Who gets to tell the story of Flix Gonzlez-Torres?
A minimalist pile of candy in a Smithsonian gallery has sparked a firestorm over memory, censorship, and who controls the legacy of one of Americas most famous queer artists.In January, Out published a blistering opinion piece accusing the Flix Gonzlez-Torres Foundation of sanitizing the queer identity of the late artist whose legacy it represents. The article ignited a flurry of online debate and became the magazines most-read story that month. A deeper investigation felt necessary.A Candy Pile Goes ViralIn December, queer art scholar Ignacio Darnaude visited the Smithsonians National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., to see "Always to Return," an exhibit of Flix Gonzlez-Torres's work, now on view through July 6. Known for his hyper-minimalist conceptual installations a string of lightbulbs hung from the ceiling, a pile of candy in the corner of a room Gonzlez-Torres died in 1996 from an AIDS-related illness. His works, which are recreated anew for each exhibition according to his detailed instructions, are now managed by the Flix Gonzlez-Torres Foundation, led by his former gallerist, Andrea Rosen.When Darnaude toured the exhibit, he was disturbed. There appeared to be no reference to Gonzlez-Torress identity as a queer man, nor to his HIV-positive status. Daranude was deeply upset by one piece in particular: "Untitled" (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), a pile of multicolored candy meant to weigh 175 pounds the ideal weight of Gonzlez-Torress lover, Ross Laycock, before he died of AIDS-related illness in 1991.In this installation, viewers are invited to take pieces of candy. As the candy pile diminishes, it echoes, in Darnaudes view, the physical decline from AIDS wasting. Curators replenish the candy endlessly, which means Ross can live forever, Darnaude says. He later wrote in his opinion piece, By not explaining what Portrait of Ross in L.A. truly means, the National Portrait Gallery has turned his work into an esoteric cypher. They turned a deeply personal and emotionally charged work into a neutral, depoliticized sculpture," Darnaude says.The Meaning of RossJoey Terrill, a longtime HIV activist and visual artist whose own still-life tribute to Gonzlez-Torres was recently acquired by the Smithsonian sees something else in this piece. You approach 175 pounds of candy Ross and take something away, he says. To me, that was a metaphor for how the virus was transmitted. You engage, you take something, you walk away carrying it. Guests attend the private view for Damien Hirst and Feliz Gonzalez-Torres' 'Candy' at Blain Southern on October 15, 2013 in London, England.Nick Harvey/WireImageUntil recently, Terrill served as director of global advocacy at the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, the controversial Los Angeles-based nonprofit that provides HIV treatment and prevention around the world. (AHF has come under fire in the past for describing PrEP as a party drug and for running billboard campaigns some have called stigmatizing to sex workers and people with STIs.) Terrill shares Darnaudes feelings. You have artists like me who lived through the holocaust of AIDS, and we know Flixs work belongs in that tradition, he says. Id argue that its precisely because it references Ross and HIV that its so compelling.Dr. Jonathan Katz, the founding curator of the 20152016 exhibition "Art AIDS America" who is widely regarded as the leading scholar of queer art, believes the foundation has spent years pressuring institutions to omit the artists biography including his queerness, his relationship with Ross, and his death from AIDS from wall texts. They refuse to acknowledge that the Ross of Portrait of Ross in L.A. is a real person, Katz says. They treat it as a kind of metaphor, not a biography. That is a political act.When Katz curated "Art AIDS America" which included works by David Wojnarowicz, Chloe Dzubilo, Hugh Steers, Hunter Reynolds, Kia LaBeija, Martin Wong, and others he says his efforts to include Gonzlez-Torress work were repeatedly blocked. I saw Flix as the gravitational center of the show, he says. The foundation would not even return my calls. Eventually, a colleague at a major museum (who would not speak on the record) told him the foundation had issued an ultimatum: If you lend this work to the AIDS show, well never authorize any future loans.Katz is emphatic: They tried to prevent Flix being in an exhibition because it was about AIDS. After what Katz describes as a series of very hostile emails with Rosen, he threatened to release their correspondence to The New York Times if the foundation did not relent. The works were eventually included, but only after months of what he calls fighting.To understand this more clearly, Out asked curators to explain how artwork is typically shown in an exhibition. In essence, artist foundations and legacy estates loan artwork to exhibits and can rescind or approve a loan at their discretion, which means they have final say over where and how artwork appears. These foundations have to authorize a display, says Dr. Joo Florncio, professor of gender studies at Linkping University in Sweden. No one can do anything about the artist if they dont sign it off.The Claims of ErasureThis criticism of the