Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.)

Small, round candies, wrapped in multicolored, shiny cellophane. As the gallery lighting plays off their reflective surfaces, the pile almost appears to glow from within.

Poured directly on the floor, the candies are piled up tall in a corner of the gallery. Though it’s a bit rough around the edges, the walls hold the pile together and it coalesces into a pyramid-like form.

But a purely visual encounter with this work cannot encompass the entirety of the viewing experience. Indeed, a formal analysis of this work requires something outside of the visually discernible.

This work is one of a collection of works in Gonzalez-Torres’s oeuvre known as “candy spills.” Built up out of mass-produced candies, they are sometimes installed in messy piles, sometimes in meticulous arrangements, sometimes made up of hard candies like “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), sometimes of mints or chocolates, sometimes of licorice or bubble gum; these works allow viewers to not only look but to touch and to taste: to take a piece of candy from the pile, and to eat it.

The “viewing” experience suddenly takes on a different meaning.

Usually, I delicately take a piece somewhere off the top of the pile so as not to cause an avalanche, but perhaps next time I will unrestrainedly plunge my hand into the pile. I glance around guiltily when the cellophane crinkles as I unwrap the candy. The sweetness of the fruit flavor lingers on my tongue as I continue on my way through the galleries.

Without access to the artwork, I can recreate the sensory experience of my participation through my memories of my repeated encounters with this work. But there is an aspect that even my actual, first-hand experience of this work—standing before this work in the flesh—does not and cannot grant me access.

There is a cumulative effect to the participatory process. With each viewer that stops to take a piece of candy—to consume it surreptitiously in the galleries or to save it for later in their pocket—the pile slowly depletes. Per Gonzalez-Torres’s parameters, it is up to the museum how often the pile is restocked, or whether it is restocked at all. Whether, instead, it is permitted to deplete to nothing.

For me, the power of this work is in the heavy lifting that the category of portraiture is doing. Though enclosed in Gonzalez-Torres’s characteristic parenthetical whisper, leaving the work open-ended, the portion of the title (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) allows the pile of candy to take on a representative role: to represent a specific body—that of Ross Laycock, Gonzalez-Torres’s lover who died of AIDS in 1991.

While the pile of candy can be stocked and restocked however the museum sees fit, the “ideal” weight of the pile is 175 pounds, which has frequently been understood as a stand-in for the weight of a healthy man’s body. The cumulative process of depletion as each viewer may take a piece of candy and consume it takes on the role of the illness as it determinedly ate away at Ross’s body

The effect is sharp. It hits me between the ribs.

In this case, it is not only the visual that is constitutive of the form of this work, but also the sensory, the participatory, and the conceptual (e.g., the predetermined parameters that the artist created, the metaphoric work that the title performs). When the work isn’t on view, there is no “object.” Rather, there is a stack of boxes of candy.

In the space of the museum or gallery, where the visual is given primacy, how are non-visual aspects of an artwork made known or knowable to the viewer? The approaches, at least in the case of Gonzalez-Torres, have varied widely. But I wonder what we might learn from those approaches. Might the attempts to make visible those non-visual aspects of certain artworks teach us something about how to convey visual aspects of other artworks in a non-visual way? How might we begin to reconsider what a “successful” or “complete” viewing experience means?

—Maggie Borowitz, 2019–20 COSI Research Fellow in Modern and Contemporary Art

Topics

• Perspectives