Mourning in the Artwork of Felix Gonzalez-Torres

Source: Mark B. Schlemmer/flickr

Felix Gonzalez-Torres was a Cuban immigrant and artist whose work has renewed relevance today during the COVID-19 crisis. Gonzalez-Torres created minimalist sculptures and installations during the AIDS pandemic. Although currently postponed due to social distancing, major museums and galleries house his pieces including MOMA, the Rubin Museum, and the Gracie Mansion Conservancy in New York City.

Gonzalez-Torres uses commonplace objects to convey intimate expressions of loss and mourning. Among his variations on conceptualist design are the "stacks": reams of industrial paper printed with photos, texts, or abstract designs. These are arrangements of paper stacks on the floor of the museum or gallery space.

The first stacks were done as memorials, roughly the same size and shape of a tombstone. Gallery visitors are invited to take one of the sheets that composed the pile as they passed by, and this act is crucial to the meaning of the work. So even while these pieces elicit gravestone associations there is an anti-monumental quality to these moving sculptures. This work came about from the artist's desire to do a show that would totally disappear.

Gonzalez-Torres began his signature stacks and spills as he faced the imminent death of his lover stricken with AIDS. According to the artist, this use of a fluctuating form was a way of externalizing emotion, of anticipating and grieving the death of his lover. He was very articulate about his purpose:

Freud said that we rehearse our fears in order to lessen them. In a way, this "letting go" of the work, this refusal to make a static form, a monolithic sculpture, in favor of a disappearing, changing, unstable, and fragile form was an attempt to rehearse my fears of having Ross disappear day by day in front of my eyes. (Rollins)

Love and loss are main themes of this artist’s work. These mobile forms of memorialization include a series of candy-spill installations that began in 1990. Bacci chocolates, Bazooka bubble gum, and black licorice in cellophane wrappers are the media for these candy accumulations. As with the paper stacks, Gonzalez-Torres invites visitors to take a piece or more from the collection.

The spills are a mode of "portraiture" originally referencing the body weight of a particular individual and their favorite candy. Wrapped sweets are heaped festively in corners or arranged as square "carpets" as in "Placebo," (1991) at MOMA. The artist describes how this candy installation was also inspired by intimate feelings of separation:

There was no other consideration involved except that I wanted to make artwork that could disappear, that never existed, and it was a metaphor for when Ross was dying. So it was a metaphor that I would abandon this work before this work abandoned me. I'm going to destroy it before it destroys me. That was my little amount of power when it came to this work. I didn't want it to last, because then it couldn't hurt me ... I control the pain. (Storr)

He uses the work to administer in controlled doses the absence he is mourning. Use of the art object helps bring a situation of perceived helplessness under imaginary control.

The psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott describes "transitional behavior" that originates in infancy during moments of absence from the mother. He claims that transitional behavior arises as an adaptive response to the experience of profound emotional rupture, from the "primitive agony" of abandonment. As he describes it, there is a primary break in the continuity of being—a violent shattering of the subject. The infant endures a kind of psychic death as a result of what he or she perceives as the intolerable loss of the caretaker.

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The child uses a transitional object such as a toy, blanket or even song, to help provide emotional balance under such intense duress. The use of this object helps master anxiety and despair. As a creative symbol, the transitional object mediates these external realities of deprivation. The object emotionally cushions the infant and provides a sense of cohesion when the subject's first experience of love is splintered by loss. Winnicott says that transitional behavior continues as a mode of adaption in adulthood when we are faced with significant loss.

Gonzalez-Torres alters the usual museum prohibition of "look but don't touch" by activating an intermediate realm between the onlooker and the artist. His works are participatory and this is central to their meaning. They would often initiate a form of civic engagement during the AIDS crisis as the guards who replenished the works spoke to gallery-goers about the illness, safe sex practices, and treatment regimes. The meaning of the artwork also shifts according to context: from the passage, from museum, to street, to home.

Finally, these moving sculptures are also about the recognition of one's vulnerability and mortality: "With people taking the work, I want to ask them what they're going to do with it,” the artist stated. “At the same time, you have to let it go." (Nickas)

British psychoanalyst Hanna Segal says the work of mourning is the essence of artistic creativity. The artist uses his or her work to recreate a lost relationship and also a lost world. Gonzalez-Torres says of "Untitled (Lover boy)" (1990), a plain stack made from lightweight industrial paper, the color of azure blue, trimmed to 24x24 inches.

It has this glow. The beautiful blue creates a glow on the wall when it rests on the floor. And when you look at it, you can think about so many things. You can think of the sky. You can think about the water. You can think about pleasant things that are related to that kind of light blue. I know it has a gender connotation; you can't get away from that. But I also meant it as this beautiful blank page onto which you can project anything you want, any image, whatever. (Nickas)

He solicits the emotional investment and projections of the audience with his illusory monuments. In addition to providing an outlet for mourning, this work also provides a space for the free play of imagination. This is symbolic play for adaptive purposes. Gonzalez-Torres’ brief career lasted less than a decade due to his early death from AIDS at age 38. Yet his work shows us how the realm between mother and child is a gradually enlarging sphere between our inward hopes and outward realities, between the joy of loving and the fear of loss—one that opens up as a range of play with art objects and becomes the space of cultural activities.