Selected presenter for the 2025 CSU Art History Symposium
Date: March 5, 2025, 5-7 PM
Location: F101, Visual Arts Building
Four talented students present their original research in art history!
Featured Presenters:
- Andrew Hunt
- Bronte Bastien
- Maximus Vogt
- Madrigal Frederick-Law
Transcript:
Video Presentation
Abstracted Mourning
Slide 1:
Through modes of coded abstraction and conceptual symbolism, Felix-Gonalex Torres’ art embraces ambiguity, to convey deep emotions that emerge with the intersection of identity, isolation and tragedy.
Slide 2:
For the theoretical framework of my research, I used American art historian and essayist, Douglas Crimp’s seminal essay, Mourning and Militancy concluding that militancy, while a product of queer mourning must stand alone. Felix Gonzalez-Torres' work brings such theories to life. He engaged with militancy through AIDs activism personally as his art mourns the loss of his partner to the disease but also through more organized artistic militancy in the artist collective, Group Material. As Crimp delineates that emphasis needs to be placed on mourning as a necessary cause of loss during the crisis, this presentation will examine Gonzalez-Torres work with an emphasis on mourning rather than as expressly political.
Slide 3: Young FGT
diverging from a bulk of past scholarship that views his work within the canon of AIDs activism, biographical details give new meanings to the work. This is not to undermine the stress that Gonzalez-Torres places on identity as inextricably political, but offers a more mournful look at his work. Even more scarce in academia is Gonzalez-Torres’ Identity as a Cuban-born artist. Because his work has been subject to the limited scope of North American conceptualism, his identity as an immigrant has been subject to erasure. Further, By investigating his work within latin-american conceptualism, we see his work not in the coldness of North American theory but nearer to the work that was pioneered by Latin American artists, work that is deeply political yet delicate and emotional.
Slide 4:
I don't want to place myself within over-determination, but for biography to be considered irrelevant is especially prevalent with Gonzalez-Torres predecessors. Origins in conceptualist theory like we see here in Art and language and Rauschenberg's text portrait of Iris focused on rational theory as opposed to emotion and lived experience. We also see the coolness in Donald Judd’s minimalism, all of which would be the foundation of Gonzalez-Torres work.
Slide 5:
Advocating for recognition of identity, Scholar Emmanuel Cooper expands “Sexuality is not intended to 'explain' [artists] work nor is it to suggest a particular context within which to view it. It is, rather, the start of a process to look again and recover what has traditionally been omitted from the history of art using this to inform the present”. Gonzalez-Torres has suffered a similar fate to other queer artists, with the provocation of their identities omitted from research, or summed up to polarized visions of identity politics. Nor do the same sex relationships of Michelangelo, Botticelli or Caravaggio create a definitive sum of their work but the inclusion of these personal details may provoke further analysis. Such as these pieces displayed here, with scholars asserting models as lovers or at least lustful depictions. Then is the process of recovery.
Slide 6 Nan Goldin
I want to begin by explaining why his art connects to this notion of militancy. Gonzalez-Torres’ early years in New York were during his education in the early 1980’s, a time when postmodernist theories reigned supreme. Postmodernist theories and those deriving from minimalism asked artists to be suspicious of their role in making and to be critical of mechanisms of power that surround them. Credited to his upbringing Gonzalez-Torres consistently uses photography throughout his career, the use of photography as a mode of activism rose with second wave feminist artists and continues with the AIDs crisis. Curator, Doug Ekland writes on AIDs activist Nan Goldin, “Goldin’s photographs of the early 1980s summarize the underlying ethos of the period: the schizophrenic alternation between a cool detachment and an aggressively confessional style, an exuberant do-it-yourself attitude that masked formal dexterity with the enthusiasm of the amateur, and the recognition that the way one lives life is an inherently political act.”
