THIS IS ART

I was recently reminded of why I still, in fact, love art. Sometimes this is a might difficult for me to admit, but something our friend in Gambier got me thinking the other day and a piece by Felix Gonzalez-Torres came to mind: Untitled: Dead by Gun. I love this piece. I think it is one of the most beautiful pieces of art I have ever encountered. When I think of it again – some seven years after the only time I have seen it in person – I still wonder at it, am moved and touched by it, am inspired by it and strive to live up to it.

If you do not know this piece – see the included images from the MOMA site – be forewarned that no image of it could conceivably do it anything resembling justice. The piece is a stack of 45” by 33” prints that is at its outset 9” high. On each print is listed the names of 460 individuals killed by gunshot during the week of May 1–7, 1989, cited by name, age, city, and state, with a brief description of the circumstances of their deaths, and, in most cases, a photographic image of the deceased. [The images and text were appropriated form Time magazine.] But this is just the beginning…

My experience of this piece in person – I believe—can stand as exemplary of what this piece is, and does. I walked in and a few people were looking at the piece, regarding it with the “correct” reverential distance, not necessarily sure even why they were doing so with this piece, it is just a stack of grainy prints, not even close enough to read the text on the prints. Most of the others in this particular gallery within the MOMA were looking at other works. I – along with my wife – looked for a while [and actually debated whether MOMA wanted us to take one, though I knew Felix Gonzalez-Torres did, but his recent death may have altered curatorial approach, you never know], and then I walked over a peeled a print off of the top of the stack and walked away. This is when the piece comes alive.

At first there were a bevy of shocked looks: “That guy touched the art! Wait, that guy took a piece of the art!!! Hey, why aren’t the guards doing anything!” And the guards continue to do nothing as I walk by. I can then see the look in the other visitors’ faces, a recognition that they too can do the same. For one reason or another – whether it be a desire to participate in this piece or simply grab something famous for free – almost everyone else in the gallery follows suit and picks up, rolls up and packs up their new piece in preparation to take it home. Thus we get to the point.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres was deeply invested in gun control and even more deeply invested in people not dying needlessly. Each one of these people – those killed by guns in early May 1989 – mattered, and should matter. They were and still are more than statistics, but they were also profoundly part of a growing number, the statistics of death that get published, printed, recorded and observed. Gonzalez-Torres accepts this statistical nature, embraces and alludes to it. He lists the dead, one after another, accumulates them in that horrific number: 460 in one week. The print itself revels in the tropes of neutrality and objectivity, but the experience reverses that posture.

I take these people home with me; these events become part of my space. Gonzalez-Torres uses the value he can confer upon the print as an artist to get the viewer to value it, to bring it into their home, to preserve it and even display it. His statement is repeated, brought to others as part of their concern. Whether they care for this piece as a message – a cry out against the horror of death, of murder – or because it is Art does not matter immediately. The two positions are imbedded in each other, the message keeps going, it leaves the gallery and follows us, out into the street, the subway, our apartments and homes. And even to the most crass and touristic the message is valuable because the print is, it is meaningful because MOMA says so.

This piece is beautiful, the way it uses that interaction, “I can touch it? I can have it? I want it even if I don’t yet know what it is.” It uses the interactive transformation to induce an investment, a concern and involvement. Those 460 people do matter, not just as statistics, instead as human beings. Gonzalez-Torres is not trying to get me to feel a false concern for a stranger. Rather, he asks me to remember that they are people, they are strangers but that in no way minimizes the tragedy. He overwhelms me with the enormity of 460 people who are no longer here because in that one week all 460 of them were killed by guns.

This is the type of interaction to which I aspire in my work. This is what I believe art is about. Someday I will make something this beautiful and when I do I plan to step back, have a little more coffee and thank Felix Gonzalez-Torres for having once shown me what art can do.