Given the Felix Gonzalez-Torres's Case: The art of placing a different idea of participation at our disposal

Abstract

Due to their availability to the visitors Felix Gonzalez-Torres's candy spills have often been described as participatory artworks. And although this description is anything but wrong, it often implies and brings about a simplification in so far as it not only limits participation to activities like taking and consuming sweets. By emphasizing these activities, it also tends to elide a dimension of the modes of participation that are additionally at stake. Against the backdrop of this one-sidedness this article chooses another approach. Instead of following the same path, it focuses on the inter-subjective dynamics these installations elicit in different situational experiences and asks for a concept or an idea of participation becoming effective otherwise. But how does Gonzalez-Torres pave the way for inter-subjective encounters? How does he transform these encounters into a crucial factor of one's experiences with these installations? And which role do the relations between persons play with regard to an understanding of participation, as distinguished from that highlighted throughout the reception history of the candy spills? These questions will be discussed in light of Gonzalez-Torres's use, further development and re-formulation of the artistic repertoire of Minimal Art, that was seminal in the way it made the situation, an artwork is exhibited and perceived in, part of the artwork itself.

Notes

¹ For the role of the certificates in Minimal Art, see Martha Buskirk (2003), especially chapter 1, ‘Authorship and Authority’.

² Regarding the anthropomorphic presence of the Minimal object, see Michael Fried (1995: 129ff).