Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative - ISSN 1780-678X
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Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative - ISSN 1780-678X |
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Issue 22. Autofiction and/in Image - Autofiction visuelle II |
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Illegible Echoes: Felix Gonzalez-Torres, the artist-spy |
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Author: Andrew McNamara Abstract (E): Art leaves a mark, so thought Felix Gonzalez-Torres, but what kind of mark? Gonzalez-Torres aimed to revitalize this age-old quest within the visual arts by challenging it. He sought to achieve his aims by fabricating a permeable monument; by highlighting the issue of legacies in art; and by contaminating aesthetics with social and autobiographical allusions, while rejecting any direct correspondence between art and life. The following analysis examines key critical assessments of Gonzalez-Torres’s own legacy, but ultimately it shows how Gonzalez-Torres sought to fulfill his critical and artistic ambitions by forging a new attitude to memory in art. He assumed the stance of an artist-spy in order to forge an apprehensive approach to remembrance. Abstract (F): L’art laisse une marque, comme le pensait Felix Gonzalez-Torres, mais quel type de marque ? Gonzalez-Torres voulait faire revivre cette quête millénaire des arts visuels en la mettant en question. Il voulait réaliser ses objectifs en créant des monuments furtifs ; en soulignant la question de l’héritage artistique ; et en mélangeant esthétique et allusions sociales et autobiographiques, tout en rejetant la possibilité d’une correspondance directe entre l’art et la vie. L’analyse suivante met en lumière la valeur critique de l’héritage de Gonzalez-Torres lui-même, et démontre comment il a cherché à réaliser ses propres ambitions critiques et artistiques en forgeant un nouveau rapport à la mémoire dans sa pratique artistique. Il a pris la pose de l’artiste-espion afin de créer une approche appréhensive de la mémoire. keywords: Felix Gonzalez-Torres, installation art, autobiography, social critique, remembrance
To cite this article: McNamara, A., Illegible Echoes: Felix Gonzalez-Torres, the artist-spy. Image [&] Narrative [e-journal], 22 (2008).
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I'm not the voice of authority. I make mistakes, I might be wrong. I do have a very clear agenda, and that is a desire to make this place a better place, and I'm an artist: that is the position where I speak from.
Confronted by a human being who impresses us as great, should we not be moved rather than chilled by the knowledge that he might have attained his greatness only through his frailties?
The aesthetic spy, or the revenge of the elevator man
There is no better indication of the escalating reputation of Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957-1996) than his nomination by the United States Department of State as the official American representative at the 2007 Venice Biennale. The press release issued by the State Department praised the Cuban-American's art because his work has proven "to be profoundly influential for a younger generation of artists." It claimed this influence derives from his attention to basic processes: "Employing simple, everyday materials, his work investigates methods of distribution, process, and audience participation." (US Department of State 2006) Can this official recognition be regarded as the apotheosis of his achievement or does it instead mark the point when an artist reaches such a pinnacle that they become virtually critically redundant? In Gonzalez-Torres's case, appearances are deceptive. Despite his undoubted success, his critical reception is more complicated, even ambiguous. On the one hand, his art is too "aesthetic" for the anti-aesthetic brigade, suspicious of his preoccupation with visual delight; on the other hand, the art is too minimal and "conceptual" for advocates of beauty and "aesthetics." If Gonzalez-Torres's art now constitutes a legacy of sorts, then its challenge relates to its capacity to incite this critical polarity without evaporating it. More corrosively, it manages to trouble the seemingly neat and automatic equation of beauty with aesthetics. The official imprimatur bestowed upon his art therefore both accentuates and confuses the assessment of his influence. It also contrasts with Gonzalez-Torres's own fondness for proclaiming his marginal status during his lifetime. He recalled how when he attended New York University as an art student few Hispanics were evident—"except for the elevator man." When he started teaching at NYU in 1987, he quipped that "the elevator man's name got onto the teacher's list by accident." "On the list of fifty-five teachers," he added gravely, "I had the only Hispanic-sounding name." (Rollins 1996: 98) Despite appealing to a marginalized status, Gonzalez-Torres largely distanced himself from identity politics and from any attempt to determine a reading of his work based upon him being gay or Hispanic. For Gonzalez-Torres, identity politics as well as the "official" discourse of multiculturalism — while perhaps they helped legitimize his presence as an artist — constituted a trap. He felt that such discourses ultimately proved too prescriptive because they tended to presume what is an appropriate aesthetic-political strategy for a Hispanic artist to adopt and also what art produced by a Cuban-American ought to look like. In particular, Gonzalez-Torres felt that such an attitude circumscribed and de-legitimized his engagement with modernist culture, particularly when it traded its critical imperatives for a tacit primitivism. He was dubious about the ideal of aesthetic and cultural "Otherness" based upon a discourse of authenticity. Gonzalez-Torres complained:
Playing against the stereotype of the "crazy, colorful Hispanic," Gonzalez-Torres instead preferred to appeal to such culturally "cooler" sources as critical theory and Minimalism, which "dared to do so little," yet formally it was "perfectly sufficient" (in Rollins: 87; in regard to the comment about Minimalism, see Spector: 17). He also appealed to canonical modernist strategies, for instance estrangement practices, which also explains why he takes such a distance from the "naturalism" of identity politics:
