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Lot Essay
'Untitled (Rossmore)' is one of Felix Gonzalez-Torres' rare 'Candy Spills'. With only a few examples sprawled flat on the floor, these spills have entered some of the most prestigious museum collections, notably the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Always displayed on the ground, their function is determined by the audience who is invited to eat the sweets and thereby interact with, and gradually dispose of the sculpture. "I need the viewer", Gonzalez-Torres said about his work in an interview with the artist Tim Rollins. "I need the public's interaction. Without a public these works are nothing, nothing. I need the public to complete the work. I ask the public to help me, to take responsibility, to become part of my work, to join in" (A.R.T. Press, Los Angeles, 1993, p.23).
Strikingly simplistic, Gonzalez-Torres' 'Candy Spills' are elegant metaphors for the artist's own personal meditations on the archetypal themes of love and death, and were created as a direct reponse to his watching his lover of eight years, Ross Laycock, slowly die of AIDS.
"I wanted to make an artwork that could disappear, that never existed," Gonzalez-Torres commented in an interview with Robert Storr, "and it was a metaphor for when Ross was dying. So it was a metaphor that I would abandon this work before this work abandoned me. I'm going to destroy it before it destroys me. That was my little amount of power when it came to this work. I didn't want it to last because it couldn't hurt me" (A.R.T. Press, Los Angeles, January 1995, p.32).
By inviting the audience to consume the sculpture, Gonzalez-Torres not only raised important questions over the form and functionality of a work of art - creating work that to all intent and purpose doesn't actually exist - but also eloquently mirrored his own personal sense of loss: what he called his having to "let go" of the love of his life.
"Freud said that we rehearse our fears in order to lessen them. In a way this 'letting go' of the work, this refusal to make a static form, a monolithic sculpture, in favour of a disappearing, changing, unstable and fragile form, was an attempt on my part to rehearse my fears of having Ross disappear day by day right in front of my eyes" (A.R.T. Press, Los Angeles, 1993, p.13).
With its monolithic format and its monochrome colouring, 'Untitled (Rossmore)' is also a deliberate reference to the reductive style of Minimalist sculpture. The artist has stated that he intended such references as a means of both acknowledging his debt to the work of artists like Carl Andre, Robert Morris and Donald Judd - whom he once praised as "daring to do so little" - as well as deliberately indicating his opposition to them in his refusal to assert any closure of meaning in his work.
Always displayed on the ground, their function is determined by the audience who is invited to eat the sweets and thereby interact with, and gradually dispose of the sculpture. "I need the viewer", Gonzalez-Torres said about his work in an interview with the artist Tim Rollins. "I need the public's interaction. Without a public these works are nothing, nothing. I need the public to complete the work. I ask the public to help me, to take responsibility, to become part of my work, to join in" (A.R.T. Press, Los Angeles, 1993, p.23).
Strikingly simplistic, Gonzalez-Torres' 'Candy Spills' are elegant metaphors for the artist's own personal meditations on the archetypal themes of love and death, and were created as a direct reponse to his watching his lover of eight years, Ross Laycock, slowly die of AIDS.
"I wanted to make an artwork that could disappear, that never existed," Gonzalez-Torres commented in an interview with Robert Storr, "and it was a metaphor for when Ross was dying. So it was a metaphor that I would abandon this work before this work abandoned me. I'm going to destroy it before it destroys me. That was my little amount of power when it came to this work. I didn't want it to last because it couldn't hurt me" (A.R.T. Press, Los Angeles, January 1995, p.32).
By inviting the audience to consume the sculpture, Gonzalez-Torres not only raised important questions over the form and functionality of a work of art - creating work that to all intent and purpose doesn't actually exist - but also eloquently mirrored his own personal sense of loss: what he called his having to "let go" of the love of his life.
"Freud said that we rehearse our fears in order to lessen them. In a way this 'letting go' of the work, this refusal to make a static form, a monolithic sculpture, in favour of a disappearing, changing, unstable and fragile form, was an attempt on my part to rehearse my fears of having Ross disappear day by day right in front of my eyes" (A.R.T. Press, Los Angeles, 1993, p.13).
With its monolithic format and its monochrome colouring, 'Untitled (Rossmore)' is also a deliberate reference to the reductive style of Minimalist sculpture. The artist has stated that he intended such references as a means of both acknowledging his debt to the work of artists like Carl Andre, Robert Morris and Donald Judd - whom he once praised as "daring to do so little" - as well as deliberately indicating his opposition to them in his refusal to assert any closure of meaning in his work.