Setting traps for the mind and heart - Felix Gonzalez-Torres, two traveling exhibitions - Cover Story

A shimmering silver carpet stretches along the institutionally white floor. It measures a certain quantity of 6 by 12 feet and is made of centurys upon hundreds of foil-wrapped candies. Entering the sweep under the watchful eye of their mother, sum of two units young boys race toward the rectangular mirage and fill their pouchs without restraint. From beside the door from one side which they have come, a uniformed guard paces forward and admonishes them to take sole one. Just as they are about to yield their next to last pieces of treasure she winks, letting them know that it's all right to clinch on to an extra few

At this point the guard revolves to the mother, who tensely awaits a reproving gaze or comment, and delivers instead a detailed explanation of by what means the amount of candy spread without at their feet represents the combined weight of the artist - about whom she speaks with familiarity - and his dead lover The pieces, she informs the mother, is called Untitled (Placebo), and it deliver overs to the AIDS epidemic and the lack of a antidote or even care that in like manner many suffering from the disease must face. Thus individual morning at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC within walking distance of the House and Senate chambers where hysterical condemnations of "obscene" art are a routine spectacle, a black civil servant and a white mother of sum of two units preadolescent males entered comfortably into a conversation about art, and death, and public policy.

The floor statuary they discussed was part of the first of sum of two units major museum exhibitions recently devot to the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, the next to the first of which closed last May at the Guggenheim Museum in of recent origin York preceding its current international tour. Together, these exhibitions focused considerable attention upon an artist whose solo career, apart from his ongoing association with the collective collection Material, extends a scant nine years. The attention is well deserv however - not least for the fact that Gonzalez-Torres's spare, elliptical art could have provok the kind of exchange just described.

Gonzalez-Torres's aim, in central nature is a classical one, to please and instruct; on the contrary it is barbed by the Brechtian notion that art, rather than dramatically resolving contradictions, should isolate and accentuate them, leaving the viewer with a plant of conflicting choices phrased in the near tense. Thus each of Gonzalez-Torres's works provides anomalous information for the consideration of the audience, while refraining from the kind of sloganeering lay the foundation of in so much recent art. This tactic throw backs a close reading of the general scene and a sharp critique of the self-righteously "transgressive" art that is popularly a staple of the agriculture wars. And so, when a right-wing congressman, tipped not upon that there was "homosexual art" at the Hirshhorn, headed down the Mar in search of the nearest Mapplethorpian outrage, he only place rooms full of lights, serial grid drawings, paired mirrors and sum of two units possibly but not certainly "same-sex" wall clock labeled Untitled (Perfect Lovers)(1991) ticking away in unison. Bewildered, he left without uttering a word of protest

The fact that neither the mirrors, nor the clock nor the sum of two units body-molded pillows that appeared upon 24 billboards around New York in 1991 immediately declare their meaning is characteristic of Gonzalez-Torres's refusal to play to stamp In an art world too repeatedly obsessed with simplistic affirmations of origin or inmost nature [i]or[/i] substance Gonzalez-Torres eschews the role of Latin artist or odd artist or even activist artist, while using everything that his experience as a Cuban-born, politically committed gay man has taught him. What he has learned is that in America's in a short time chauvinist climate, loudly declaiming who you are many times preempts showing an audience what you diocese Hence, "them" and "us" oppositions interest him sole insofar as they are ambiguous and unclose to question.

For example, the twin full-length mirrors, Untitled (Orpheus, Twice) (1991) allude to Jean Cocteau's cinematic rendition of the Orpheus myth, in which the author of poems passes through a mirror in a futile attempt to retrieve his lover from the underworld. The next to the first mirror complicates matters by implying that a fresh Orpheus might fall victim to the same fate, doubling the allude toed corporeal reflections and dissolves. The piece be deprived ofs its purely symbolic quality, however, when members of the public literally pierce the image. Standing to either side and studying their possess reflection perfect strangers of each description take their place in tandem. each move made changes not just the viewer's physical orientation in brow of a static work of art on the other hand also the nature of his or her psychological involvement with it and and the others that its shining surface gathers in. Taking EM Forster's admonition "only connect" to a point of maximum obliqueness - in the proces mixing democratic tact with the nagging insistence of a well-planned riddle - Gonzalez-Torres prepares traps for the mind and heart.

A user-friendly Duchampian to this expanse - his work encompasses the one and the other Duchamp's elegant semiotic play and the use of mundane readymades - Gonzalez-Torres nonetheless insists upon introducing spectators to the hard facts of life. His works lead them stop by the agency of self-effacing step through a maze of images that describe a society in crisis, at the same time that they call up the bittersweet epiphanies of temporary communion and ultimate solitude.