While he sought to revivify certain radical strategies, Gonzalez-Torres disavowed the Left-sociological wariness regarding aesthetics and art. He confessed, "I am a big sucker for formal issues." (94) Instead, he sought to reignite the critical dimensions of aesthetic ambition. Gonzalez-Torres trod a fine line however. While he distanced himself from identity politics and emphasized his aesthetic-formal commitments, he also made the question of the artist's biography central to his practice as well as to his reformulation of the legacy of minimalism and conceptualism. While appealing to the powerful attraction of aesthetic inquiry, he also asserted that he wanted to "contaminate" aesthetic forms "with something social." (94) His work may have investigated "methods of distribution, process, and audience participation," as the U.S. State Department press release claims, but his motivation was as much critical as aesthetic: if "cultural production and socioeconomics are intertwined," then he declared "either you do work for it or against it." (97) In short, if Gonzalez-Torres sought to make a discursive point, then it had to be aesthetically convincing, even seductive. The ambition to create visually evocative artworks was, however, engineered through the often rather austere aesthetic legacy of minimal and conceptual art. This meant that his art tends to be rather sparse, verging on the non-descript or sometimes the almost absent. The ambition to conjure aesthetically enticing art was, in effect, both achieved as well as offset by the presentation of an often-obdurate paucity of form. He wanted to leave a viewer with, in his own words, "something else, non-artistic yet beautifully simple." Hence, his simultaneously seductive and confounding ambition: "I love it when people say: 'But it is just two clocks next to each other. It is just light bulbs hanging.' I love the idea of being an infiltrator. I always said that I wanted to be a spy." (93)
Making a Mark
Gonzalez-Torres repeatedly stated that his prime ambition was to leave a mark, a mark that shows that it is possible to see the world otherwise. The spy in him sought to contaminate the aloof, pure forms of minimalism with social references, "looking is invested with identity: gender, socioeconomic status, race, sexual orientation. Looking is invested with lots of other texts." Yet, as we have seen, he also feared that this process of "social contamination" could prove thoroughly limiting when it provided the excuse for pre-determined, rather mechanistic readings of art. "Looking" could be contaminated, but he wanted to prove that "someone like me — the Other — can indeed deal with formal issues. This is not a white-men-only terrain." (93-94) Gonzalez-Torres therefore assumed the role of the artist-spy in order to play a double game with loaded references. He invoked autobiographical reflections as well as particular artistic, social, political and sexual affiliations, whilst playing a kind of cat and mouse game with such associations. The quest to "leave a mark" naturally focused Gonzalez-Torres's attention upon the question of memory and of memorials. Yet it is important to note that his is a photographically permeated oeuvre that simultaneously sought to undercut the monumental solidity of public sculpture. As Andrea Rosen notes, Gonzalez-Torres regarded "most of his work as being photographic in some way: the photostats, the puzzles, the billboards, the photogravures, of course the framed photographs, and even the stack pieces, since lithography is a photographic method." (Rozen: 50) It is as if his practice asks what a photographically constituted sculpture would look like or, to put it another way, it ponders what form the public monument would assume if it was exposed to the conditions of mechanical reproduction. Gonzalez-Torres was, however, a photographer who shied away from having his own photograph taken, and this reticence informed his ambition to leave a mark as well as to be an artist-infiltrator. Thus, this cat and mouse game with reference also becomes apparent with the seemingly straightforward act of titling his works. Gonzalez-Torres labeled all his works "Untitled" as if rendering them all "anonymous" or impersonal. At the same time, he places the generic "Untitled" in scare quotes suggesting that it too is somehow a suspended or suspending gesture. It is as if to say that this act of imposing a blanket of anonymity, by calling everything "untitled," can only ever amount to a provisional banishment of more specific references. Immediately following the ubiquitous, "Untitled," he usually inserted a much more evocative title in brackets often resonant with direct authorial-biographical or social-political associations or events. The modification initiates the same push and pull effect in the very act of titling his works that permeates his entire oeuvre. This is apt because Gonzalez-Torres's aspiration is to leave a mark takes the form of a trace, a trace that wipes away any particular subjective presence or resonance and yet for all that effort installs it in another form (re. the trace in Gonzalez-Torres, see also Merewhether). Conversely, while Gonzalez-Torres's portraits operate in a similar fashion, they reverse the process. The subject (or owner) furnishes dates of personal significance; that is, events significant to their lives, which are often largely incommunicable to strangers. These dates are incorporated into a list of events that sketch a portrait devoid of any visual representation. The effect of these portraits is that a life reads like a roll call of highly charged personal events, which nonetheless form opaque and transitory attachments. Gonzalez-Torres "completes" the portrait by inserting dates of wider social, political and cultural significance. Each "public" event, though far more familiar to a wider audience, reads like an incision or an intrusion within an otherwise intimate outline of a life. The push and pull effect of biography and of specific references testifies to the complex trajectory of Gonzalez-Torres's art, which upholds the Brechtian demand of breaking the "pleasure of representation" as well as the desire for a "flawless narrative," thus contaminating art with the social, yet also investing in the formal and critical power of visual art. The enticement of Gonzalez-Torres's art is that his seemingly sparse and fragile works can deploy social, aesthetic and personal resonances in such a contradictory tension. His January 1990 exhibition featured such well-known stack pieces as