Episode 68: Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ Untitled (March 5th) #2 (1991)

VOICE 1: It's a pair of light bulbs. They're hanging against a white wall. Incandescent light bulbs. They're glowing warm yellow. They're on individual cables that sort of. They hang from. There's a nail, I think. A cable sort of fall looping around each other in that way that, you know, Christmas lights do when you leave them in a box too long.

When they hit the floor, there's a coil or a knot or something where the excess length is taken up before they both plug into the wall. It's hard to see from where I am, but I think they both plug into the same socket. They remind me of like a workshop set of lights. Someone's just needed extra light somewhere and they've strung up a pair of light bulbs. If I didn't know better, I wouldn't even think this was a piece of art. This is someone needing more light.

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Growing up, my parents had a small, pleasant cottage in a small, pleasant town in New Hampshire. It was located, appropriately on a street called Pleasant Street, which was a few miles from Pleasant Lake, and in their younger and spryer days, they would go for runs around the lake and then come home sweaty and enjoy a cold, well-deserved beer on the porch. I remember that at the beginning of the summer, when they were working up to the full lap around the lake, they’d stop and turn around at a predetermined marker that they called the Kissing Trees. It was always fun to walk by the Kissing Trees. That beautiful, unique little tweak of nature: two trees fully wrapped around each other, like they were embracing. Just a heartwarming, familiar signpost.

Until one summer, when one tree was gone. My mom noticed it on her run of the season. It was a year after she and my dad had split up. And it felt poetic; she was writing a lot of poetry then, and this metaphor was too good, and too sad, to pass up. The remaining tree had rub marks and discolorations from where the other tree had been fused to it. Why leave one tree standing, when you could just have easily cut them both down? How much harder must it have been to take one down? How do you even do that? I was fourteen that summer, and it was a painful time in my life. It was painful to be at that cottage. I didn’t have a lot to give to other people who were suffering, I remember that. But I also remember feeling bad for the tree that had been removed, chunk by chunk. And worse for the one left behind.

If it’s not already kind of obvious, this episode is going to be sad. But like that metaphor, the artwork we’re looking at is too good to pass up, even if it’s particularly easy to pass it by. Plenty of people wouldn’t even think of it as an artwork at all, and certainly not a particularly sad one. It’s not that different from something you’d see in a display at Home Depot. It’s just two lit lightbulbs, hung high, attached to a slightly dusty black extension cord that reaches into a plug at the base of the wall. A staff member at the museum turns it on every day, and off at the end of the day, when the museum closes.

But as you’ve probably already guessed, the artwork is not about the material objects. Not really. It’s about the metaphor. It’s about an artist and activist named Felix Gonzalez-Torres, who was born in Cuba in 1957, and would be 67 if he were still alive. But he’s not. He died of AIDS-related complications in 1996 at the age of 38, at the tail end of the long decade plus of the AIDS-related deaths of a whole generation of gay men in the U.S. Including his long-term partner, Ross Laycock, whose birthday was March 5th, and who died of AIDS in January of 1991 at the age of 32. He’s the other light bulb. And these two unadorned bulbs are meant to share their burning illumination, together, for as long as they can, gradually extinguishing, until one goes out entirely. And then they’re both replaced.

This artwork is one of many that Gonzalez-Torres created for Ross as a memorial, and they are for Ross, but like all the best metaphors, they’re never exclusively for one person so much as they are about a larger, universal idea. And here, it’s loss. The loss of a lover, a partner; the loss of this entire generation – the art they would have made, the children they would have had, the rights and acceptance they would have fought for. But it always comes back to something deeply small and intimate. Two bulbs. Two clocks, ticking in unison. A photograph of an empty, unmade bed with matching divots in the pillows, letting you practically feel the warmth slowly leaching from the mattress. You can almost smell the slightly sour sweetness of the room, the couple just up, together, downstairs making coffee. And yes, it’s sad. It’s sad in the same way that acknowledging the fleetingness of everything beautiful in our lives is sad. You don’t necessarily have to project these works onto the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and early 90s, thinking about all the partners lost as they lay wasting away, and hidden away, in hospital rooms. There are other deaths, covid deaths, ordinary illness, even just the quiet normalcy of a beautiful, old-age death, that will ultimately separate lovers all eventually. Because it does come for us all. It’s just part of the unspoken contract of being alive, and finding love in the first place.

