Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), Felix Gonzalez-Torres, 1991

There's an argument on the validability of how distant one should place oneself from the art one creates. I think one of the essential roles of viewing art is its ability to bluntly spark a dialogue that otherwise would be undermined. Historians tend to fetishize the struggling artist trope as representative of authenticity yet what happens when you lose your identity in the repetition of your practice? How do you separate yourself from your work and is it even possible to discuss art without referencing the creator's legacy in some way? Salvador Dali has become reduced to something of an immortal emblem with his painting 'The Persistence of Memory' being infinitely parodied. The crown jewel of Surrealism famously also happened to be an unrelenting fascist during his lifetime with a noted fascination with Nazism. Felix Gonzalez-Torres is primarily known today as an installation artist- though he also heavily incorporated photography into his creative practice. His work deals with the idea of physical permanence in art as well as the resilience of queer love. He’s stated that his work requires an audience in a theatrical sense. As opposed to other mediums, the audience’s response and interaction with the work is essential. His Untitled (Billboard) series created from 1989-95 displayed on dozens of billboards across Manhattan included among many subjects, photographs of a tangled double bed in which the impression of two bodies was easily discernible. The comfort of the bedroom is undermined by loneliness. The bed is a space of intimacy yet undefined, and innocent so as to question our often hurried need to judge. Gonzalez-Torres’s work prompts us to question what happens after loss. The word "emotion" finds its roots in the Latin word "emovere" which means "to move out, remove, agitate". Thinking of the emotional distress of Gonzalez-Torres's work as an incomplete dialogue helps put it into perspective. Gonzalez-Torres's life has been defined by accepting loss, spending the better part of his childhood crisscrossing across the world from Cuba to Spain, then Puerto Rico before finally arriving in New York City in 1979. Borrowing heavily from the cues of the Post-Minimalist movement of the 1960's yet he undermined the purity that the movement stood for. Gonzalez-Torre's projects all seemed to be stripped down, designed to disappear and disrupt the art-marketing system. Using disposable objects and everyday materials such as printer paper, lightbulbs, and candy wrappers in such extreme amounts to critique the lifestyle of overconsumption emerging in the US during his lifetime and challenge his audience to think about the fragility of life compared to the value we place in these objects that seemingly become worthless in such quantities. In the case of his "Untitled" (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), a series of gallery installations including a 175lb pile of candy meant to represent Ross Laycock. Throughout the exhibit, the pile is depleted by gallery visitors representing Laycock’s gradual decline in health. Ross Laycock was Gonzalez-Torres's partner of eight years and died of AIDS in January 1991. I believe this desire for his works to have the ability to be so easily disseminated and transcend the need for representation in a gallery space is from a glaring dissatisfaction with these mainstream art institutions' inability to recognize queer artists of the AIDS era. From the late 1980s to the 1990's there was hysteria over fears that funding for art institutions would be severely limited. President Ronald Reagan's 1988 fiscal budget plan intended to cut up to 31 million in funding for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). Therefore many museum and gallery directors acted in favor of their donors in implanting censors against works deemed too "politically-motivated". Felix Gonzalez-Torres wasn't the only artist affected by this suppression as many queer artists such as Peter Hujar, David Wojnarowicz, and notably Robert Mapplethorpe whose series "The Perfect Moment" including his nude portraits and floral studies was abruptly canceled at the Corcoran Gallery of Art before legal battle ensued between the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center which had picked up the show and Citizens for Community Values, a conservative watchdog group intent on dismantling "immoral" art. Even more recently relatively progressive institutions such as the David Zwirner Gallery which hosted a retrospective of Gonzalez-Torres' work make little if no reference to his or his Laycocks' AIDS diagnoses. The Whitney which hosted a similar showcase of Wojnarowicz's work in 2018 seemed intent on making his life oddly-digestable. It's a disservice to someone who attaches their identity so indefinitely to the work they create only to be sanitized and packaged away. Life isn't nice and neat. Felix Gonzalez-Torres died of AIDS in 1996.