Félix González-Torres

Félix González-Torres or Felix Gonzalez-Torres (November 26, 1957 – January 9, 1996) was a Cuban-born American visual artist.

He lived and worked primarily in New York City between 1979 and 1995 after attending university in Puerto Rico.

González-Torres’s practice incorporates a minimalist visual vocabulary and certain artworks that are composed of everyday materials such as strings of light bulbs, paired wall clocks, stacks of paper, and individually wrapped candies.

González-Torres is known for having made significant contributions to the field of conceptual art in the 1980s and 1990s.

His practice continues to influence and be influenced by present-day cultural discourses.

The billboard works date from 1989 to 1995.

The billboard works consist of specific images or texts that are installed at billboard scale.

It is essential to 14 of the 17 billboard works that they must be installed in multiple, diverse, public/outdoor sets of locations (ideally 24 locations at a time).

Documentation of each billboard location is an essential aspect of these works.

The ‘birds in sky’ works date from 1989 to 1995.

Images of birds in the sky are featured across many bodies of work in Gonzalez-Torres’s practice, including billboards, doubles, framed photographs, paper stack, pedestals/platforms, and puzzles.

The ‘curtain’ works date from 1989 to 1995.

The fabric curtain work is intended to be installed on existing windows as standard curtains would typically appear.

There are five beaded curtain works, each with a specific bead pattern, and one fabric curtain work.

Beaded curtain works must be installed in locations where individuals would naturally have the choice to pass through them and the work’s dimensions vary with installation.

The ‘candy works’ date from 1990 to 1993.

The dimensions for the majority of the candy works include an “ideal weight.” (In total there are 20 candy works. Fifteen of the candy works have ideal ‘weights’, four of these ‘ideal weights’ may correlate to an average body weight of an adult male, and three may correlate to a combined average body weight of two adult men.) The medium for each candy work includes “endless supply” as well as “dimensions vary with installation.” When candies are present in a manifestation of a candy work, it is integral that viewers must be permitted to choose to take individual pieces of candy from the work.

The candies may or may not be replenished at any time.

Candy works can exist in more than one place at a time and can vary from installation to installation based on the owner’s or authorized borrower’s interpretations.

Each of the candy works are unique.

One particular example is the way Gonzalez-Torres structured a lecture on the occasion of a solo-exhibition of his work at The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago in 1994.

Following a slide show of various artworks and exhibitions in which his work was included, Gonzalez-Torres proceeded to read a prepared statement reflecting on the current national deficit, government budget allocations for public housing versus military spending, incarceration and poverty rates, and inequitable wealth distribution.

He closed the lecture with a quote from a New York Times article that establishes a legacy of contention around the separation of church and state.

This methodology was intended to foster individuals’ right and responsibility to have their own point of view.

Over time the work has been interpreted through varying critical lenses, including: the subjective construction of histories, questions of monumentality and attachment to permanency; the profoundness of love and partnership, codes and resilience of queer love; the role of ownership; perceptions of value and authority; discourse around death, loss, and the potentiality of renewal; questions of display and conditions of reception, notions of disidentification; the role and subversiveness of beauty; the rewards and consequences of generosity; arbitrary delineations between private and public selves/places; social, political, and personal dimensions of the AIDS epidemic; questions of established economic and political structures; occupation of the margins and infiltration of centers of power; the instability of language and what is connoted vs. denoted; somatic responses/forms of knowledge; etc. At the core of so many of the artist’s works is the physical experience of the works and their capacity to be manifest in perpetually changing circumstances.

Gonzalez-Torres stated that his work requires an audience, following Bertolt Brecht’s theory of Epic Theatre.

This is a theory that means an audience member is primed to have an individualized response to a performance that leads them to effect change in the world.

Gonzalez-Torres maintained that his work should always remain open to new and changing interpretations.

While Gonzalez-Torres’s work is conceptual, the formal qualities of the work are especially powerful in their ability to elicit individualized emotional responses from each viewer.

“My work is about the daily dealing with events, and objects that form, transform, and affect my positioning.”

Categories and Bodies of Work most often reflect the way that Gonzalez-Torres commonly referred to works in his lifetime.

Certain works may fit into more than one category/body of work.

Some bodies of work by González-Torres's are accompanied by Certificates of Authenticity and Ownership.

The certificate includes information about the parameters for installing or exhibiting the work, the conceptual nature of the work, as well as the owner's integral role in the artwork.

González-Torres died in Miami in 1996 from AIDS-related illness.

González-Torres was trained as a photographer and his oeuvre incorporates this medium in varying ways.

He is well known for works that transform commonplace materials into installations that foster meaningful responses from audiences, as well as works with which audiences can choose to physically interact, and works that may be manifested anew and can change each time they are exhibited.

González-Torres stated “the only thing permanent is change,” always questioning the stability of the art object.

Throughout much of González-Torres's practices, he purposefully incorporated dissonant information and formats.

Examples of these contradictions include the way he structured courses as a professor, wrote press releases and texts, gave lectures, participated in interviews, and created varying strategies for each body of work.