the monochrome light blue stack, "Untitled" (Loverboy) (1990), with its cryptic allusions to gay identity, but also (according to the artist) the clear blue skies of the Caribbean (Rollins: 89-90) This exhibition also featured the paired stacks, "Untitled" (1990), which were even more minimal and sparse except for the fact that one stack carried the inscription, "SOMEWHERE BETTER THAN THIS PLACE," the other, "NOWHERE BETTER THAN THIS PLACE." Gonzalez-Torres has been important in rearticulating the scope of artistic ambition — which has struggled to find convincing alternatives to sheer utopian projection or the avant-garde idea of the vanguard — without totally evacuating its critical aspirations. If his ambition was to leave a mark, then Gonzalez-Torres asserted that he was also "still proposing the radical idea of trying to make this a better place for everyone." (Spector: 29) Art could only articulate this aspiration in the exasperating, indeterminable passage between "somewhere better than this place" and "nowhere better than this place." He explains to Rollins that his practice is best described as the negotiation of a series of "betweens": "…between public and private, between personal and social, between the fear of loss and the joy of loving, of growing, of changing, of always becoming more, of losing oneself slowly and then being replenished all over again from scratch" (Rollins: 95). The emphatic endorsement of art's capacity to serve as an imaginative counterpoint to a more circumscribed social experience is tempered by emphasizing this sense of vulnerability, which gives the idea of the spy a less heroic and knowing quality. The sense of being caught "between" worlds or between possibilities grants such an ambition a far less commanding aspiration, though it is no less committed to critical renewal and transformation. Gonzalez-Torres was not wholly immune to the familiar aesthetic appeal to mastery though. If he risked loss and vulnerability in art, he also sought to compensate for it. He refers to the stacks as his "indestructible" pieces, thereby testifying to a complex negotiation of vulnerability. In response to loss, Gonzalez-Torres fabricates an endlessly reproducible machinery of replenishment. The urge to generosity stems from this act of replenishment. An audience dismantles the work by taking a part of it away with them, as if mimicking the religious act of communion. The audience thus may take home with them the idea that replenishment is possible in life. Yet also they gain the experience of how a work by Gonzalez-Torres is capable of infinite replenishment. It explains why he is so committed to the quandary of monumental form. The audience dissolves the stacks by taking away sheets of paper, but the stacks or piles (of candy) are continually restored to their original form. Ironically, the stacks constitute a permeable, often precarious, yet solid monument to Gonzalez-Torres's ambition to leave a mark.
Echoes
A legacy, however, is like steam or condensation. It defies any substantial definition other than that of a drifting, nebulous form — and it always seems to be the residual effect of some other pressure. When it assumes a more imposing form, it can appear fluid like water or acquire the solidity of ice. As ice, it gives the impression of formidable density and consistency. If an initiative or a new idea sets a sufficient precedence, then it can soon be regarded more as an impediment than a benefit. In the short period since his death in 1996, the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres has been claimed for many causes. The authors of Art Since 1900 declared that Gonzalez-Torres "performed a queering of … artistic forms of the sixties and seventies" and also "was influenced by poststructuralist critiques of the subject." As this description may sound a little too mechanical, they qualify it by asserting that his art is more concerned "with the making of a gay subjectivity than with its unmaking" and for that very reason they conclude that "Gonzalez-Torres attempted to carve out of heterosexual space a lyrical-elegiac place for gay subjectivity and history" (Foster: 608-610). Between the hard-nosed critique of subjectivity and the carving out of a lyrical-elegiac space, one notes not a passage from one possibility to another, but an ambition that seeks to fuse seemingly incongruous motivations. In a perceptive commentary about art discourse, Lane Relyea notes how the seemingly diffuse strategy of Gonzalez-Torres art has subsequently proved too influential a precedent:
For Relyea, Gonzalez-Torres's example has become too seductive, seemingly too apt and, as a consequence, it now lends itself to worn repetition. Relyea's diagnosis envelops the reception of Gonzalez-Torres within a blanket image of total determination. In his provocative analysis of art-historical contextual determination, Relyea outlines a process in which art is first subsumed and dominated by discourse, then subsequently superseded by the total dominance of the "experience economy." The downside of this form of analysis signals the plight of a dominant (critical) trend in art criticism, the determinate contextualization, which tends to gauge its explanatory power by a capacity to account for (and thus encapsulate) all examples. For that reason, it ultimately proves inert as an explanatory model because it must explain anything and everything the same way — in advance and without exception. Furthermore, any reading sympathetic to Gonzalez-Torres's effort to restore the critical vibrancy of aesthetics must resist such a determinate outcome. In contrast, Nicolas Bourriaud offers an unequivocally positive critical appraisal of Gonzalez-Torres when crediting him as a pioneer of "relational aesthetics." Because, ultimately, I do not find this positive alternative wholly convincing either, I wish to clarify why in detail so that I can present an alternative reading Gonzalez-Torres's legacy. Bourriaud regards relational aesthetics as a type of liberation. The "lyrical-elegiac" dimensions of Gonzalez-Torres's achievement entailed, for Bourriaud, offering "a life model that could be shared by all, and identified with by everyone" (Bourriaud: 50). Bourriaud was alert to Gonzalez-Torres's antipathy to identity politics, therefore he asserted that homosexuality constituted for Gonzalez-Torres "a form of life creating forms of art." Gonzalez-Torres anticipated "a space based in inter-subjectivity," according