By Robert Storr

Originally published in Art in America, January 1996, Brant Publications, Inc.

A simmering carpet stretches along the institutionally white floor. It measures some 6 by 12 feet and is made of hundreds upon hundreds of foil-wrapped candies. Entering the room under the watchful eye of their mother, two young boys race toward the rectangular mirage and fill their pockets withot restraint. From beside the door through which they have come, a uniformed guard steps forward and admonishes tem to take only one. Just as they are about to surrender their next to last pieces of treasure she winks, letting them know it's all right to hold on to an extra few.

At this point the guard turns to the mother, who tensely awaits a reproving look or comment, and delivers instead a detailed explanation of how the amount of candy spread out at their feet representes the combined weight of the artist - about whom she speaks with familiarity - and his dead lover. The piece, she informs the mother, is called "Untitled" (Placebo), and it refers to the AIDS epidemic and the lack of a cure or even care that so many suffering from the disease must face. Thus, one morning at the Hishhorn Museum in Washington D.C., within walking distance of the House and Sentae chambers where hysterical condemnations of "obscene" art are a routine spectacle, a black civil servant and a mother of two preadolescent males entered comfortably into a conversation about art, and death, and public policy.

The floor sculpture they discussed was part of the first of two major museum exhibitions recently devoted to the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, the second of which closed last may at the Guggenheim Museum in new York preceding its current international tour. Together, these exhibitions focused considerable attention on an artist whose solo career, apart from his ontological associations with Group Material, extends a scant nine years. The attention is well deserved, however -not least for the fact that Gonzalez-Torres's spare, elliptical art could have provoked the kind of exchange just described.

Gonzalez-Torres's aim, in essnce, is a classical one, to please and instruct; but it is barbed by the Brechtian notion that art, rather than dramatically resolving contradictions, should isolate and accentuate them, leaving the viewer with a set of conflicting choices phrased in the present tense. Thus each work provides anomalous information for the consideration of the audience, while refraining from the kind of sloganeering found in so much recent art. This tactic reflects a close redaing of the current scene and a sharp critique of the self-righteously "transgressive" art that is currently a staple of the culture wars. And so, when a right-wing congressman, tipped off that there was "homosexual art" at the Hirshhorn, headed down the Mall in search of the next Mapplethorpean outrage, he found only rooms full of lights, serial grid drawings, paired mirrors and two possibly, but not certainly "same-sex" wall clocks labeled "Untitled" (Perfect Lovers) (1991), ticking away in unison. Bewildered, he left without uttering a word of protest.

The fact that neither the mirrors, nor the clocks, nor the two body-molded pillows that appeared around New York in 1991 immediately declare their meaning is characteristic of Gonzalez-Torres's refusal to play to type. In an art world too often obsessed with simplistic affirmations of origin or essence, Gonzalez-Torres eschews the role of Latin artist or queer artist or even activist artist, while using everything that is his experience as a Cuban-born, politically committed gay man has taught him. What he has learned is that in America's presently chauvinist climate, loudly declaiming who you are frequently pre-empts showing an audience what you see.

For example, the twin full-length mirrors, "Untitled" (Orpheus, Twice) (1991), allude to Jean Cocteau's cinematic rendition of the Orpheus myth, in which the poet passes through a mirror in a futile attempt to retrieve his lover from the underworld. The second mirror complicates matters by implying that a modern Orpheus might fall victim to the same fate, doubling the suggested corporeal reflections and dissolves the piece loses its purely symbolic quality, however, when members of the public literally enter the image. Standing to either side and studying their own reflections, perfect strangers of every description take their place in tandem. Every move made changes not just the nature of his or her physical orientation in front of a static work of art, but also the nature of his or her psychological involvement with it and with the others that its shining srface gathers in. Taking E.M. Forster;s admonition "only connect" to a point of maximum obliqueness - in the process mixing democratic tact with the nagging insistence of a well-planned riddle - Gonzalez-Torres prepares traps for the mind and heart.

A user-friendly Duchampian to this extent - his work encompasses both Duchamp's elegant semiotic play and the use of mundane ready-mades- Gonzalez-Torres nonetheless insists on introducing spectators to the hard facts of life. His work leads them step by self-effacing step through a maze of images that describe a society in crisis, at the same time that they evoke the bittersweet epiphanies of temporary communion and ultimate solitude.

