is necessary to get in the door. Also particularly poignant in Gonzales-Torres' work is its new prescience as America fights a second war in Iraq, and goes through a second period of social conservatism.
Always lying behind the question of why American art experts chose this or that artist to represent America is the real question: how does America see itself being seen? In an era when pure, unironic dissent is labeled as un-American and run out of town, those of us who feel a little stranded on our own soil use the American presence at the Biennale as a message in a bottle to the rest of the world. So Biennale pieces for America are less about seeking to represent ourselves to the world, and more about seeking to show the world that we understand how we are represented. Gonzales-Torres pieces, with their beautiful, tasty forms and their sad and angry ideas, are a perfect fit. Gonzalez-Torres himself, who during his life handed out subversion in a spoonful of sugar, is a perfect fit as well.
E-mail Aemilia Scott at aemilia at gmail dot com.