to Bourriaud, and this constituted the path "explored by the most interesting artists of the next decade." (51) Because it was "process-related or behavioral," such work challenged the very nature and definition of an artwork. (7) Unfortunately, Bourriaud's argument was severely hampered by his insistence upon an absolute break between the type of contemporary art he claimed to be "relational" and any predecessor. "Relational" art was "essentially unreadable" against the dominant framework of "sixties' art history," Bourriaud declared. (Bourriaud: 7) It could only be read, or made legible, by acknowledging its absolutely distinct cultural features. This is his opening claim. In effect, Bourriaud magnifies the uniqueness of relational art by minimizing its relation to the modernist legacy, the avant-garde tradition in particular. Gonzalez-Torres is, however, an ambivalent figure for the purposes of such a schismatic understanding of contemporary art because, as we have seen, he readily acknowledged the impact of predecessors such as Minimalism, Conceptual Art, Smithson and earlier estrangement practices, particularly Brecht. There are other equally profound differences in their respective approaches. Bourriaud's semi-canonization of Gonzalez-Torres's art accords with his own definition of "relational" art as a harmonizing, compensatory activity. He astutely notes how frequently the figure "two" occurs in his art —two clocks, two pillows on a crumpled bed, two mirrors, etc — and he argues that this prompts a different thinking about "ways of being together." The usual ambivalent tropes do not appear in Gonzalez-Torres's work. According to Bourriaud, his work instead offers a different insight into the couple, one that is less fraught, that is the couple as a "tranquil, twofold unit, or an ellipse." (51) Compare, however, Bourriaud's interpretation of "Untitled" (Perfect Lovers) of 1991 as a "tranquil, twofold unit" to Gonzalez-Torres's own explanation of this work:
The dramatic contrast stems from the fact that Bourriaud and Gonzalez-Torres maintain sharply differing conceptions of the relational. Gonzalez-Torres's attitude must be considered in view of the complex positions he took in regard to identity politics, the eliciting of biography and the social as an antidote to aesthetic insularity as well as the effort to rethink the memorial and mark-making capacity of art. For Bourriaud, relational aesthetics marks a distinct departure from the transgression-obsessed modernist critique because, as against utopian projection, it offers proposals for living in and accommodating the "existing world." (22, 12-13) Rather audaciously, he contends that relational art encompasses the entire scope of human relations (113) and that its generative aesthetic helps to transform the social context for the better. (13, 19) Bourriaud's key terms, "relational aesthetics" as well as "postproduction," indicate that he wants to espouse new models of cultural production better suited to current socio-economic conditions — namely the advent of the tertiary economy characterized by its burgeoning services sector, information and communication technologies and its "liquid" immaterial forms (as compared to the leaden secondary economy of industrial production, whose stolid forms so fascinated Minimalism). (Simpson 2002; Bourriaud 2002) For all the insistence upon "harmonious parity," Bourriaud too admits that the world is not wholly "relational," and this determines the necessity of envisaging countervailing spaces such as the interstitial. Art is compensatory; it fills in for what is lacking. In a "classic" aesthetic move, Bourriaud defines the interstitial spaces of relational aesthetics as a space apart. In other words, contrary to his original intentions, he implicitly evokes art as a unique space separate from everyday experience, which is marred by diminished social relations. For Bourriaud, this interstitial counter-space provides an aesthetic experience of the relational encounter that is uniquely convivial, democratic and non-authoritarian (57) as well as inter-subjectively communicative and interdisciplinary. (16) In short, the space of relational aesthetics is everything the social space is not. It is this eudemonic emphasis within Bourriaud's outline of relational aesthetics that has drawn the most criticism. Claire Bishop criticizes it because it fails to articulate the antagonistic qualities of democracy. Her preferred alternative would be a "relational antagonism" that would provide a more concrete ground "for rethinking our relationship to the world and to one another." (Bishop: 79) But wouldn't this revised assertion more or less cohere with Gonzalez-Torres's original position, the so-called precursor of relational art? Complicating this perceived affinity, Hal Foster rebuked the claims of relational aesthetics using a caricature of Gonzalez-Torres's art to make his point:
Foster of course is one of the co-authors of the book Art Since 1900, which praised Gonzalez-Torres's work as "lyrical-elegiac." He challenged relational aesthetic's conflation of "an open work and an inclusive society," and remarked that its interdisciplinary openness produced "a Babelesque confusion" resulting in the risk of "illegibility."(22) Contrary to these rebukes of relational aesthetics, Gonzalez-Torres's legacy is to show that it is not a matter of delineating those practices wholly exempt from complicity with (say) the "experience economy" — such an assertion would suggest that contemporary practices resided on either side of an abyss, with one set of practices lucidly adhering to an antagonistic democratic politics, while the other covertly conforms to the imperatives of globalization at its worst and the experience economy at its most vacant. Gonzalez-Torres's example has been to assert that there are no practices free from complicity with the shortcomings of this mediagenic culture. Yet, for him, this constituted no recipe for acquiescence. Contemporary practices must necessarily risk illegibility because, for Gonzalez-Torres, they must seek to espouse "a better place," while at the same time alert to how and when cultural production is intertwined with socioeconomics. While Gonzalez-Torres invokes love and the beauty of chance as key elements of his art, they are paired with death, erasure and a fundamental precariousness, which remains at odds with Bourriaud's comparatively one-dimensional, eudemonic focus on harmonious parity and