foundation is not new. In 2017, The Village Voice published an article noting that a Flix Gonzlez-Torres exhibitions at the prominent David Zwirner Gallery failed to mention AIDS.Also in 2017, Poz Magazine highlighted how galleries were editing HIV/AIDS from his legacy. In 2023, Spanish art magazine A*Desk speculated on the foundations politics in a piece titled Private Happiness, Public Cancellation.The most high-profile incident came in 2022, when the Art Institute of Chicago quietly altered its label for Untitled" (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), removing reference to AIDS and Laycock and instead describing the pile in terms of average weight. Katz believes the foundation was behind the change. After backlash on social media, the original label was restored. Out reached out to the FGT Foundation to ask about these claims. The foundation sent a 1,600-word letter disputing Darnaudes article and defending its curatorial philosophy. It declined to be interviewed or to allow any excerpts from its email correspondence to be published. However, in February, the foundation seemed to address the controversy indirectly with a post on Instagram. In it, the organization states that Gonzlez-Torres aimed to trust the viewer and avoid direct explanation of his works in exhibition contexts. The post includes multiple quotes by the artist that seem to support this. (The post appeared to backfire the comments largely express outrage. You have reduced this work to nothing more than free candy on the floor, one commenter writes. Another: Why does this post not mention HIV/AIDS at all?)What Did Flix Want?The foundation maintains the artist intended his work to be open-ended not about AIDS or his lover, but about the visitors singular experience. Its website states that the organization upholds the artist's intentions to let viewers reflect on the work in the present moment and defends the artists belief that all audiences have the ability to encounter the work on their own terms. It maintains that all works can have shifting, multiple meanings depending on context and interpretation. Upon examination, this seems at least partly true with caveats. Both sides of this debate those certain that Gonzlez-Torress biographical data is essential to reading his work and those who feel it must be open-ended base their views on statements made by the artist during his lifetime, and Gonzlez-Torres contradicted himself. In various interviews before his death, he both insists on the specificity of his work specifically its connection to Ross and rejects authoritative interpretation, suggesting meaning is up to the viewer. Saxony's Science and Arts Minister Eva-Maria Stange of the Social Democratic Party (SPD, l-r), art patron Erika Hoffmann and general director of the Dresden's art collection Marion Ackermann stand around Felix Gonzalez-Torres' piece 'Candy spills' at the Albertium, Dresden, Germany, 2018Oliver Killig/picture alliance via Getty ImagesIn a 1995 interview with Robert Storr for ArtPress, Gonzlez-Torres speaks of the joy he felt watching a security guard hand candy to children at one of his installations, saying the work functioned even if the viewer didnt know its deeper meaning. In that interview, he says: When people ask, Who is your public? I say honestly, without skipping a beat, Ross. The public was Ross. The rest of the people just come to the work.Gonzlez-Torres even describes "Untitled" (Placebo) as a way to cope with Laycocks death: First and foremost its about Ross, he says. He further notes, I wanted to make artwork that could disappear, that never existed, 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.In a 1990 interview, Gonzlez-Torres says about his work: It is all my personal history, all that stuff...gender and sexual preference, it's all that. I can't separate my art from my life. However, in another interview, he says, Ive become burnt out with trying to have some kind of personal presence in the work. Because Im not my art. He adds, I made Untitled (Placebo) because I needed to make it and there was no other consideration involved.Katz feels this mixed messaging was intentional: At every point, he said you can get out of his work what you want. This was how he displayed work during the Helms Amendment, which made it illegal to represent AIDS or queerness. The Helms Amendment, passed in 1987 as part of a federal appropriations bill, prohibited the use of U.S. federal funds in AIDS prevention programs to "promote or encourage, directly or indirectly, homosexual sexual activities" also a powerful deterrent for publicly funded museums and arts institutions during the height of the AIDS crisis. According to several art scholars, Gonzlez-Torres used ambiguity in his work to reach audiences in a time of extreme censorship, homophobia, and AIDS panic.Theres a reason Flix was successful during his lifetime, unlike other gay artists at the time making art about sexuality and AIDS, Florncio says. He played with the Trojan horse thing making art that is about something but looks like it could be about anything in order to infiltrate the art world.A now-famous, oft-quoted line by Gonzlez-Torres, from a 1993 interview with artist Joseph Kosuth, supports this: At this point I do not want to be outside the structure of power. I want to