On February 25, I went to David Zwirner Gallery to say good-bye to the Felix Gonzalez-Torres show, particularly to “Untitled†(Public Opinion), one of 20 signature installations involving sweets that visitors can take and eat. Crowds gathered around a large flat rectangle composed of 700 pounds of clear-wrapped licorice candy spread on the gallery floor. It was pitch-perfect post-minimalist art from the 1990s. When I walked in at 3 p.m., the piece was still in its elegant, ground-bound form surrounded by a contemplative aura. Here and there, someone bent down, took a candy, and sampled it.
Gonzalez-Torres’s work exists essentially as sets of instructions. A museum or collector purchases a “certificate†and may show, sell, or lend the work. The instructions for “Untitled†(Ross), 1991, are: “Candies in variously colored wrappers, endless supply. Overall dimensions vary with installation. Ideal weight: 175 lb.†This has long been understood to represent the weight of his lover, Ross Laycock, who died from complications of AIDS that year. “Untitled†(Lover Boys), also from 1991, is an “endless supply†of candies at the “ideal weight†of 355 pounds — perhaps to do with the weight of the boxes the candies come in or the combined weight of Laycock and the artist, who himself succumbed to AIDS-related illness in 1996 at the age of 38. Gonzalez-Torres said, “This work cannot disappear … the same way other things in my life have disappeared.†He said, “Aesthetics are politics.†And an undoing of death. You eat of his body and join with some essence of him. It’s a kind of transubstantiation.
“Untitled†(Public Opinion) was also made the same year as the death of Gonzalez-Torres’s father. The work is both epitaph and sanctum, a fountain of eternal youth and a benediction to all of those with AIDS. For audiences who are aware that they may sample the sculpture, it is an immense heaven where the terrestrial rules of art soften some. This fills the gallery with a magnificent presence of freedom.
In a very quiet way, Gonzalez-Torres illustrates one of art’s most fundamental aspects: Art is not just a noun, a thing; art is something that does something to us. Art is a verb. “Untitled†(Public Opinion) lets us feel this ancient cosmology of art as a life force, something with an agency, an otherness, and poetry of its own. To his materials and forms, Gonzalez-Torres adds oral gratification, touch, sugar highs.
On the last day of his show at Zwirner, another radical aspect was added. Two young people suddenly separated an entire corner of “Untitled†(Public Opinion) and moved it, intact as a triangle, about a foot from the piece. It was like a Tasmania to the sculpture. I was shocked. I wanted to “repair†the piece. Like a good little prig, I thought to alert a gallery attendant. I’m glad I didn’t. Then all hell broke loose.
In no time, many of the formerly reverential viewers were bending over on all fours, playing with the piece. They drove canals into it, created lakes and hearts. It was tremendous, a mutation of the aesthetic gene Gonzalez-Torres had created.
Some kids wrote “L A T I N A M E R I C A†in black licorice. Another group used the candy to speak about gay rights. “Untitled†(Public Opinion) was now graffiti. Elsewhere, people created looping paisley or geometric patterns. On one side two women were re-creating a portrait of the Mona Lisa using their iPhones as reference. Most amazing was when a long tail developed and headed toward a corner, where it rose again like a new termite mound.
The mood was joyous. Something that had had just one form now had many, like a giant Etch a Sketch. People poured candy into Tiffany bags. Galleries, museums, and critics had long claimed that this work was open and free, that it could be reproduced and literally taken with you, but really, we had taken Gonzalez-Torres only halfway. Before my grateful eyes, I saw this artist transformed from an insider art star to a public artist like Basquiat, Kusama, Kruger, or Haring. At Zwirner, I witnessed the apotheosis of art as a verb, as something that did something to people, and, now, that people did something to.