Art Review : Gonzalez-Torres Evokes a Poetry of Interaction

The gossamer poetry of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ spare and evocative art is spoken through a symbolic interaction between artist and audience. At the Museum of Contemporary Art, where his gently lovely exhibition, “Traveling,” opened last week, the activity of looking at art is cast as a ritual exchange.

The show is small, just eight works made of simple materials--mirrors, clocks, a string of lights, candies wrapped in bright gold foil--arrayed in simple configurations. Often they’re set out in pairs, as in two thick stacks of rectangular sheets of paper standing on the floor in proximity; two mirrors embedded side-by-side in the wall; or two ordinary commercial wall clocks ticking in near-unison.

The repeated pairing keys you to consider connections between things. Gonzalez-Torres’ art puts community on an artistic platform usually reserved for individuality alone. Publicness mingles with privacy, while the boundaries between them blur.

The round wall clocks, “Untitled (Perfect Lovers),” are installed high on the wall and they abut. In design terms, abutted shapes are said to be kissing . The clocks, set at exactly the same time, steadily tick away, but their second hands are not quite in perfect sync.

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Were they ever? Or is this couple inexorably going further and further out of sync, as time goes by? Or are the two just different in the details within the larger commonality of telling the same time?

In “Untitled (Strange Bird),” a wall-size black-and-white billboard image of a cloudy sky is interrupted by the sight of an oddly shaped bird. It’s odd, that is, until you realize that the bird, seen in silhouette from a great distance, is actually two birds, not one, flying freely yet apparently close together.

In addition to the billboard in the museum, 20 more are scattered around Los Angeles, while the image also will be printed in six suburban newspapers, all as part of MOCA’s show. The picture’s appearance in emphatic public settings asks the question: Out in public, are these two birds together?

Gonzalez-Torres, who is openly gay, knows as well as anyone the ramifications of the question. Identity exists only in relation to the world outside itself, not as something autonomous or pure. So, distinctions between public and private are tricky. False ones lead to repressive institutions like the closet, which is a public concealment of gay identity, and which in turn fuels such failed schemes as the dumb U.S. military policy of “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”

A pair is also the sparest means by which to suggest repetition, and repetition is the core of ritual. Gonzalez-Torres’ best work has the unmistakable heft of public ceremony with all the sense of gravity and moral seriousness ceremony conveys, but without pomposity or posturing.

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The most unpretentiously beautiful example is “Untitled (Placebo-Landscape-for Roni),” which consists of 1,200 pounds of brightly illuminated foil-wrapped candy. Like shimmering golden treasure strewn across the art museum floor from which a slight, sickly sweet aroma arises (toffee?), the dazzling eye-candy is there for the taking. A visitor is invited to take a single piece from the pile and consume the gift later, after leaving the museum, where its taste will recall the collective experience to mind.

The pairs in Gonzalez-Torres’ art are compounded in “Untitled (Portrait of MOCA),” made especially for the show. Like decorative trim on an entablature, two rows of words forming a non-sequential time line are painted on encircling gallery walls at the juncture with the ceiling. Each event is paired with a date--Great Society 1964, Talkies 1927, MTV 1991, LA 1781--and interspersed with the names of exhibitions seen at MOCA since its founding.

The only punctuation marks in the frieze are quotations around the show titles--”Louis I. Kahn,” “High and Low,” “Helter Skelter”--which highlight them as institutional packages about history. These reverberate against the personalized packages of memory, which one has of the rest of the encircling list. Both bump up against “Traveling”--the show this work is in.

Gonzalez-Torres provocatively explores the busy, crowded intersection between public and private, collective and personal. In part, his skill was honed by participation with Group Material, a changing 1980s collaborative of artists.

Cuban-born in 1957, the New York-based artist is also fully of his generation. His work is built on public-private intersections derived from traditions of Pop, Minimal and Conceptual art. Its emphasis on ritual may owe something to the fact that, after 30 years, the Pop-Minimal-Conceptual watershed definitively shaped the landscape of contemporary art. It now forms our culture’s ceremonial circle.

As such, how does an artist showing in a museum keep from being elevated to ceremonial high priest, which would tip the scales by promoting the individual over the communal, the personal over the public? MOCA, which organized the show in collaboration with the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, where it also is being shown, seems to address the dilemma with the accompanying catalogue. But, the effort badly misfires.

Beautifully designed, the 80-page book contains an introduction by the three curators, a short bibliography and six essays by six authors, some startlingly autobiographical, others focused on specific aspects of Gonzalez-Torres’ art. One essay (the most interesting) is by an eminence grise of Conceptual art.

There is no checklist of the show (which changes at each venue), no biography of the artist and no overview of his artistic development. Given the art, the omissions and inclusions presumably mean to shift focus away from the artist as personality, while denying a singular reading of his art.

The miscarried result, however, is to spotlight institutional clout. Leaving scant room for dissent, a tribunal of influential curators bolstered by a juggernaut of writers collectively anoints an artist.

You’re left feeling slightly dazed by an onslaught of officialdom, while still wanting some rather basic information about Gonzalez-Torres, his work and the context within which the eight examples in the galleries have grown. Perhaps one ironic measure of this gossamer art’s significance is how well it fends off your countervailing urge, which is to flee the airless grip of its looming institutional frame of reference.

* Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave., (213) 626-6222, through June 19. Closed Mondays.