be like a virus that belongs to the institution. So if I function as a virus, an imposter, an infiltrator, I will always replicate myself together with those institutions.These shifting quotes raise the question: How much should curators depend on the words of the artist? Opinions vary. We hold Felix on too high of a pedestal if we think everything he said once, he stood by forever, says Shawn Diamond, a lecturer on art history. It makes sense that some days hed be missing Ross and say something like, This is all for Ross. And other days hed say, Well, the work can be taken any way.Censorship or Strategy?Katz believes that instead of honoring the artists wishes, a darker, financial-based motive drives the foundations approach one he insists runs counter to what Gonzlez-Torres wanted for his work. Katz notes that, in the high art world, labels of AIDS art and even queer art can limit where work can be shown and its commercial value to collectors.They believe that the more this work is associated with queerness or AIDS, the smaller the potential audience, Katz says. That impacts money. Terrill agrees: In my opinion, the foundation is concerned with maintaining high value and prestige. I dont hear anything from them about empathy or the community. I think theyre motivated purely by money. (In May of last year, the piece "Untitled" (America #3) a single string of lights hung from the ceiling was sold on auction at Christies for $13.6 million). Darnaude also points to a 2021 Zoom event helmed by the FGT foundation to mark the 25th anniversary of the artist's death from an AIDS-related illness; he calls the presentation a "smoking gun" about the nonprofit's intent to downplay the role of AIDS and Laycock in Gonzlez-Torress work. After the 17:50 mark, historian Robert Hobbs cued up a slide called "Subjects Important to Gonzlez-Torres" that was "put together" by Rosen. The slide attempted to show "how few works really deal with Ross" and AIDS by counting the number of pieces with Ross and "loverboys" in the titles. "There are under 50 works that deal with this," Hobbs stressed, as compared with say, the subject of politics, which numbered over 80 on the slide.In fairness, this seems to be at least one function of an artist foundation: to increase awareness, spread, and commercial value of art. Its worth noting that the Warhol Foundation isnt the same as the artist who created the work. Rather, it exists to legitimize the artwork and advance its reputation. Artist estates both protect and exploit legacies. They dont create with the purity or vision of the original artist. In one sense, it seems the Flix Gonzlez-Torres Foundation is just doing its job, even if seemingly irresponsibly. However, various reports by those who have worked with the foundation in the past seem to support Katzs view and lend credibility to his claims of antigay, AIDS-phobic erasure.For this article, multiple individuals who worked with the FGT Foundation previously curators, gallerists, researchers were contacted. Speaking anonymously, all described pressure to display the work in accordance with the foundations view that it should be open to the viewer and depoliticized. However, none would speak on record; many refused to engage further when the foundation specifically was mentioned. Katz calls this a conspiracy of silence in the art world. Guests at a private viewing of Damien Hirst And Felix Gonzalez-Torres's exhibition "Candy" at Blain Southern on October 15, 2013 in London, England. They know theyre going to want to show [Flix Gonzlez-Torress work] at some point, so they dont do anything that will trouble the relationship, he says.Additionally, Katz claims Rosen ignored some of Gonzlez-Torress dying wishes regarding his archives, including his love letters with Ross Laycock. Felix wanted their [love letters] read and seen, Katz says. She has refused to give these materials to institutions he promised them to.Shawn Diamond seems to corroborate this. Diamond studied the work of Gonzlez-Torres for over 10 years. In his thesis about the artist, Diamond writes, Wall texts and gallery guides have largely abandoned context and biography, promoting a sanitized and aestheticized form of engagement. In his research, Diamond was troubled by how the foundation appeared to restrict access to certain documents in particular, those that are explicit about the artists sexual relationship with Laycock. Diamond found a quote from Gonzlez-Torres expressing his wish for the couples letters to be donated to Bard College upon his passing. Even so, Diamond writes that the foundation retained the original copies and later donated a copy of these letters to Bard College but restricted access to them. The Politics of InterpretationThis renewed debate over Gonzlez-Torress legacy comes at a moment of rising cultural tension in the arts. In March, President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled "Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History," directing Vice President JD Vance to eliminate "improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology" from Smithsonian institutions, including museums and research centers a development that feels darkly similar to the Helms Amendment. This is 2025, Terrill says. Were facing a fascist takeover in the United States. The arts are