But when you do consider his work as a pivotal part of the AIDS crisis, and the artistic response to it, it gains a particular potent specificity. For as universally resonant as his art is, Gonzalez-Torres considered himself an activist for this specific cause. His work can’t help but contain his politics, some more explicitly than others. Everything he does takes found or industrial or otherwise everyday objects and materials and asks that we see them with new eyes, through the lens of this mass tragedy. Not just strings of lights and ticking clocks, but stacks of paper, even individually-wrapped candies, like in his Untitled (Candy Works) series from 1990-93, where a pile of candies sit on the gallery floor, weighted to match the average body weight of an adult male. Visitors are permitted to take pieces for themselves, and sometimes the candies are replenished, and sometimes they aren’t. The metaphor can allude to the hollowing out of a body by AIDS, as weight loss was such a horrific and visible symptom of the disease. Losing weight was a clear sign of a downward slope. And it draws attention to the senselessness to imagine the weight decreasing from the average person’s benevolent ignorance, just grabbing a candy as they walk by.

And the audience is, according to Gonzalez-Torres, a crucial part of the work. His work is a physical experience to behold, not unlike the post-Holocaust representation of Christian Boltanski, from way, way back in episode 2: you feel the heat and brightness coming off of the bulbs, you see the spots in your eyes when you stare at them too long. And the way that the work is in a constant state of flux – that needs to be experienced by someone: the bulbs slowly getting dimmer, the candy getting eaten, these perpetually changing circumstances that draw your own attention, as the viewer, to change, to time passing and the world spinning under your feet, even as these artworks, you’d think, invite such stillness and quiet. Artworks, to Gonzalez-Torres, are never meant to be stable. “The only permanent,” he would say, “is change.” And we’re invited to consider what that means to us. That’s also why the audience is so important – because he wants our own interpretations of the work to be part of the work. We didn’t know Ross Laycock – it’s not for us to assume we did, or that we can understand the depth of Gonzalez-Torres’ loss. But we can surely tap into our own. Our own individualized responses are always welcome. This is why every work of his is untitled – “things are suggested or alluded to discreetly,” he wrote. “The work is untitled because ‘meaning’ is always shifting in time and place.”

And this extends to curatorial input as well – although, to a point, as we’ll come back to later. But the museum is allowed to decide what to do with, for example, these bulbs. They can be hung on the wall, or piled on the floor, or strung across a doorway – dealer’s choice, really. The only mandatory stipulation is whether or not the bulbs should be replaced when they go out. Some are required to be replaced. Others, like this one, at the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, should be replaced immediately. And it’s amazing how these strictures can affect the visitor’s experience of the work, the incredible power of that metaphor. For all of the talk about his artworks changing from when you see them to when you see them next, it’s also possible to never really notice that slow erosion. You might not notice a pair of bulbs getting ever gradually dimmer between visits. Which is why a dramatic change can knock you sideways.

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Stephanie Fox Knappe: I'm Stephanie Fox Knappe, the Sanders Sosland Senior Curator, Global Modern and Contemporary Art and the head of the American Art Department at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City. It was, gosh, about a little more than a month ago, in mid-December, when I was down in my curatorial office in the basement of the museum and a colleague in our IT department came by and said, Stephanie, one of the bulbs has burned out.

Richard Romero: It was just a regular day. I was walking through and, uh, you know, you have to kind of crouch down to, to turn it on. And I did that and just immediately felt like the light felt different. And so the second I saw it, I actually even before I let Stephanie know, I reached out to marketing and said, like, hey, real opportunity here. Here's a picture I snapped on my phone real fast. My name is Richard Romero. My pronouns are he/they, and I am the specialist comma information services logistics at the Nelson-Atkins.

Stephanie Fox Knappe: It still gives me chills to realize that Richard experienced a moment that is so rare with this piece. Normally you see two bulbs burning, but Richard was able to see when one bulb burned out.

Richard Romero: For me, it was very personal because last December was actually the ninth anniversary of my own HIV diagnosis. And this has always been a piece that's really spoken to me, because I don't have a lot of queer elders. Um, and this particular piece really does speak to that, which is why it's such a cool honor for me to occasionally be able to be the one to turn it on. Um, and so, yeah, just I it really felt in that moment that it was just everything kind of lined up and was like, I'm really glad I got to be the one to to find this.