cohabitation. Passages are invoked (whether of time or of the passage of the work as it is dismantled and reconstituted again), but so too are incisions, which cut through the narrative like puncture marks. The conception of the relational in Gonzalez-Torres is different not simply because he evokes that seemingly limbo zone of aspiration between "somewhere better than this place" and "nowhere better than this place." It is not just that personal attitudes to love and loss inform the difference in approach and rhetoric between Bourriaud and Gonzalez-Torres either. Illegibility, in short, plays a central role in Gonzalez-Torres's espousal of the relational in his art. It is not an end, but a risk. If the date pieces were developed with a sense of a perceived tele-visual overload in mind, then Catherine Liu remarks that it demonstrates how "the event is an obsolete category: it is the relationship between events that signifies" (Liu: 131) Confronting illegibility also means confronting what is viable as much as disconnected, even if it means confronting what has become illegible in the relationship between events. Even while declaring, "this is not life," and instead seeking to break the connection between art, representation and "the pleasure of the flawless narrative," it still means devoting one's attention to recasting relationships, including those of art. It is not surprising that Andrea Rosen argues that Gonzalez-Torres "was not all Brechtian." Rather she asserts that his "true aesthetic talent was the ability to transform the cliché into the exceptionally meaningful and touching" (Rozen: 47). But which clichés are these? Our entangled, mediatized experience calls for different practices as well as different approaches to art. Gonzalez-Torres strives to undercut the three-dimensional solidity of sculpture, for instance, by permeating it with the equally frail and transient properties of the photographic cliché. The somewhat paradoxical consequence of these deft moves is to expose the "limits of monumentalization." (45) Think of what constitutes an artwork by Gonzalez-Torres: what is its aesthetic dimension and when? Is the work the certificate that an owner of these various, disparate works may possess, which seems a paltry aesthetic object to acquire (does this represent the perverse revenge of the most obdurate Conceptual Art)? Yet it is the certificate that enables one to restore the stacks or candy pours or to re-install, say, the billboard of the unmade bed. Andrea Rosen's essay on the artist in the catalogue raisonné goes to great lengths to assure the reader that there is actually a sufficient vestige of an art object by Gonzalez-Torres to own. This betrays a certain anxiety over their status. Even a barely probing remark from Rollins about the status of the work is enough to throw Gonzalez-Torres himself into a quandary: "Your question is more puzzling to me than I had previously thought because, yes, an individual piece of paper from one of the stacks does not constitute the 'piece' itself, but in fact it is a piece." (Rollins: 95) The quandary is that these endlessly replicable, individual pieces (candies or sheets of paper) do not constitute the work itself, yet they are far more "aesthetic" than the mundane certificates, which are all there is to testify to ownership of an artwork by Felix Gonzalez-Torres. The certificates, in turn, signal a pact, certainly relational, but a pact to redraw and reconstitute the parameters of an art object and an art event — including a pact around the art of Gonzalez-Torres in the wake of Felix Gonzalez-Torres the human being, which is evoked by fashioning a new version of monumental form through an odd, "indestructible" process of reproducibility and disappearance.
An apprehensive remembrance?
It is no doubt correct to say that Gonzalez-Torres was "not all Brechtian" —whatever that might mean — but this is because there is a decidedly Benjaminian inflection to his practice, which is rarely mentioned. When Gonzalez-Torres speaks of infiltrating aesthetics and showing that it "is not a white-men-only terrain," he is engaged in performing a kind of "ethical rescue" in accordance with Walter Benjamin's thinking on history. To achieve an ethical rescue as an artist, Gonzalez-Torres infiltrates aesthetics not to disparage it or to assume some purportedly pure and uncontaminated position external to the art world and its machinations, but in order to revive the critical potential within artistic practice or aesthetic inquiry. This is not to say that this critical potential was dead or dormant prior to Gonzalez-Torres. It is more to acknowledge that this potential needs to be constantly revived and renewed, perhaps with each generation, or according to each new circumstance — without every time having to insist on a new label because art has entered some wholly new paradigm or that it has encountered some wholly unique situation. How is this ethical rescue to be achieved? Benjamin raised the prospect of such a rescue as central to his rethinking of history. He wanted to promote "a form of remembrance [Eingedenken]" capable of modifying what seems determined in and as history (Benjamin: 471). If, as Gonzalez-Torres contends, aesthetic choices are political and artistic "forms gather meaning from their historical moment," then what purpose does his social contamination of the aesthetic serve? (Rollins: 93-94). First of all, the proposition that artistic forms carry historical weight is taken as read by Benjamin, who instead insists that this doesn't mean their "historical moment" (as Gonzalez-Torres puts it) or their form is determined once and for all:
