Felix Gonzalez-Torres
A Process without an End


Felix Gonzalez-Torres has died. When I heard about his death, I of course felt very sad, but…for some reason, it was not a surprise, but instead, I was caught in a strange sense of déjà-vu. Feeling that anticipation, which has constantly surrounded his works, that is to say an expectation of the beginning of “a process called loss”– I think I was sensing a hint of it with my skin.
Michel Foucault answered in an interview that “the best moment for homosexuals in love is when a lover leaves by taxi.” You “recall the smile, the warmth of his body, and the tone of his voice after sexual intercourse when the young man leaves” and “what plays an important role in homosexual relationships is recalling of memories rather than expectations of acts.” Each time I saw G-T’s works, I felt such bittersweet afternotes and reverberations, almost more than I could bear.
In 1992, for instance, his billboard works were installed at 24 places in New York City on the occasion of his solo exhibition at the NY MoMA. What the large billboards showed were images of the double bed whose owners had left. Tousled sheets, a pair of pillows set side by side still showing the untouched impression of the heads that lay on them…that empty white space felt like it conveyed moments of pleasure in which someone I could not meet actually lived, and an intimate relationality which diffused and evaporated like air. Installed on the busy crowded streets in the city, this extremely private space was secretively transfused into the hectivity of the street corners. And, was not that which was intertwined there not only these two spaces originally cut apart from each other, but also the “memories of the relationships” soaked in those spaces? In the photographs on the billboards, I could not feel any hint of alienation, but something felt like it was being opened up toward me. As if I myself was becoming enveloped into that “relationship” which occurred totally indifferent to me.
When asked if he is infusing any metaphor in his works about relationship between the individuals and the collective, G-T answered like this: They are metaphors about relationships occurring;
“Perhaps between the public and the private, between personal and what is social, between fear of loss and the joy of loving, of growing, changing, of always becoming more, of losing oneself slowly and then being replenished all over again from scratch.”
You can clearly understand what these words mean when you see his works. The sculptures of hundreds of paper sheets piled up, a mountain of candy accumulated in the corner of a room, posters on billboards, words written on walls along the street – all of them imbued with a hint that they will disappear one day. Words will be painted over with new paint and posters will be torn down. Even the candy and paper placed inside a gallery’s enclosed white space is expected to be carried away by the visitors. Yet, “something being lost” probably does not mean that “everything will wither away completely”.
After all, candy is just candy, and paper is merely paper. If those of G-T’s are different from the ones we see and touch in our daily lives, that is not because his candy and paper is enveloped with an aura of institutions such as art or museums, but because they create a sort of “relationship plus something extra” with those who touch them.
For example, let’s see the work “Untitled (Loverboys)” from 1991. Candy swirled in white and blue wrapped up in transparent cellophane and piled up in the corner of a room fall to the floor, taken one by one by visitors while supplemented endlessly by the gallery staff during the exhibition period. What was important was the fact that the total weight of the candy set as an ideal amount was the total weight of the artist and his partner. That is to say, this work was precisely the same as their bodies, lovers’ bodies assembled together, and possibilities were opened up toward us, the visitors, to extend our arms toward the bodies of the lovers, put them in our mouths, enjoy them with our tongues, and absorb their “bodies” inside ourselves. Ephemeral, they will melt and disappear in a moment, but so hot as they light a fire inside us. Like an impulse of passion. Furthermore, they are infectious agents like viruses.
Viruses? It’s like the worst, most horrible joke. G-T and his partner both lost their lives to HIV. What is running inside our bodies - are they aphrodisiacs, poisons, or something utterly beyond our comprehension? If we go through a pair of white and red bead curtains, “Untitled (Blood)” and “Untitled (Chemo),” what will our bodies be infected with?
By the way, there is a commentary to the words of Foucault I cited above. The importance of reminiscence in the homosexual relationship is merely the fact of concrete and practical investigation and does not speak to the internal quality of homosexuality at all. But then, what is its essential quality? To borrow Foucault’s words again, that is, “to utilize our own sexuality in order to discover or invent new relations,” and what is at stake is that “To be “gay” is to be in a state of becoming. […] I would add that it is not necessary to be homosexual but it is necessary to be set on being “gay.”
Looking back, weren’t the works of G-T always such a process in and of themselves? Something gets lost and something else get filled. In such a process, there occurs a relationship. And if this process is something like a passage to bridge between “here” and “somewhere other than here,” then, what we glimpse through the curtains that enclose us may be “all” that we can only wish and anticipate for, “all” that we cannot stop aspiring to be.
As fear and desire for loss come side by side, the drive to be fulfilled is never totally satisfied, even though what lights up in this road without a terminus is merely the light of incandescent lamps.
First written in Japanese in the Spring of 1996, and appeared in STUDIO VOICE, November 1996, Infas: Tokyo.
Translated into English in 2017 by the writer.