The artist's recent retrospectives retraced his progress in distinct but complementary ways, though the Guggenheim show was the more comprehensive of the two. A photographer by training, Gonzalez-Torres is, by cultivated instinct, a master of placement regardless of the medium in question. The range of materials he has utilized -none of which involve the hand of the maker but all of which unmistakably convey his sensibility - include electric light fixtures, jigsaw puzzles, printed multiples of various kinds, live male go-go dancers and bead curtains. The candy works themselves employ a "palette" that encompasses cellophane-wrapped licorice , Bacci chocolates and Bazooka bubble gum. They may be heaped in corners, squared off on the floor or spilled in arcs, as they were in ironic harmony with the stylish scallops of Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim interior.

Gonzalez-Torres's "dateline" works derive from the kind of mental and emotional channel-surfing that the artist engaged in, years ago, upon returning home early in the morning after working long hours as a waiter. Mingling references to intimate occurrences, cultural trivialities and historical events, he created photostat pieces in the late 1980s in which a few lines of white text on a black ground metonymically align the machinations of power with TV crazes and personal milestone. The large billboard he mounted in New York's Sheridan Square in 1989 used the same technique to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots and the beginning of the gay rights movement. By purposely confusing different orders of experience, these works undercut official hisory at the same time that they underscore the fitfulness and fragility of memory. Gonzalez-Torres has also crafted friezelike text "portraits" of various friends and collectors. Cross-referencing the public events of our epoch with Pop/Proustian "maeleines" that bring back not just the facts but the feel of times past, he has invented a graphic stanza form composed of raw but carefully selected data.

The jigsaw puzzles that Gonzalez-Torres has had printede and cut to order, using pictures culled from the mass media and personal snapshots, run the same gamut of public and private experience. One depicts two white chairs turned slightly away from each other; another shows the shadows of two people standing side by side; a third reproduces a conventional family portrait that happens to represent Klaus babie, the Nazi "butcher of Lyon," with his wife and children; and a fourth shows Pope John Paul II giving the sacraments to Kurt Waldheim, the former UN secretary general and Austrian president who hid his involvement in World War II deportations and reprisals.

These works constitue a group of separate but linked enigmas. The two chairs that apparently stand in for a couple- what, we wonder, is their relationship? The shadows that indicate two people who may or may not actually be touching as they lean toward each other - how are they relateed? An ideal nuclear family whose head is a destroyer of nuclear families - knowing this, what is our feeling about the familial archetype that is personified? The head of the church absolving the leader of historical transgressions - what bond can we have to the complicitous order they represent? Intricately cut, assembled and hermetically sealed in plastic bags, these puzzles present us with conundrums that beg to be dissected, even though the questions they symbolically pose can no more easily be answered than the prepackaged images can be taken apart.

Works like these share common ground with the word games of first-generation Conceptualists such as Lawrence Weiner and Joseph Kosuth and with the later agit-prop montages of Barbara Kruger. But Gonzalez-Torres's work is less linguistically formalist that that of the first two, while his rhetoric is politically subtler than Kruger's. The nuances on which he relies suggest not so much an effort to correct his predecessors as a sympathetic evolution from them. The minimalism of some of Gonzalez-Torres's installation objects takes past aspects of reductivist art in stride in the same way. His cascading light-strings loosen the rigid grids of Dan Flavin even as his choice of small round incandescent bulbs instead of flourescent tubes softens the intensity and changes the affect of their glow, warm candle-power substituting for Flavin's industrial light-blasts.

At the Guggenheim, for example, Gonzalez-Torres hung rows of light strings from the ceiling of the two story gallery off the Rotunda's second floor, further brightening the already brilliant room with a veil of bulbs. At the Hirshhorn, by contrast, a single cluster of such lights placed in one corner illuminated an otherwise penumbral space, whose far walls were papered with a gigantic mural photograph of two birds disappearing in opposite directions into stormy clouds. From the architectonics of Flavin's varichrome tubes in white rooms, Gonzalez-Torres moves us incrementally into a new kind of light-space, as matter-of-fact as its houseware wires and sockets but as atmospheric-and romantic- as the framed voids of James Turrell and Robert Irwin.

Gonzalez-Torres's grid drawings likewise take Minimalism as a starting point but encode its neutral modularity with an altogether different kind of information. Logically laid out and exquisitely drafted, "Untitled" (Bloodworks) (1989) might be a Sol Lewitt or robert Ryman drawing but for the fact that its coordinates and bisecting lines are determined not by purely formal templates and linear stresses but by a desire to chart the ineluctable decline of the immune system's resistance to infections. In sharp contrast to Ronald Jones's cruelly chic renditions of the AIDS virus as Brancusi-esque sculpture, Gonzalez-Torres conflates esthetic convention with grim scientific exactitude to mark the precise passage of time against the perceptible erosion of vital force. He respects Minimalisms systematic principles but replaces esthetic self-referentiality with allusions o the equally "impersonal" processes of disease.

Adding a Pop element to this unsentimental mixture of pure seriality and disturbing content, Gonzalez-Torres has hung curtains of beads in doorways in his recent installations; the beads are color-coded white and red to represent bloodcells, or blue and green to represent the chemicals used in blood therapies. While it is delightful to walk through these rustling strands, it is also unsettling to imagine oneself enveloped by them as if by a sparkling shower of body fluids and medications.

The curtains are in fact vertical variations of Gonzalez-Torres's glittering carpets of sweets, which gradually wane at the pleasure of meandering gallery-goers. According to his instructions, once they are totally depleted these atomized body surrogated must be fully reconstituted, only to undergo the same inexorable vanishing act. Far more than a mere commentary on commodity fetishism or a ritual geture of defiance in the face of institutional possessiveness, works such as "Untitled" (Placebo) are examples of an explicitly existentialist art, one advantageously free of stylistic angst. Casually transforming the most banal accumulation into an arresting contemporary vanitas, the ever fresh presence and always impending absence of these works quietly focuses attention on the slow metamorphosis of objects, architecture and other pieces of art in their vicinity. With their planned impermanence, the candy spills are like luminous shadows of all permanent things. Cyclically appearing and disappearing ad infinitum, their essence is substituted for that of their maker and his late lover, even as the artist, by means of a wholly secular but patently esthetic transubstantiation, reminds us of the evanescence of all that is human.

Among his several variations on Minimalist formats, Gonzalez-Torres's "stacks" are the most commanding and the most radical. Recalling te manufactured block sculptures of Judd, LeWitt, Tony Smith and others, these stacks consist of reams of paper variously printed with texts, pictures or abstract designs. Each work addresses one of Gonzalez-Torres's consistent themes. The two rings of "Untitled" (Double Portrait) (1991) reprise the paired clocks of "Untitled" (Perfect Lovers) and the paired round mirrors of "Untitled" (March 5th) #1 (1991). Two other stack works make use of black and white photographs of the sky and the sea, respectively. A work featuring a double black border like an old-style Catholic funeral announcement is called, with untypical polemical forthrightness, "Untitled" (Republican Years) (1992). Another, blunter still, bears the names and faces of all 464 Americans shot dead during a one-week span.

While the work is on exhibit, the paper shets which compose the stacks are available to anyone who wants them. As with the candy spills, theis availability changes the usual museum rule of "look but don't touch" and shifts the criterion for judging the work away from coveted uniqueness to intellectual or imaginative value. Moving ahead on the course set by LeWitt's "democratic drawings" -works whose price was forever fixed at $100 - and the affordable artists' books LeWitt and others pioneered decades ago, Gonzalez-Torres has effectively created unlimited-edition multiples; obliging any institution that buys the "original" stack to reproduce and give away its paper sheets as long as there is a demand. Whether and how the offer is accepted by museum and gallery goers depends on the particular stack in question. Judging from observation, the moody sea and sky pictures are most popular, constituting a kind of take-home sublime, with the cryptic textbooks and "abstractions" coming next. People seem more reluctant, however, to pick up a copy of "Untitled" (Death by Gun), as if it carries a curse. But at the level on which artistic gambits reveal social and psychological truth, this hesitancy exposes the fear such carnage has instilled in us an epitomizes our vain efforts to keep violence at arm's length.

In these and other ways, Gonzalez-Torres has revived Minimalist and Conceptualist strategies and recued them from merely academic elaboration. The artist's relation to the intellectual discourse of his own generation is comparable. Like most of his contemporaries, Gonzalez-Torres has steeped himself in Marxist , structuralist and postmodernist thought. Unlike many of them, however, he is not content to illustrate these ideas for a ready-made audience of initiates. Whil his peers have intoxicated themselves with theory, he has suggested that it is best, perhaps to read theory with a bottle at your elbow.
"Something I tell my students is to read [a text] once; then, if you have problems with it, read it a second time. If you still have problems, get drunk and read it a third time...and you might get something out of it. But always think about practic...Theory is not the endpoint of work, it is the work along the way to the work."
To those hamstrung by intellectual or esthetic doctrines that compel artists to justify what they do according to formally or historically programmatic principles, these words should sound the "all clear." Conceptualism, for Gonzalez-Torres, posits ideas and follows intuited mental progressions; it owes nothing to ideological purists or to the received opinions of scholarly guilds.