under attack. Trump probably thinks the Flix Gonzlez-Torres Foundation is doing the right thing, but I dont.Florncio agrees: In the current American political climate, it may be important to [the FGT Foundation] that the work is not seen as gay art. In the exhibition "Kinderbiennale - Trume & Geschichten" in the Japanese Palais, a museum staff member arranges sweets in golden foil as part of Felix Gonzalez-Torres' work of art "Untitled", Dresden, Germany, 2018Sebastian Kahnert/picture alliance via Getty ImagesGiven the responses from the FGT Foundation and others, the idea of whether art is fixed in time or open to evolving interpretation seems central. Among those we spoke with, opinions are divided and heated.Saying 'Untitled' (Portrait of Ross) is just open-ended art is like displaying the AIDS Memorial Quilt and saying its a modern interpretation of quilt-making, Terrill says.Patrick Davis, a queer publisher who has studied the quilt as an act of biography and material storytelling, counters: "It is indeed a modern interpretation of quilt-making. It is a domestic art historically practiced by women to provide comfort. Men making them for their dying loved ones is subversive. The quilt panels are, essentially, the size of a grave."Florncio says, The work of Flix Gonzlez-Torres is no longer the same work if the idea is not present. He adds, The idea behind the work is the work.Davis similarly disagrees: Does Van Goghs The Starry Night not stand on its own artistic merit? Art lives beyond the artist. Limiting Gonzlez-Torress work to its original spark of brilliance restrains it.Patrick Moore, former director of the Andy Warhol Museum, writes in his book Beyond Shame: Reclaiming the Abandoned History of Radical Gay Sexuality, If the art of Felix Gonzlez-Torres is truly meant to be open to interpretation, then I propose one such interpretation. I propose claiming Felix as a gay man who died of AIDS and relating his legacy to that powerful experience. The entirety of the authorized body of work by Gonzlez-Torres was created while he watched his lover die and discovered that he too was dying. The work is not about formal concerns; these are only the medium in which they were created. The work speaks of trying to grieve for another person even as you watch your own death approaching.In The Painted Word, Tom Wolfes acerbic 1975 critique of the modern art world, he notes, Modern Art has become completely literary: the paintings and other works exist only to illustrate the text. Citing this, Davis adds,: Gonzlez-Torress work remains true even if meaningful text does not accompany it.Florncio notes that even the artists contemporaries accused him of being too coy, too vague, and too beautiful in his approach. Many said he was not gay enough or AIDS-y enough, he says. But if the work had screamed gay art from the beginning, he wouldnt have been the artist he became.Florncio says Gonzlez-Torres was indirect by design, so embracing that uncertainty is part of the work. Terrill similarly compares Gonzlez-Torres to other artists of the time. His work was such a contrast to the art about AIDS I was familiar with, like the agitprop from ACT UP, Gran Fury, General Idea, even Robert Mapplethorpes photographs. Gonzlez-Torress work was more subtle, less angry. It carried the undertone of grief and loss.Andrew Hibbard, a curator who has worked with several contemporary art institutions and who worked with the FGT Foundation in 2018 to curate a Gonzlez-Torres exhibit, says, As an artist, he was open about some things and also very cagey. You dont see many photographs of him. He didnt want that. Its worth noting that Hibbard is the only past curator who worked with the FGT Foundation who would speak on the record; he has since left the art industry and now works for a tech company.The board members of the FGT Foundation themselves seem to have shifting views. Julie Ault, a MacArthur Fellow and editor, curated the exhibit "Afterlife: A Constellation" (2014), which rejected monolithic AIDS narratives and emphasized subjectivity in how artists like David Wojnarowicz and Martin Wong are viewed. During his lifetime, Gonzlez-Torres named a work after her Untitled (Portrait of Julie Ault) and she later published a volume on his work. Curators Elena Filipovic and Ann Goldstein helped shape some of the artists major exhibitions, like the controversial David Zwirner show in 2017, which received accusations of AIDS erasure. These exhibitions stressed evolving, open-ended interpretations of Gonzlez-Torress work while still acknowledging its roots in illness and loss.Curator Miwon Kwon has similarly argued that Gonzlez-Torress work avoids specific meaning and instead centers on singular, unrepeatable viewer experience. Nancy Spector, who curated a major Guggenheim show while the artist was alive, once emphasized Gonzlez-Torress political and queer dimensions, but later, after the artists death, curated exhibitions that seemed to downplay them.Musing on the board members, Hibbard says: Theyre mostly straight women. And it seems like the people pushing this critique are not straight women. Its clear the tension isnt just about wall text or curatorial choices its about how queer artists are remembered and who should define that memory. Must a legacy foundation of a queer artist be run by queer people, like the Tom of Finland Foundation (an organization not without its own controversies)? At the same time, it seems necessary to let multiple interpretations of art exist.In her 1964 essay Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag famously writes, Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. She argues that interpretation in our time is more often reactionary, stifling and that the role of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.Hibbard muses on this. The question of biography is tricky, he says. The issue of not alluding to HIV and AIDS in didactics makes sense to me. If you look at things Gonzlez-Torres said, he was interested in AIDS not as a biological factor but as a kind of social ill. Framing it as a single issue could alienate an audience. He adds: I think Flix would bristle at any effort to hammer down one meaning.,The Current ExhibitIn the current Smithsonian exhibit which juxtaposes Gonzlez-Torress work with selections from the National Portrait Gallerys permanent collection the main text at the entrance makes no mention of the artists identity as a queer or HIV-positive man. It reads, His work refuses to convey history in a singular authoritative voice or through linear narratives of progress. Instead, Gonzalez-Torress practice questions and exceeds binary thinking, such as past and present, public and private, major and minor, or collective and individual.Notably, the exhibit omits accent marks in the artists name though these appear elsewhere in published material. The FGT Foundations website also omits them. However, there is a reference to the artists Cuban heritage on wall text for "Untitled" (Portrait of Dad) (1991). "Untitled" (Leaves of Grass) (1993) notes the works allusion to Walt Whitman but does not mention Whitman or Gonzlez-Torress sexuality, though Whitmans queerness is referenced elsewhere in the exhibit. Finally, along one wall sits "Untitled" (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), a pile of shimmering, multicolored candy laid flat, like a body. Its label reads: Ideal weight: 175 lb. The wall label does not explain who Ross was. "Untitled" (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) in present day at the Smithsonian National Portrait GalleryCourtesy Ignacio DarnaudeOn another spot in this room, separated from the "Untitled" work, there is a wall label that reads, "Gonzalez-Torres cared for his partner Ross Laycock, named in the candy works title, who died from HIV/AIDS in 1991." (Darnaude, when he viewed the exhibition, doubts many visitors will make the connection to truly understand the context of the work.)Speaking on the exhibit, which presents Gonzlez-Torres as one of the 20th centurys greatest portraitists, Terrill says, When I think of Flix Gonzlez-Torres, I dont think portraitist. Say portraitist and I think of Grant Wood, John Singer Sargent, Romaine Brooks not a pile of candy.But, he adds, if 175 pounds of candy is a portrait, who of? Its Ross. That makes the piece compelling. To say the 175 pounds is just the ideal weight of the piece seems counter to the Portrait Gallerys mission. Portraits are of people, and this one is of Ross. (Its worth noting that the artist himself defined the untitled piece as a portrait.)Hibbard still urges restraint. Id be generous to the foundation, he says. There are always a lot of interpretations. I dont think theyre stifling anyones vision. Hes a hard artist to show because of the very nature of the work.Theodore Kerr, coauthor of We Are Having This Conversation Now: The Times of AIDS Cultural Production, writes, As confused as I might be with the foundation's actions, I do think it is worth noting, celebrating, and continuing to organize around the fact that for so many of us, Flix Gonzlez-Torres' work is about many things, including how we learned to and continue to process the ongoing HIV crisis.Kerr goes on, Every time I go to a friend's house and I see that they, like me, have an Untitled"(Portrait of Ross) candy that they have saved for years, I get emotional. Those candies are memorials for our friends, the loved ones we lost, and the people we never had a chance to meet. No amount of attempted censure can take that connection away from us.Davis, who publishes queer books and queer art through his journal Revel, says, This gets to a bigger debate. Can we separate art from the artist? Some want to cancel Picasso because he was a sexual predator. That criminality does not erase Cubism. Art requires nuance.Diamond feels this debate mostly amounts to a request to see more from the Flix Gonzlez-Torres Foundation especially from those who survived a dark chapter in American history that the artist did not. The loudest voices calling for change are those who lived through the devastation of AIDS and fear its greatest voices being lost or, worse, intentionally erased.If anything, Diamond says, I wish they would put out a specifically queer exhibit on Flix or at least agree to always acknowledge who Ross was. Because Ross represents everyone we lost.He adds, They dont have to take a stance on how the work must be read. But presenting more biographic information at exhibits would give viewers another lens through which to view it not the only one, but another one. That would be enough. That would matter.