Stephanie Fox Knappe: Because it happened on a Monday. We're open to the public Monday, but not Tuesday. Wednesday. There was just this brief period where if visitors happened to walk through the gallery and happen to pause, they would, you know, they would be able to experience this. So it is also that that moment, even mediated through a photograph on social media, really affected so many people. The comments on Instagram just kept going and going and going. We've worked with the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation, so we understand how important it was to both the artist and to the foundation today that as soon as one of those bulbs burns out, uh, the request is that it be replaced immediately. So those two lives, those two energies, those two globes could be back together thinking about this as a gesture towards perpetuity, toward immortality, toward renewal.

Richard Romero: I respect that, you know, the artist wants for bulbs to be replaced as quickly as possible. And I'm always very much about honoring, you know, the artist's intention there. But at the same time, I am happy to grab little quick opportunities just in the interim where, you know, we got several thousand objects on view and, you know, hundreds more constantly being worked on by conservation. They can't immediately run to, you know, change a light bulb, especially when we're open for the day. So it was a neat little opportunity of, yes, we're going to honor this artist, but logistically you got eight hours. Come check it out. You know.

Stephanie Fox Knappe: So we wanted to be sure that we were able to do right by the artist and do right by the foundation. So my colleague Crista was able to get into the gallery and to replace the light bulbs. So when we opened again to the public that Thursday, untitled, March 5th, number two from 1991 was back glowing the way the artist intended.

Crista Pack: My name is Crista Pack. I'm objects conservator at the Nelson-Atkins, so I haven't been there quite a year yet, so I'm still kind of learning the museum. And that's when I think I passed in the gallery before, but not really paid attention to. And so when Stephanie sent the email that that artwork had a light bulb burned out, that was kind of my first interaction with it. Um, so that's when I learned that we had, you know, extra bulbs that were in storage that we could replace them with, and that when one goes out, you're supposed to replace both of them at the same time. So the cycle kind of just starts anew.

So then quickly became one of my favorite pieces in the museum because it is so moving. You know, I think all of us have experienced death at some point. You know, of a loved one. And so that really was just very, very poignant to kind of be there in that place at that time. And. Yeah, and kind of get to know that piece a little bit better that way.

Stephanie Fox Knappe: It's so easy to think about this as far as just our human relationships, and to think of those bulbs as a reminder of the transience of relationships, the temporality of human life. Uh, one day you flip a switch and a light doesn't turn on, or you reach out to a friend and you've heard that they've passed away, or you get that phone call in the middle of the night. So for me, I always think about these two bulbs that burn together until they don't.

Crista Peck: You know, I've been married for 23 years, and I just think of that. You know, we all know that that's going to happen at some point, you know. So one of us and so just, you know, it is moving. It is hard not to get choked up about it, about that, you know, dimming of a light that shines brightly next to you. So, yeah.

Stephanie Fox Knappe: I felt it was a great honor to be able to see what, to me, feels like the totality of the piece, especially understanding its its origin story, understanding how, um, you know, this was a memorial that did stem from deep loss being in the glow of a single light bulb. Were you able to see just a glimpse of what that was like when this piece was reduced to half? So for me. Yeah, it does feel like an important part of of the cycle, an important part almost of this roller coaster that we have all experienced of something there, something gone. And then, yeah, I don't know if it's through healing, through memories. This notion that I know is important to the foundation of perpetuity and of renewal. You know, it's that whole it's that whole cycle.

Richard Romero: You know, it's it's a different world now than it was when this was made for Felix and Ross. And, uh, I'm I'm glad that I got to help a little more and continuing their story, you know, for a piece that, like I said, can be easily overlooked. Or, you know, if the light bulb had gone out and nobody had seen it except for conservation, it just gets changed and we all go about our lives. Um, it was just really important to me that I was able to get that shared out there again. I'm glad I got to remind everybody how far we've come.

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I was introduced to this artwork, and subsequently to Stephanie, Richard, and Crista, through that social media post. I knew I wanted to write about Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and when I saw that a museum had so recently experienced what Stephanie calls this whole cycle of his work, I was champing at the bit to talk to them about it. But something that struck me, through every conversation – and which I feel completely allowed to talk about, given Gonzalez-Torres’ own permission to lend my own interpretation to his work – is that I feel like that bulb didn’t need to be replaced so quickly. And it’s for a few reasons. One, which Richard mentioned in the course of our conversation, is that there’s a kind of cynical metaphor here, idea that those lost to AIDS could be replaced as easily as a trip to Home Depot, that these deaths disappear into senselessness and meaninglessness. You can understand why a marginalized group of people experiencing this kind of utterly devastating plague, and being stigmatized for it, would be particularly sensitive to no one caring. And so replacing the bulb just as soon as it goes out, instead of sitting with the loss, serves to – forgive me – hang a light on that sense of expendability. But it’s also something else to me. When you lose a partner, you don’t just get to replace them. You sit in darkness for a long time. I could imagine walking through the museum and seeing one bulb lit, one burnt out, and feeling the full tragic resonance of what Gonzalez-Torres wanted to hammer home. Ross Laycock, the light of his life for over a decade, is gone. Don’t run to replace him. He cannot be replaced.