Slide 7:
This “aggressively confessional style” marked the militancy of the AIDs crisis, namely the work of AIDs Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), Crimp describes the group as, “a weird hybrid of traditional leftist politics, innovative postmodern theory, and access to professional resources.” You’ll likely recognize the THe Coalition used the Silence = Death motif , The collective prominently used the image in the General Post Office protest on April 15, 1987 as people filed tax returns before the deadline, news stations routinely reported on this occurrence so the poster got displayed inadvertently in this coverage, this was also to comment on the lack of funding for AIDs research by the federal government.
Slide 8:
These “Guerilla-like-tactics” continued in Group Material, the artist collective that Gonzalez-Torres joined. Focusing on politically motivated art, the group's exhibitions focused on social issues such as gender equality (1981), the efficacy of democracy (1988) and the AIDS Epidemic (1988-89). While involved in these heavily confrontational movements, Gonzalez-Torres’s work is imbued with much more ambiguity, often his work is simply marked by “untitled” or he leaves minute breadcrumbs about his work that demand the viewer becomes active. Postmodernism then becomes an important lens to view Gonzalez-Torres’s work, scholars note the Barthesian “Death of the Author” attitude in Group Material, no single artist dominated, this continues in Gonzalez-Torres’s personal work as he understates his role as the author. THe theory spells out: The metaphorical death of him as the artist causes the birth of the viewer. In response to this theory, I want to stretch it once further, I say that the death of the author not only exacts the birth of the reader but that the reader can resurrect the author with “mutual communion”, that being the interaction and possession of the work. The audience’s participation is also often crucial to the work, the audience ascends from their role as passive receiver to active communicator.
Slide 9:
In 1992, after the death of his partner, Ross Laycock, Gonzalez-Torres exhibited “Untitled” (Billboard of an empty bed) a photograph of a black and white empty bed across 24 billboards throughout New York City. He comments on an idea of intimacy deteriorated, in his billboards private revelations are foremost in the public view. privacy is bastardized as he blurs what is constituted as private thoughts, spaces and property. This image forces the viewer to reconcile an almost demure photograph of an unmade bed and reflexiveness as it reminds the viewer of their own privacy and intimate setting, shattering that expectation as a Metro bus rolls by and their view is shifted towards the city once again. Similarly to ACT UP, Gonzalez-Torres is then able to militarize these public spaces. However, Instead of keeping the work expressly political, he takes advantage of this space for mourning. This public work comes an at an incredibly crucial time, as Conservatives led a crusade to defund public art in the brewing “war on culture”
Mourning slide 10:
Now I want to shift to the focus of mourning in FGTs work, in the foundational essay crimp says. “we may also be able to recognize–along with our rage-our terror, our guilt, and our profound sadness. Militancy, of course, then, mourning too”
I highlighted then the only minute difference between the cozy image of the bed we have in our mind and the bed that Gonzalez-Torres presents us with. As the heads of the pillows are imprinted on and the comforter and sheets are freshly tousled there is a recent and painful sense of absence and anguish in the cold image. The work is not expressly political but rather a reflection of a melancholic state, perhaps a message to those around him that he is not available for militancy, only able to mourn such a profound loss. On this piece hooks asserts, “Although bodies are gone, memories sustain the experience, allowing the feelings these bodies generated - the warmth and passion - to be revealed, recalled, recorded.” Crimp draws on this aspect as well, he says that during the AIDs crisis not only friends and families were lost but also lifestyles, community and safety; with only memories to carry on. Not only is the soul and body of Laycock gone, the work also highlights the “warmth and passion” that is lost, the recording of this memory then becomes key, the implication of Laycock's body is abstracted by the broader collective grief and persistence of memory.
