POUR A LITTLE SUGAR ON IT [487]

Can a conceptual artwork remain open to interpretation following its conception?

Controversy recently surrounded the installation in 2024 of “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), a 1991 work by Félix González-Torres, at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C., run by the Smithsonian Institute, because information considered, since the work was created, to be required to form a full understanding of the work had not been included.

It is one of a series of works consisting of a pile of candy sweets, this one wrapped in different colours and with a consistent total weight of 175 lbs (79 kg), to be arranged by the owner or curator as desired, but with the requirement that viewers can take candies from the artwork, with The Félix González-Torres Foundation assisting in replenishing the work. 

The prescribed weight has been interpreted both as being the weight of the average adult human male, but also of the titular “Ross”: Ross Laycock, González-Torres’s partner, would die of complications from AIDS in 1991, as would González-Torres five years later. 

The controversy arose from this information not being supplied alongside the work, as had been when previously on display at other galleries. The Art Institute of Chicago, which owns and shares the work, also removed this information from the written display by 2022, keeping it on its audio guide, before reinstating it after the discrepancy was discovered, then decried. 

Ignaciao Darnadue, writing in “Out” magazine, talked of this being a “queer erasure”, having “witnessed people blissfully taking pictures of pretty candy — empty calories on the floor robbed of their stirring spirit.” The Félix González-Torres Foundation later replied to what they said was “misinformation”, having “made a point of incorporating significant queer content throughout this exhibition”.

I have seen this artwork on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2011, accompanied by an explanation of who “Ross” was, effectively making it into an AIDS memorial, charging further symbolism into the act of “participating” in the work by taking weight from the representation of a “body”. The “portrait” made by González-Torres is more visceral than a painting or photograph, removing the boundaries usually placed on an artwork in a gallery setting by requiring you to pick up and eat it, alongside imagery of Catholic communion. This is before you then consider the notions of production and commerce inherent in manufacturing, procuring and delivering the sweets, followed by the human digestion of them.

However, I needed to be given that context – a “conventional” portrait may give you more of a sense of a person’s biography than name and weight. The nature of a gallery space also means you cannot assume that works are intended to be as approachable, and ever since Marcel Duchamp put a urinal on its side and signed it, anything can be appropriated as, or reappraised as, art. Does it mean that González-Torres’s “portrait” is less successful if the context is not signposted? No, it just means that the cultural significance the work has accrued since its unveiling may be something to be looked up beforehand, or later.

Meanwhile, in 2011, I was apparently happy to take six sweets from another González-Torres work, “Untitled” (USA Today) (1990) – weighing 300 lbs., it symbolises the more digestible and reduced porting the newspaper of that name symbolised, along with the country itself - and put the red, white and blue-wrapped sweets into a bag along with a printed explainer, ready for me to rediscover it fourteen years later, taking a picture of it before throwing it and the melted sweets away. This was intended as a souvenir of my visit to an art gallery, but the sweets have moved on from their original form, like if I had eaten them at the time.

THAT’S A BEAUTIFUL SPEECH, BUT NOBODY’S LISTENING [74]

One hundred and one years ago, the Swiss writer Hugo Ball, with artists Hans Richter, Tristan Tzara, Jean Arp, Richard Huelsenbeck, Sophie Taeuber and others, inaugurated the art movement known as “Dada,” at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. Some Dada exponents found their way to Switzerland due to the upheaval of the First World War, and it was the horror of this conflict that fomented a rejection of the logic and values that led to it. Dada, purportedly taking its name from the word reached when a knife was plunged into a dictionary, aimed to effectively start again, making new connections with language, context and understanding, using collage, cut-up writing, poetry, sculpture, theatre – anything can be Dada-fied, right down to Marcel Duchamp putting a urinal on its side, putting it on a plinth, signing it, and calling it “Fountain.”

Now, it is a little bit of a stretch to extrapolate this extreme version of rejecting one form of looking at the world in favour of another, and try and compare it to the current trend over fake news, alternative facts, left versus right, Marxism versus neo-liberalism, or common sense versus nonsense, but that never stopped anyone before. Therefore, I will say that the rejection of the perceived status quo in British and American politics, and the ideologies and acts that have followed it, feel like a kind of anti-Dada, or “jackanape,” to take another random word from my nearest dictionary. It does feel like, instead of reacting to the logic of those at the top, we are instead reacting to the strange and unpredictable sounds coming from the bottom.

The immediate problem with this kind of definition is that politicians, activists and conspiracy theorists are not groups that can have their title replaced with “artist,” or “jackanape artist,” because the artistic imperative is not there, unless they then comment on their own activities in an artistic way. However, either side can accuse the other of being a “stand-up comedian” if they think they are hearing rubbish. Even worse, you can call yourself a “performance artist playing a character” as a way of excusing outlandish thoughts and actions, as done by the lawyer representing arch jackanape artist and “Infowars” presenter Alex Jones. This description came about during a custody battle with his ex-wife, but yelling down a camera cannot be explained away later as a performance, if that is not how it has been presented.

So, the “jackanapes” is not something we have seen – yet. If we do, I have “soapberry” ready, another random word, for any possible anti-anti-Dada uprising. Artistic responses to politics will always come, but when politics feels like it sometimes defies interpretation, the question could then become whether it is easiest to oppose it, or bypass it, or ignore it, instead of interpreting it – if a single answer does arrive, I hope it can pick a better word at random than “soapberries.”