But then I think about what Stephanie also talks about: this sense of perpetuity and renewal, of healing. This sense of optimism, maybe even invincibility, in the face of all this death. And that’s when you realize what it means for an entire generation of men to die in their 20s and 30s, young men who would be aging and balding and slowing down now, but who at the time were plucked from the ripeness of their manhood. There’s a virility to their work. It reminds me of Egon Schiele dying at the age of 28, having never had the opportunity to outgrow his extended adolescence, his heady sexuality slowing giving way to routine, children, distraction. Time. You can feel this kind of potency and energy from so much of the work of these gay artists from the 80s and 90s, almost all of whom also have a death date from those years. From the dynamic, ecstatic cartoon figures by Keith Haring, who radiate rays of energy, to the obscenely erotic, statuesque black and white nudes of Robert Mapplethorpe, to the fiery rage of David Wojnarowicz. Relatively speaking, Felix Gonzalez-Torres is a much quieter artist than so much of his cohort. But they all seem to speak to something burning, and ongoing, even at the end of their lives.

I think that’s why this movement did keep going, why it was able to awaken the public consciousness to the devastation hiding in plain sight. This righteous, powerful energy seemed to feed off of loss. You can feel this incandescence glowing on every horrific, tragic page of Randy Shilt’s tome on the AIDS epidemic, “And The Band Played On,” in every furious monologue from playwright Larry Kramer, in the “Silence = Death” tee-shirt that Richard wore during our interview. In the two bulbs that always need to burn brightly together.

But still. It’s really sad. It’s sad because there is a day, somewhere out there, when this work will speak to us not just abstractly, not just as a well-chosen metaphor, but directly. The tree will bear the marks of its missing mate, and that’s all we’ll jealously see in these bulbs that still have one another. And that’s the moment that all the political and contextual associations will fall away and we’ll instead be lost in our own memories, our own grief, our own healing. That seems to be where Felix Gonzelez-Torres lived until his own death. His work is often described as a poignant invitation to the viewer for this very reason, but there’s a contradiction there. Because as soon as one really gets to the root of it, his art, and he, were quick to deny us. It’s like it needs to be alone in its grief. When asked in a 1995 interview, who is your art for, he responded, “when people ask me ‘who is your public?’ I say, honestly, without skipping a beat, ‘Ross.’ The public was Ross. The rest of the people just come to the work.”

CREDITS:

The Lonely Palette is written and produced by me, Tamar Avishai. Special thanks to Stephanie Fox Knapp, Crista Pack, Richard Romero, and Kathleen Leighton at the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, Missouri (sorry about the Super Bowl), and especially to Martin Young.

The song you’re hearing right now is by Rick and Michele Gedney of the band Open Book, and Michele, no one loved Rick like you did, but we surely, surely loved him, and miss his warmth and his music every day.

To see all the images from this episode, and to find out everything else about the show, how to support it, sign up for our newsletter, become a patron, and more, go to thelonelypalette.com. You can also follow the show on Instagram @thelonelypalette, and reach out any time with ideas for upcoming shows. And if you’re a business looking to sponsor a show enjoyed by an active and engaged audience like yourself, email us at sponsorships@thelonelypalette.com. We’d love to hear from you.

The Lonely Palette is a proud founding member of Hub & Spoke, a fiercely independent collective of mind-expanding, thoughtful podcasts. One you might want to especially catch up on is Vanessa Lowe’s Nocturne, a beautiful, sound-rich podcast about nighttime. Her most recent episode might be particularly of interest to listeners of The Lonely Palette – it focuses on an artist who paints dramatic landscapes of wild nature…but only in the dark. Listen at hubspokeaudio.org, nocturnepodcast.org, or wherever you get your podcasts. And I’ll see you in two weeks.