Slide 11:
However, the importance of memory is thin on the subject of AIDs remembrance, just as art works to memorialize it, the art also shows how much was lost and forgotten. His early work of photostats combine dates and associated events, some are connected with a similar sting of conception while other dates are smashed together arbitrarily. In this way they show how memory can function but also fail us, how documentation might be lasting but present only slivers of reality. Untitled” (1988) reads “Supreme 1986 court crash stock market crash 1929 sodomy stock market court stock supreme 1987.” The work operates in the coded logic of postmodernism, namely what scholar and critic Fredric Jameson characterized as schizophrenia, in which the postmodern artist engages in the deterioration of signifiers in language as a product of isolation and disconnection. The work isolates the date of the monumental Bowers v. Hardwick decision in which the supreme court upheld Georgia's criminalization of homosexual intimacy in between two significant economic dates, yet the language is confusing and jumbled. Foremost Commenting on the erasure of queer history, the selection of this confused date may also serve to represent the collective isolation queer people experienced or even the confused state that memories and historical events take once they are memorialized.
Slide 12:
It is in Gonzalez-Torres most famous piece that we also see his connections to Latin American conceptualism. Curator Gerardo Mosquera writes, “ The way Félix tackled political issues in his projects is subtle and complex, a relation between art and politics quite common in Latin American culture.” Mosquore notes the attentiveness to both politics and emotion, something that would remain detached in North American conceptualism but was inherent to the practice of Latin American artists in the time. For a comparison, I want to bring up Cuban-born artist, Ana Mendieta. Her Silueta Series which started in 1973 till her death in 1985, includes feminine silhouettes that she made from natural materials like mud sticks and grass.
Slide 13:
All of her work alludes to the body or implicates its form just as gonzalez-torres, “untitled” portrait of Ross in L.A. creates a memorization of his partner in the form of individually wrapped candies. In Portrait of Ross, the audience is allowed to take the candies and consume them, the pile is replenished by gallery attendants to constantly stay at 175 pounds, Laycock’s ideal weight before his decline following AIDS diagnosis. Mendita’s silhouettes then conjures the form of the body as it lays static in a grave, with natural materials summoning the body's return to earth. Just as candies replenish a constant state of mourning that never seems to satiate the loss of the living, the silhouette is fleeting yet, something in which we long to recognize.
Slide 14:
This piece serves as a good segway to discuss the virality in GT’s work which encompasses each crucial aspect of his identity that I am exploring. Giving credit to scholar Josh Letson who developed virality in GT’s work, I want to shift the remainder of my investigation to see his works as living entities but stretch this notion further as the fluidity in the pieces implicate them beyond passivity. Virality then becomes interesting within my theory of resurrecting the author as opposed to his death in postmodernism. The candy piece would then be read as a source of contagion, thus the ingesting of the body (communion of you will ) marks the site of infection in the viewer and implicates GT as an infector. The changing form of the work (decreasing and increasing in size), the way in which it activates the viewer, and possible repercussions it has on the author give way to the metaphorical resurrection. I stress the role of gonzalez-torres as a still active player in his work because the theory of virality requires it. As Letson notes the term virality is not only laden with a queer, HIV-positive identity but also the immigrant. Anti-immigration sentiment has often been conflated with contagion of disease. Or even deeper rooted in conservatism, the ideology that immigration poses a cultural threat to the North American body politic idealized as virile, masculine and white.
Slide 15:
Gonzalez-Torres piece “untitled” (passport) fits perfectly within the intersection. In (Passport),Gonzalez Torres places stacks of white paper in galleries, a form stripped down to pure minimalism. The endless supply of paper invites the audience to take sheets as they see fit. As possession is transferred, a blank piece of paper becomes personally significant and the viewer’s reconciliation of the paper becomes a private activity, a space in which to reflect on their own ideas of passports (so again that idea of implicating the viewer for the artist’s sake). In his correspondence on the piece, gonzalez-torres shares that passports, even blank ones, mark the possibilities of new places and new lives, “a chance to alter one’s future.”. His first papers stacks were deeply tied to memory, commenting on the concept of monuments as often monolithic marble structures, in which we see another example of memorialization in the work. Regardless, (passport) fulfils a paradox that bears repeating in his work: mysterious, yet deeply biographical. When investigating his personal life, the place for the artist is incredibly transient. Born in Cuba then living in Puerto Rico and Spain in his youth, then living most of his life in New York, Canada and Miami. Considering this perpetual status as an immigrant among places he might call home, the passport as a gateway to these places and possibilities becomes deeply important to the artist’s life.