While the freshness of Gonzalez-Torres's approach was immediately apparent at the Hirshorn, circumstances at the Guggenheim skewed perceptions of his work there. In each venue he and the curators had to work against the architectural constraints if the circular spaces involved. At the Hirshhorn, the inward turnging orientations of the building was used to good purpose, emphasizing the meditative quietude of much of his art. At the Guggenheim, Gonzalez-Torres and curator Nancy Spector positioned the works so that they hugged the walls and floor and discreetly filled the niches and bays of the museum's spiraling walkway. By conceiving of the concavities of the coiling building as an armature and its pristine surroundings as a ground, this installation showed Torres's stacks, mounds, light-string and other works with surprisingly graphic intensity.

Regrettably, the artist had to share the museum's ramp with the concurrent retrospective of Ross Bleckner, whose murky paintings and drawings pined for 19th century Symbolism as obviously as Gonzalez-Torres's work asserted its complete contemporaneity. That the two artists also dealt with AIDS further invited esthetically irrelevant comparison. Judging from the short shrift Gonzalez-Torres's show received in the press and the avalanche of generally indulgent notices that greeted Bleckner's, this ill-conceived double-bill seems to have reiforced the popular tendency to oppose painting's sensual amplitude to conceptualism's supposed cerebral austerity.

In this instance, the salient differences lay elsewhere. Bleckner's memorial pictures present his themes by means of one-to-one metaphoric correspondences. Black betokens mourning; evanescent whites and yellows represent spiritual transcendance; urns, flowers and ribbons signify remembrance; and so on, in images limned with heavy-handed if at times satisfyingly quirky painterliness. Yet Gonzalez-Torres's work appeals every bit as insistently to the senses as Bleckner's, and with greater visual discipline, variety and nuance. Moreover, he draws attention to the pain and gravity of his subject through counterimages created from provocatively ephemeral or dissonantly enjoyable means. Even the overt romanticism of his panoramic landscapes and wheeling birds avoid nostalgia. Instead, like the closing freeze-frame shot of Truffaut's The 400 Blows, Gonzalez-Torres's images suspend life in the perptual actuality of photographic grain.

Inclined toward neutral materials and leery of being entrapped by a signature method or style - he ceased making stacks when they became the average collector's idea of a "Gonzalez-Torres" - the artist nonetheless leaves his impress on whatever he touches. Like the sandy footprints in a recent series of photgravures, his presence is low-keyed, nearly anonymous, but residually felt just the same. His return to photography in these works seems to have been prompted by the way in which that medium captures interrupted time. While his "dateline" pieces stretch and warp the passage of years, these elegiac photogravures contract in an instantaneous click all the chance meetig, partings and missed convergences recorded in the human treadmarks they preserve. The deathly and irrevocably "that has been" which Roland Barthes identified as photography's essential aspect is, in Gonzalez-Torres's latest images, commonplace and immanent. Embedded in the cool esthetic surface of these pictures lies a harsh reality. His is the first generation of Americans since the world wars for whom life's duratoin is often measured in days and months instead of decades. Too frequently in this context, an artist's first mature statements must also count as his or her summation.

Nevertheless, the impression one takes away from these two shows is not morbid. For all its references to loss and sorrow, Gonzalez-Torres's art quickens the imagination. Unencumbered by polemical baggage, it is likewise free of self-pity or special pleading; these, the artist plainly understands, are mistakes a serious artist cannot afford. Daily awareness of mortality is a crucible, and at the limit where such consciousness predominates, each thing yet to be made must be able to stand alone, not just as a testament of that moment but as a completely self-sufficient entity within the larger esthetic discourse of its time.

That is the standard that all important art must meet, and Gonzalez-Torres's work does. How the poingancy that suffuses his art could be manifest in such economical terms is the story vividly told by his two recent retrospectives. To the extent that critics and the public have so far failed to take their full measure, the record of these exhibitions deserves reconsideration, just as the artist's ongoing work demands the most serious scrutiny. In any case, what he has already accomplished signals an important and influential shift away from mechanical or largely reactive types of postmodernist thinking. Replacing the "discourse" of artistic intervention with its poetics, he as created one of the pivotal bodies of work to emerge from the often disspiriting confusion of the last decade.

Robert Storr is an artist and critic, as well as the Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the Museum of Modern Art.