A kind of consubstantiation takes place in the candy pieces whereby González-Torres’s soul mate’s dying (dead, now) body and González-Torres’s own dying (dead, too) body are present in the candies. It points to death: to his own, to his soul mate’s, to countless other AIDS-related deaths and, ultimately, death in general: the predator of peace that lurks in the fog of the future. If González-Torres bade us break bread or imbibe wine, he would, indeed, be crossing a line. However, he never sets himself up as a savior. In fact, what these pieces say is that he can’t save: himself, those he loves, his audience, or anyone. His pieces make plain their own mutability and impermanence, and are intended to remind us of our own. By dying, his pieces point to death, but are therefore never dead. They’re replenished, over and over, always living on the horizon that separates presence from absence, dying from birth, and pain from paradise
Tuesday, December 15, 2015
Flexibility, Intense Fragility, and Death in the Work of Félix González-Torres
It’s
been almost two decades since the death of Félix González-Torres and his masterpieces of mutable minimalism have only become more impressive; still more radical than almost any oeuvre that has been developed since. His aesthetic godfather, Bertolt Brecht once said, “Because things are the way they
are, things will not stay the way they are,” and González-Torres shows us the
opposite-and-equal reality: because things will not stay the way they are, they are the way they are. His oeuvre is more his own and less his era’s,
less his culture’s, than most for the simple reason that it doesn’t insist upon itself as
monolithic “truth,” as the pioneering but limited work of, say, Donald Judd does. Because González-Torres’s works refuse to stay the way they are, and because their
very nature entails incredible variability, they become what they are:
witnesses to change, attesting to the ridiculousness of the concept of stasis itself.
Static works, like Judd’s or Michelangelo’s “David,” for instance, can’t stay
the way they were or are but are endlessly transformed in—and by—the sea of
time. Flexibility was an acquaintance of Andre’s, an enemy (it seems to me) of the
monolith-making Judd, and a close, close friend of González-Torres. In
Idolizing Pictures: Idolatry, Iconoclasm and Jewish Art, Anthony Julius writes:
“Destroying the idol just leaves an empty space, one which another idol may
occupy. But preserving the idol, while denying it its bogus magic, strikes a
telling blow against all false gods. To defeat your and bury him is one thing.
To dress him in a jester’s costume and have him perform for you is another,
more crushing, victory. One need not fear his return because he already has
returned, in a guise which poses no threat at all.” Félix González-Torres’s work is impermanence incarnate—incarnate meaning “come
to life” and “in material form,” and incarnate meaning “made human.”
A kind of consubstantiation takes place in the candy pieces whereby González-Torres’s soul mate’s dying (dead, now) body and González-Torres’s own dying (dead, too) body are present in the candies. It points to death: to his own, to his soul mate’s, to countless other AIDS-related deaths and, ultimately, death in general: the predator of peace that lurks in the fog of the future. If González-Torres bade us break bread or imbibe wine, he would, indeed, be crossing a line. However, he never sets himself up as a savior. In fact, what these pieces say is that he can’t save: himself, those he loves, his audience, or anyone. His pieces make plain their own mutability and impermanence, and are intended to remind us of our own. By dying, his pieces point to death, but are therefore never dead. They’re replenished, over and over, always living on the horizon that separates presence from absence, dying from birth, and pain from paradise
A kind of consubstantiation takes place in the candy pieces whereby González-Torres’s soul mate’s dying (dead, now) body and González-Torres’s own dying (dead, too) body are present in the candies. It points to death: to his own, to his soul mate’s, to countless other AIDS-related deaths and, ultimately, death in general: the predator of peace that lurks in the fog of the future. If González-Torres bade us break bread or imbibe wine, he would, indeed, be crossing a line. However, he never sets himself up as a savior. In fact, what these pieces say is that he can’t save: himself, those he loves, his audience, or anyone. His pieces make plain their own mutability and impermanence, and are intended to remind us of our own. By dying, his pieces point to death, but are therefore never dead. They’re replenished, over and over, always living on the horizon that separates presence from absence, dying from birth, and pain from paradise
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment