On the “Untitled”
(and yet)
This is a short rumination on the recent discourses around didactics and Félix González-Torres’s “Untitled” works in general as they relate to some thoughts I’m having around a class I start teaching the day this goes live. It is the start of writing in regard to the class and its ideas, and will be fleshed out further. If you’d like to read the original articles I refer to, you can find them here, here, and here.
When I first came to build this class out in my mind I referred to it as “Untitled.” I was thinking about Félix González-Torres and the boundless possibility he could put into “Untitled” while recognizing the searing specificity that comes within that boundless possibility. An infinity contained within the semiology of the individuated creation. He would often add clarifiers in parentheses to these “Untitled” the kind of double bind that comes, but also the way that a parentheses sets to the side, not like putting into a box for the basement, but rather like setting it on a bedside table. But really for me, when I took that title for the class it came because I didn’t know what would come, I just knew I could not be that deciding factor, it had to also come in time, in the current of the present of the class, some in what the students would want to know, some of it in recognizing what role I really wished to fill as the facilitator of the class. Freed from the responsibilities of pay and expectation of fulfilling a role, what would come would come. And yet, specificity flows back in, like a liquid filling a vessel.
In 1993 in an interview González-Torres responded to Tim Rollins desire to talk about theory with:
Tim, I must say that without reading Walter Benjamin, Fanon, Althusser, Barthes, Foucault, Borges, Mattelart, and others, perhaps I wouldn’t have been able to make certain pieces, to arrive at certain positions. Some of their writings and ideas gave me a certain freedom to see. These ideas moved me to a place of pleasure through knowledge and some understanding of the way reality is constructed, of the way the self is formed in culture, of the way language sets traps, and of the cracks in the “master narrative”–those cracks where power can be exercised… Last but not least, Brecht is an influence. I think if I started this list of influences again I would start with Brecht. I think this is really important because as Hispanic artists we’re supposed to be very crazy, colorful–extremely colorful. We are supposed to “feel,” not think. Brecht says to keep a distance to allow the viewer, the public, time to reflect and think. When you get out of the theater you should not have had a catharsis, you should have had a thinking experience. More than anything, break the pleasure of representation, the pleasure of the flawless narrative. This is not life, this is just a theater piece. I like that a lot: This is not life, this is just an artwork. I want you, the viewer, to be intellectually challenged, moved, and informed.1
Of importance here—and I quote it at length for a reason—is his simultaneous push against his role as a representative of an entire identity category (which he expands upon later) and the simultaneous investment in his audience as people who are allowed to be thoughtful. Not, as we will often see spouted about making, that the work is “up to interpretation”, no shit, but rather the viewer has a right to be challenged, to be exposed to these cracks, and to have it done in a way that isn’t invested in discounting information brought in, but rather welcoming it as part of what is in the network. “Up to interpretation,” has become a promiscuous tool in the belt of those who make, but in ways which forego art’s potency in its place as a meaning making engine, one way or another. We forget that artworks are themselves always networked, they do not live in these bubbles of pure meaning, but they also are not to be so easily subsumed into an anything goes kind of generalism. That is the general vs. the general. I think it as the difference between generic universalism that is rather a supremacy disguised, and instead something like the archaic use of it as meaning the general public, that mass of people that is difference incarnate. The general intellect, or as Fred Moten and Stefano Harney would state it, the general antagonism. A general which holds Édouard Glissant’s declaration that we “clamor for the right to opacity for everyone.”
Understanding González-Torres’s work—which itself comes from various traditions of intellectual investment and work which sees in simplicity a potency—makes the recent push into the “anything goes” notion of understanding his work as all the more rich for excavation for assessing when and where we give context. Which is to say, when is a freedom to understand anything really a desire to know nothing. I’m speaking about the discourse around the recent decision by the curatorial team at the National Portrait Gallery to change the now iconically standard installation plan for “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) as a pile (although it is simply iconically standard and not dictated by the work’s certificate), and to, in its accompanying didactics, (part of what Joseph Grigely would refer to as part of the exhibition prosthetics) remove any contextualizing information about the AIDS epidemic and González-Torres’s partner Ross Laycock for that piece in particular.
While the show itself goes to many lengths to include this information in other didactic materials, and in the introduction when walking into the various galleries, the outcry still arose in various forms. Both in the original op-ed written by scholar Ignacio Darnaude for Out, and echoed in many a social media post—including a friend and contemporary of González-Torres and Laycock—the accusation still stood. One the one hand, there is an absurdity of focus here that forgoes all of which is around the piece to create a paranoid reading as clickbait in a time when queer erasure, in especially governmental contexts, is incredibly real. On the other, there is something to acknowledge in what is essentially, if even accidentally, a recognition that since for them it was easy to tune out all which surrounded the work in favor of this particular instance, it only intensifies their claim for following this read one has to ask: if these scholars could focus in on a detail like that and find it lacking, who’s to say someone who doesn’t know could very easily lose the plot as they are moving through a gallery of quite challenging and stark works they are encountering for the first time.
Darnaude focuses on an anecdote in which a woman engaging the work went to pick up a piece of candy to eat, and in that moment reading the didactic explanation immediately looked horrified and returned the piece to the pile. And yet. Do we lose something in this kind of absolute respect for the dead, missing that moment of communion the work in some respects strives for. But even this on my part is a disingenuous read of Darnaude’s full article, which in my choice of language is mimicking the kind of defensiveness that appears in the ArtNews and ArtNet articles. What is crucially missing here for me is my actual presence in the galleries to read these didactics and see whether or not Darnaude missed something, or if his read of certain contradictions within them stands as worthy of this concern.
In this controversy then we find what I believe to be that potency of González-Torres’s work and conceptual philosophy intersecting with the deep specificity of his work’s contexts. One must consider covertness and the way meaning cruises the works as part and parcel with original contexts of censorship in the face of the AIDS crisis in the 80s and early 90s. The conceptual rigors that come with González-Torres’s notions of audience’s abilities to interpret, not just openly but concertedly the works meanings then are manifestations of his belief in care on the part of audience’s viewing and thinking habits. His are works which subvert and rethink the poetic capabilities of minimal and conceptual practices of the 60s and early 70s, while recognizing the stubborn ways meaning has in its ability to embed itself in material and symbol. Knowledge’s pleasure and culture’s sedimentary nature. That idea that to attach a name to an item of food can trigger the smallest notion of transubstantiation which gets us where we need to go. He notes in the above comment the traps that language sets, and it occurs to me that there aren’t many who understood that potency as intrinsically as him (to risk a kind of veneration).
And at a time when this same understanding of art’s “untitled” capabilities in regard to conceptualism and minimalism are utilized by someone like Maurizio Cattelan in Comedian to make a joke of its ability to sell through the certificate of authenticity alone, critiquing global trade and capital, can be so easily coopted. The idea of the work as idea, not material, was echoed by the cryptocurrency entrepreneur Justin Sun as he ate the banana in a “performance” after purchasing it noting that he purchased and owned the idea not the thing. Or we can look how the work was recently utilized by that which it “critiques” to sell Rayban’s AI glasses paired with Meta in a Super Bowl Ad featuring Chris Pratt, Chris Hemsworth, and Kris Jenner. I’m not sure there is much more I need to explain about that, except that each day it becomes clearer that the interconnectedness of form and idea (like that of the body and the mind) will be an intellectual battleground for how it is we formulate our own ethics in regard to a thingly and ecological world we (and I use we to illustrate it’s danger) stray away from each day.
There is much more to be said.