It is clear that a similar conception of historical and critical transformation informs Gonzalez-Torres's attitude to aesthetic form, whether it be the social contamination of seemingly impervious and hermetically sealed aesthetic forms or his fabrication of an aesthetic machinery of endless reproduction. In an extended commentary on this aspect of Benjamin's thought, Rainer Rochlitz argues that Benjamin's approach can be best typified as an aesthetic treatment of history. By this, he does not mean anything disparaging, such as that Benjamin confuses categories that should remain distinct. Instead, it means that the historical commentator should not be "indifferent to his or her objects, that they belong to the historian's own irreplaceable experience and that he or she is responsible for a past always threatened by the interests of the present." (Rochlitz, 1996: 250) Rochlitz argues that Benjamin sought to counter this interest by attempting to "give voice to what in history has been condemned to mutism." (254) The ethical dimension arises for Benjamin precisely in giving voice to what has been forgotten or repressed in the success stories of history. The peculiar significance of Benjamin's approach, Rochlitz notes, is that it is "both traditionalist and critical." It is critical due to its ambition to rescue an oppressed tradition. Again, this is pertinent to Gonzalez-Torres because, by acknowledging and engaging with the tradition of practice that informs his own work, he is able to transform and renew its legacy (such as minimalism). Without such a profane faculty of memory, Rochlitz contends, "the narcissistic present forgets its debts toward all aspirations for freedom that have been vanquished in the past." Remembrance is the irritant that disrupts historical narratives presuming the untrammeled success or superiority of the present — and without this gnawing remembrance, the injustices of the past can haunt the present because, as Rochlitz amplifies Benjamin's point, such injustices "can be reproduced with impunity." (254) What is intriguing about this discussion is that Rochlitz finds a particular place for art in Benjamin's scheme of remembrance. While Rochlitz concedes that art might not always aim to mount an ethical rescue, it nevertheless does save "from mutism and forgetting certain irreplaceable experiences to which society assigns no other rightful place." (254) In Gonzalez-Torres's oeuvre the commitment to an ethical rescue is exemplified by a work such as, "Untitled" (Museum of Natural History), 1990, which is based on the monument to Theodore Roosevelt at the Museum of Natural History in New York. It depicts the former president on horseback straddled by a half-naked Native American Indian on one side and an African American on the other. As Andrea Rosen notes, "their positioning implies a direct relationship between their hands and Roosevelt's boot straps. Perhaps when this sculpture was made in 1936 this positioning was considered generous and uplifting, now it clearly implies a servile relationship" (Rosen: 45) Gonzalez-Torres does not focus on these figures however. Instead he concentrates upon the words carved into the monument glorifying Roosevelt's vast array of personal qualities: Patriot, Historian, Ranchman, Scientist, Soldier, Humanitarian, Author, Conservationist, Naturalist, Scholar, Explorer, Statesman. "Untitled" (Museum of Natural History) is composed of a sequence of photographs that isolate these descriptions within single frames thereby divorcing them from their context within the original monument, but also magnifying this roll call of abilities. The tactic accords with Gonzalez-Torres's broader attempt to explore and unravel the monumentality of the monument. Whereas the original ambition was to set in stone a historical record of personal and social values purportedly impervious to the corrosion of time and shifting social attitude (supposedly like aesthetic forms themselves), Gonzalez-Torres's tactic has the effect of rendering what has been set in stone read like hyperbole. Magnified and isolated, the descriptions actually appear less stable and rather more incongruous. This penetrating scrutiny is all the more resonant because of the understated formal composure Gonzalez-Torres lends to the sequence. In black and white, formally balanced and rigid, they appear as grave and stolid as the original monument, though they have now become monuments to historical reflection and contestation. For Rochlitz, a reading of Benjamin's ethical rescue of history offers a useful alternative insight into such an artistic ambition. It testifies to how art may serve as "the symbolic crystallization par excellence of those of humanity's aborted dreams that cannot or could not be translated into action or institutions, that could leave no trace in history." (Rochlitz: 255) Despite deriving an inventive explanation of modern and contemporary art from Benjamin's philosophy of history, Rochlitz nonetheless takes issue with how Benjamin confers an "implicitly aesthetic quality" upon revolution. Rochlitz feels that this aesthetic interpretation of revolution mitigates the critical inventiveness and challenge of remembrance as an ethical rescue. This aesthetic appeal is evident when Benjamin resorts to the destructive impulse, with its catch-cry of "to make room." The revolutionary-aesthetic impulse tends to have ears only for an exuberant vitality, a well-known and well-worn aesthetic model. Yet to make room means just as readily to take up space. The violent usurping resounds as the supreme revolutionary amplification. Its appeal to rupture revels in an ascetic ideal of purity. The ascetic appeal of the revolutionary stance reinforces quite conventional aesthetic models because it relies on the supposition that the aesthetic stands for the encapsulation or anticipation of a harmonious plenitude beyond struggle and tension—a proposition that is inimical to the challenge of remembrance or the ethical rescue. Rochlitz believes both Benjamin and Hannah Arendt are prone to the seduction of a revolutionary-aesthetic epiphany identified with a "density of a full and fulfilled time that characterizes works of art and celebrations." This is quite unlike the unfulfilled image of remembrance that Rochlitz finds compelling in Benjamin's thought, and in which he finds a rather different model of art's possibilities. In fact, Rochlitz argues that the revolutionary-aesthetic zeal functions more like its "alter-ego." Due to its vibrancy, and its "take-no-prisoners" uncompromising attitude, it has been the dominant counter-cultural aesthetic model throughout modernity. Yet, it underscores a conservative, primordial platform: it cherishes "the abyss of pure spontaneity" as its fulfillment—"origin is renewed, without any dissociation between signifier, signified, and referent, and without 'homogenous empty time'." (248) If art restores that which "society assigns no other rightful place," if it articulates the possibilities of society's aborted dreams, then this is because art now responds to different imperatives other than the urge for spontaneous fulfillment or the quest for pure origins or the idea that whatever happens is "inevitable" due to "progress." While Gonzalez-Torres's identification of the artist as a