Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled” (L.A.)

0:00:08.2 Steven Zucker: We’re in the Akron Art Museum, looking at a work of art that for me, really typifies some of the most interesting art made in the 1990s. This is a work by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, titled “Untitled” (L.A.).

0:00:19.9 Wendy Earle: I have the pleasure of talking to viewers about this piece. It’s so wonderful to see this broad scope of reaction. Some people get so nervous. When we first come into the gallery, some people, usually younger people, like children, get it right away and try to launch themselves into the candy. We’re in a white-walled institution. You’re not supposed to touch the art, but there’s all this candy on the floor and the sign says you can take a piece. We even have a little infographic of a hand touching a piece of candy. So are you actually able to touch the art? Are you able to take a piece of candy? Are you able to eat the candy? You can’t do that in museums, right? And then thinking about, what would this candy have tasted like in 1991? Was it the same candy? Surely not, right?

0:01:04.8 Zucker: In 1991, this was absolutely radical. It’s still uncomfortable. There’s still a barrier that we have to consciously get over to be able to reach down, take a piece of individually wrapped candy in the cellophane, to hear the crackle as we untwirl it, and then to put it into our mouths and taste it. It’s not the way that we generally interact with works of art.

0:01:28.5 Earle: Just the idea of being able to use your senses that way doesn’t always get brought up in galleries. As much as we curators would love to engage all of your senses, that’s not usually possible.

0:01:38.4 Zucker: This was made in 1991, the same year that the artist partner Ross Laycock passed away due to complications from HIV/AIDS. This was an incredibly traumatic moment. It was just a few years after the very first successful treatments for AIDS was developed. And in fact, some critics have likened this work to issues of the distribution of that medicine, AZT, to those who were infected.

0:02:02.7 Earle: And a lot of iterations of this work start with about the same amount per pound of candy that would be proportional to a healthy adult male. And you can see the gradual depletion of the candy. The gradual lessening of the weight is very analogous to the way that the disease would’ve ravaged a body.

0:02:22.3 Zucker: But also in a moment when AIDS activists had been aggressive in their efforts to get the government to develop a cure and to distribute it. Here is a kind of free distribution of individually portioned items that are sweet, that are in some ways caring. And here the distribution is completely unrestricted. It seems like a reaction to those years of want.

0:02:45.6 Earle: And I think it gets a little bit into trust, too. Trust that the candy is clean and safe to eat, that it’s in fact, candy. Could be something else that just looks like candy. And then you think about how many people have also touched this candy pile. And yes, the candy is individually wrapped, but there’s still a lot of issues of trust even today, and especially at that time when touch was so taboo of people who had HIV/AIDS, that I remember when Princess Diana was raked through the coals for touching a patient that had HIV.

0:03:19.5 Zucker: In its totality, this pile of candy is beautiful. It’s sparkling. The lights shimmer off the cellophane. At the purely visual level, it is just this gorgeous gleaming object. And here in the gallery, it’s set off in a corner with a slightly ragged edge so that it has a kind of organic quality to it. This particular candy is both white and green. But the artist allowed for a degree of interpretation, a degree of change. This could be set in the middle of a room. It might be a sharply defined triangle. And its formal qualities, whether or not it’s got the ragged edge, whether or not it’s got a straight edge, is, for me at least, referencing the tradition of minimalism, but also undermining that tradition. Because here we can enter into it. It is not a perfect form that is somehow outside of human experience. This is directly tied to our senses.

0:04:11.1 Earle: We have to spend a lot of time rearranging it, kind of evening it out because some people treat it almost like a sand garden. I’ve seen a smiley face sort of carved into it. And I wonder what the artist would’ve thought of that. This idea of almost a canvas where you can put your own interpretations on it, figuratively and literally, you could make a work of art out of it. And there is a temporality to it. Certainly the candy goes away. But then as staff members learned early in the process, they stopped making some of the candy. So they had to find a new distributor, which I’m told involves some taste testing of different flavors and figuring out what might work well, and then finding a new supplier. And then this is a traveling piece. This is owned by Art Bridges, so when it goes on loan to its next location, all of this candy gets boxed up and shipped over. And I’m sure that they’ll also need to replenish it as well. But just this thinking about this “conservation” of the piece, I think, is very interesting.

0:05:06.7 Zucker: The artist foresaw that a particular color, a particular kind of candy, might no longer be manufactured and allows for that change. In this work, the artist is drawing on a tradition that comes out of conceptual art. I’m thinking specifically about the work of Sol LeWitt, who created careful directions for his wall drawings, which could then be recreated in a single iteration in virtually any environment. So while the work of art exists on the wall, its authenticity is drawn from the authority of a kind of license and set of directions. And here, the artist has done something similar, but also different. Instead of restricting it to a single iteration, actually allows for multiple iterations that can be produced from that single certificate. And as it has developed, the artist’s foundation will inscribe the name of each new owner on that certificate. And so the certificate functions in such an interesting way because it holds the authority of ownership, even as the object itself is all about a kind of generosity to the general public.

0:06:14.0 Earle: And I think that gets back into the issue of trust. The audience has no context for any of this. I think they just see this candy disappearing, but they have to trust that this is a legitimate Felix Gonzalez-Torres.

0:06:28.3 Zucker: So although the artist is deeply informed by the history of minimalism, the history of conceptual art, of Dada, we might think of Duchamp and his ready-mades. After all, the artist did not fabricate the candy. And yet he also is concerned about a kind of immediacy, a kind of direct human connection.

0:06:45.4 Earle: Of course, it’s not the same candy, but it would’ve been similar candy, and we are eating it just as a viewer would’ve been eating it, and just as likely the artist himself would’ve been eating it. And so it creates that connection across time and space. That’s our goal in museums, is to create these connections across time and space and to make you think of these artists as human beings. Yeah, it’s a very human thing to eat a piece of candy.

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