Slide 16
In the piece, Gonzalez-Torres confesses, without the ability to move and travel, his work might not be possible. He would have never met his partner in New York and never known for his contributions to conceptualism. Thus passports work to subvert anti-immigration sentiment with a piece that speaks to its potential consequence. In virality the works serves a dual meaning, passports act as travel inscribed and culture exchanged, that without a host being accessible in which there were no travelers to inflect, a passport would remain sanitized. Further , Gonzalez Torres implicates the viewer once again, the papers that get folded and saved as a keepsake or end up in a landfill, or the candies that travel to the pocket or purse then are passed to a friend echo the migratory nature of his own life.
Slide 17
Passports also serves as a hearty connection to Colombian born artist Dorris Salcedo who also immigrated to New York, in her piece Unland; The Orphan Tunic Salcedo memorializes the victims of political violence and oppression in the Colombian civil war. Her choice of domestic furniture in which to highlight absence recalls the strictly banal forms that Gonzalez-Torres works in, namely as he uses curtains, clocks and strings of light in which minimalist forms are isolated.
Slide 18
21 days of blood work-steady decline is the last piece I will analyze. I first want to look at its form, exciting right?!It's clear that this piece derives from first-generation minimalism, without too close of an inspection it could appear to be some of the first Wall Drawings by Sol LeWitt, playing off of that same cool grid. In which the exact purpose for the wall drawings was to be painted over after it was shown, with the ownership only existing in conceptuality, not commonody. The ephemerality in the piece then bears a resemblance to Steady deline, in which we not only see proof of Gonzalez-Torres interest in minimalism but we also see the direct impact of early Latin-American conceptualism.
Slide 19:
Sol LeWitt may have never displayed these wall drawings if curation had not been influenced by the Rosario group, an artistic and activist collective in Argentina. This group “sought to reinvent political art aesthetically and ideologically” in which they pioneered forms of minimalist documentation for activism. The engagement with this group drove the curator to create this exhibition as Benefit For The Student Mobilization Committee To End The War in Vietnam, While these series of events happened almost two decades before gonzalez torres was active, his work is derivative from its effects. Then, we do not only see how his work is impacted by Latin American conceptualism but how it has been slighted by other conceptualist origin stories.
Slide 20
This work also became poignant as an object of mourning because of his engagement with medical documentation through caring for his partner with AIDs and himself. The work shows blood work graphs and the stability of the T-Cell count, a type of white blood cell. An ascending line on this graph indicates survival while a descending line confronts mortality. Gonzalez-Torres' inspiration for this work comes from his partner’s bloodwork shown in medical code, “even more frightening because all the numbers could be easily reversed. It was a total abstraction; but it is the body. It is your life.” with the modernist grid, the piece reflects the sterile environment of medical care, the dehumanization of it and its impact on one’s consciousness. The piece then grapples with the concept of mourning the living, a process that may have begun with diagnosis. The delicate lines of the piece mirror the precariousness of life, the stark distinction of life and death speak to our ability to compartmentalize and forget.
Slide 21:
I noted at the beginning of this presentation the process of recovery for queer art history. Recovery not only takes place in the past but forces us to reconcile what is missing from the present. This presentation only marks the beginning how Gonzalez-Torres work can be viewed for its emotional impact and reflection of his intersectional identity. Crimp’s Mourning and Militancy, allows for a framework to view the art for its inherent qualities in activism but also to explore how it reflected loss and bravery. I’d like to end on this quote from bell hooks because it's beautiful, “Union will not come without struggle or sacrifice, without active resistance against those forces of domination that seek to shut down our agency, our will to be self actualized. FGT’s art declares that to be political is to be alive - that beauty resides in moments of revolution and transformation”