spy is not wholly free of similarly ambitious knowledge claims with which aesthetic thinking is associated and thus prone to, it is nonetheless committed to the idea that art lets other ideas as well as other possibilities of living resound. In a Benjaminian mode, art may recall what the course of its own history has condemned to the "obsolete" bin and seek to revive and reformulate its critical possibilities. Hence, Gonzalez-Torres's dictum of working in a spy-like manner extends to reviving a critical ambition for art that does not rely on the purity of the avant-garde postulate, the "future alone." In a sense, Gonzalez-Torres helped to revive, renew and transform the critical idea of art as the struggle of the here and now. Like Rochlitz, Gonzalez-Torres urges affiliation with a less euphoric aesthetic stance: "I want to work within the system. I want to work within the system and try to create a better place." This better place is no longer a utopian projection, as Bourriaud grasped (though he failed to recognize how critical remembrance was equally central to Gonzalez-Torres). It is instead articulated within the narrow social-cultural confines which confront and limit us all and which many contemporary practices seek to redraw in a variety of different ways. Gonzalez-Torres, for his part, continued to express the hope that art fulfils some need—although he confessed to Rollins in their interview that the precise need for art is difficult to ascertain (particularly under the conditions of cultural modernity):
Today, the art of Gonzalez-Torres has clearly been deemed important, yet that individual recognition does not advance an understanding of the need for contemporary art in general. Modernity brought with it a perennial perplexity about critical-cultural issues, and this is not simply due to the Enlightenment baggage it carried with it. It is equally due to the fact that modernist aesthetic legacy meant that cultural and aesthetic autonomy had the unsettling consequence of leaving art socially unanchored. Being dis-embedded simply means that certain cultural practices, such as art, "ceased to be, on the one hand, subordinate to pre-given, externally fixed social tasks, and on the other, to be internally organized around determinate social occasions and situations and addressed to some particular, restricted circle of recipients." (Markus: 20) In short, the conditions of modernity unleashed new possibilities — and new quandaries — for art because it is no longer anchored to any determinate social setting either in time and space. By autonomy, Markus argues that art is socially dis-embedded because it is no longer embedded in the traditional calendar of events or activities at given times and within set places within a community, such as religious ceremonies or communal festivals. This is the condition of its possibility within modernity, but as the quote by Gonzalez-Torres betrays, this situation is as much the source of profound anxiety as of possibility. Autonomy achieves an ambivalent freedom because it spells a certain dislocation or lack of social anchoring. One indication of this reality is that Gonzalez-Torres expresses the hope of a social and cultural need for art (especially his own), while simultaneously committing his art to unraveling representational givens, to articulating the breakdown of communication as well as upsetting the expectations of his audience by infiltrating art with non-art. Hence, Gonzalez-Torres insists upon the spy-like insertion of other stories that disrupt the pleasure of certain smoothly coherent and well-established social, cultural and aesthetic narratives. His work therefore enacts this disruption as a kind of remembrance of voices not usually heard in the standard acts of commemoration and of memorial building—hence the queering of art history and admitting the "crazy Hispanics" to the canon as coolly intelligent spies. Gonzalez-Torres's practice is genuinely apprehensive because it concedes that the previously forlorn possibilities it may revive to be heard could just as easily result in deformation as much as transformation. And such a possibility is difficult to contend with, let alone take responsibility for — the transgressive impulse in art has always been naïve in assuming only the best of outcomes. The impetus of Gonzalez-Torres's practice is to explore what constitutes one's possibilities, including one's critical and aesthetic legacies, but also what delimits them. At the same time, the additional impetus of his practice is to ask for more: nowhere better than this place, but please something better. The challenge entails facing up to the contemporary realities of art — its commodity status, its marginal place in the media environment, its circumscribed cultural role and paradoxical potential within modernity — while still subscribing to the view that art can leave a mark of alternative subjectivities, which articulate that "perhaps it is possible to have a different view of life." This can only be achieved — or revived and maintained as an aesthetic possibility — by probing the contemporary horizon of what is possible and by acknowledging the aesthetic as an enticing, but rather tenuous arena of ambition. Within art, it remains possible to rehearse and examine the feasibility of our roles as cultural-critical actors. This is not because the aesthetic amounts to, as Bourriaud would claim, the relational compensation for an impinged social space. It is not compensatory, but rather apprehensive because, if it does proclaim an interstitial space, it is not in the vain act of inhabiting a separate space, somewhere apart fulfilled and wholly "relational." Its is apprehensive because it supports the precarious ambition of inhabiting a less than adequate space and articulating alternative critical possibilities within that less than ideal space of real, lived possibility. By appealing to Brecht and thus to estrangement, Gonzalez-Torres not only heralds the contemporary relevance of minimalism and post-minimalist practices, but also earlier modernist practices such as Russian Constructivism and Dada as well as the theater practices of Brecht, Piscator or Meyerhold. Estrangement is, however, perhaps not the best description to privilege in Gonzalez-Torres's case because it places too much emphasis upon detachment. The apprehensive, on the other hand, stresses not simply distance (though it does necessarily encompass it to a degree), but it also accentuates an incongruous relatedness; a relatedness of among other things, art and life, without any presumption that they might fold into one another, which implies that the apprehensive must be distinguished from estrangement as well as from the more recent account of the relational outlined by relational aesthetics. The incongruous relatedness evoked by the apprehensive signals a barb-like relation because it highlights both what is connected to as well as how it is torn from what it connects to; it urges a double-take in which one is prompted to consider again what we presume to be self-evident and naturally related. A practice such as Felix Gonzalez-Torres's does not eliminate the perennial quandary of the critical and cultural need for art under the conditions of modernity, but it does urge its reconsideration. His is an apprehensive practice for the simple reason that Gonzalez-Torres is not always a "knowing" spy, but quite often a perplexed one. He is able to articulate that perplexity in an aesthetically suggestive manner due to the way in which he infiltrates minimalist idioms with deceptively simple quotidian references. The outcome is work that has the extraordinary power to render everyday references strangely brittle, just as his art appears equally brittle and sparse at times by risking being barely evident and thus risking appearing insubstantial, even quaint. The art of Gonzalez-Torres risked inscribing a life as a sequence of juxtaposed events that are simultaneously public and private, legible and illegible. If it stands for any need it is the need to say, in paraphrasing Gonzalez-Torres, "I was here, it is possible to have a different view of life." Then in a slightly altered register: "I was here. I was hungry. I was defeated. I was happy. I was sad. I was in love. I was afraid. I was hopeful. I had an idea, and I had a good purpose, and that's why I made works of art" (Rollins: 101) It is an art practice that risks this rather ordinary brittleness and in the process strives to make it aesthetically evocative and compelling. The apprehensive dimension of Gonzalez-Torres's practice is not a weakness or a fault, but becomes truly telling when it derives from the ambition to "break the pleasure of representation," while simultaneously producing work that looks "like something else, non-artistic yet beautifully simple." Art therefore can be regarded as the tenuous possibility that strives to articulate an apprehensive adherence. It defines that most unmanageable propensity to articulate what takes hold where it is least binding, to pause at the point where we are said to be "represented" and to make these representations more vulnerable. This is not the point of resignation or disempowerment; instead it signals the start of our critical commitments. Art articulates what does not relate in our most seemingly firmly fixed social relations and seeks instead to explore what possibilities have not been allowed. In this way, it announces, perpetuates and accentuates the apprehensive ambition of the aesthetic idea through contemporary practice. It has become art's most tenuous yet deceptively enduring possibility.
Bibliography
Benjamin, Walter. [N8, 1], The Arcades Project. trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999. Bishop, Claire. "Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics." October, 110 (Fall, 2004): 51-79. Bourriaud, Nicolas. Esthétique relationnelle. 1998; subsequently in English as Relational Aesthetics. Trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods, with Mathieu Copeland. Dijon: Les Presses du réel, 2002. Bourriaud, Nicolas. Postproduction. Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World. New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2002. Foster, Hal. "Arty Party." London Review of Books, 4 December 2003. Foster, Hal, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh. Art Since 1900: Modernism, Anti-Modernism, Postmodernism. London: Thames & Hudson, 2004. Liu, Catherine. "Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Rastovski." Flash Art 142(October, 1988): 130-1. Markus, Gyorgy. "A Society of Culture: the Constitution of Modernity." Rethinking Imagination: Culture and Creativity. Eds. Gillian Robinson and John Rundell. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Merewhether, Charles. "A Lasting Impression." Trace. Ed. Anthony Bond. Liverpool: Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art in association with Tate Gallery Liverpool, 1999. Nickas, Robert. "Felix Gonzalez-Torres: All the Time in the World", Flash Art 161 (1991): 86-89. Relyea, Lane. "All Over and At Once." X-Tra 6.1 (2003): 3-23. Rochlitz, Rainer. The Disenchantment of Art: The Philosophy of Walter Benjamin. Trans. Jane Marie Todd. New York: The Guildford Press, 1996. Rollins, Tim. "Felix Gonzalez-Torres, (interview)." Between Artists: Twelve contemporary American artists interview twelve contemporary American artists. Eds. Lucinda Barnes, Miyoshi Barosh, William S. Bartman, Rodney Sappington. Los Angeles: ART Press, 1996: 82-101. Rosen, Andrea. "Untitled (The Neverending Portrait)," Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Catalogue Raisonné. Ed. Dietmar Elger. Ostfildern bei Stuttgart: Cantz Verlag, 1997. Schiller, Friedrich. On the Aesthetic Education of Man (in a Series of Letters), Trans. & ed. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L.A. Willoughby. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, (1801) 1967. Simpson, Bennett. "Public Relations-Nicolas Bourriaud-interview." Artforum. April (2001):47-8. Spector, Nancy. Felix Gonzalez-Torres. New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1995. US Department of State. "Works by U.S. Artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres to Represent United States at 2007 Venice Biennale, Exhibitions Also Selected for 2006 Biennales in Cairo, Dakar and Sao Paulo." Media Note, Office of the Spokesman, U.S. Department of State, Washington, D.C., April 4, 2006/337. |
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Andrew McNamara teaches art history and theory at QUT, Brisbane, Australia, where he also coordinates a research group, "Arts media, design and modernity." He is the co-editor with Ann Stephen and Philip Goad of Modernism & Australia: Documents on art, design and architecture 1917-1967. He is currently striving to complete a study, "An apprehensive aesthetic: art after modernity." |
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