Could the aesthetic realm be a space of reparative possibility? This question has become newly urgent during the continuous destruction of Palestine, during which art, literature, and theory have been tested in their capacity to make inoperative the death, disappearance, and violence against minoritized life. When they are forbidden, even censored to sense—feel, touch, hear—minoritarian subjects disavow and produce regenerative creations that can potentiate repair: reparative gestures of solidarity for the deacceleration of genocide. Such a vision of repair, one that insists on foregrounding the light of possibility, also animated the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Today, we may be drawn to his work as we face continued crises in the present, magnetized by his oeuvre as it (re)works forbidden topics of his era all while providing a sense of restorative engagement, embracing a desire for life. His artistic project of the 1980s and 1990s was shaped by moments of crisis where one can find gestures and actions of re-imagining chaos and uncertainty. In his work, he conjures the silenced—the forbidden—to ponder on acts of solidarity through combinations light and color as techniques of possibility despite catastrophe and despair.
Gonzalez-Torres is one of a few artists whose work during the 1980s and 1990s incorporated forbidden concepts through a minimalist and conceptual lens. He lived a life in diasporic displacement—in errantry, Édouard Glissant would say—where he saw and felt conditions of precarity, coloniality, and vulnerability in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the United States. His art reflected on socio-political disenchantments, with the U.S. government’s inaction in the face of the HIV/AIDS crisis, which would also claim his own life in 1996; the inequalities of class, race, and sexuality; the effects of the Gulf War and migration; and the neoliberal policies that exacerbated the uneven distribution of life chances for racial and sexual minorities. Embedded in these circumstances, Gonzalez-Torres’s work transmits vulnerability in his minimalist and conceptual work. His work may appear surprisingly abstract for all the personal pain and political protest it nonetheless embodies.
In “Untitled” (Lovers-Paris), from 1993, two cords are set in exhibition, each with 42 light bulbs. In some exhibitions of this piece, the light bulbs are placed on the floor, while in others they are hung from the ceiling in arch forms. Other configurations appear in different set-ups, depending on the place, curator, or exhibition. The luminosity of the light bulbs gestures toward a future of two lovers in Paris. Although the work was created after Gonzalez-Torres’s partner died in 1991 as an in memoriam, the lightbulbs can also be read as sights of hope in different causes and struggles, like the rise in activism amidst accelerated accounts of AIDS-related deaths.
By 1991 the artist had created more than 77 works and between 1992-1993 some 67 more. “Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.)” from 1991 is another piece conglomerated by light and color. In this portrait, Ross, Felix’s partner, is not visibly framed; rather, an “infinite supply” of candy in different colors (or flavors) are assembled with an “ideal weight” of 175 pounds, the weight of the human body. The piece was displayed in different ways: as a miniature mountain piled on the floor, sometimes in a corner of an exhibition room, or at times in the center of a museum space. The mass of candy in “infinite” and “ideal weight” insists, like in “Lovers-Paris” (1993), for a possibility of “keeping” an ideal amount of matter, of one’s loved one, even in a symbolized state of being. Scholars like José Esteban Muñoz have argued for a desire of concrete utopia as an ideal place and time that arises as a critique of the present, a now that is not enough for minoritarian peoples. For Gonzalez-Torres, the pile of candy as an ideal size of possibility attempts to keep what is lost in an “ideal” form, as frames of care fail to nurture fragile forms of life. As a symbolized synecdoche of the lost, the candy is, like Muñoz’s utopian longing, disenchanted with the present, but also urging for a different way of holding on to loss. A hold that is not necessarily melancholic but an aesthetic injunction to not let a loss be lost but instead be repaired.
Indeed, Gonzalez-Torres’s work is singular. Instead of representing destruction or chaos, the artist accentuates color and light in most of his work: traces of possibility and luminosity that shine bright both then and now. Perhaps one of his most famous installations is the 1991 billboard photographing an empty bed with pillows and white sheets. Placed in strategic neighborhood spaces where it cannot go unnoticed, even in malls or in the traditional museum halls, the shot captures textures of whites and greys where the reflection of light highlights an absence itself. Absence in this work, as in the other previous two, is an invitation to be in relation to what is no longer with us. The ephemerality—of what was once there, and yet also still there and here—is accentuated with rays of light that come from the outside of the frame. That external introspection is also a call upon the viewer to embrace precarious forms of life.
The use of light—or the technique of light to accentuate color—lets the artist envision a canvas of repair. When it seems that the world had failed the self, when destruction and death permeate the social, and when horror may still be stumbled upon, Gonzalez-Torres’s artistic acts of repair shift our attention to other ways of engaging loss and disappearance. At a crossroads of various activisms and militancies of the 1980s and 1990s that were mobilized from a shared experience of harm and exclusion, his work proposes building coalitions and communities of care and repair mediated through the aesthetic sphere. There, in the artistic production, the colonized, enslaved, sexually “deviant,” and the disenfranchised can meet and collide for calls to action.
In the acrylic panel titled “Forbidden Colors” (1988), Gonzalez-Torres enacts repair by not only emphasizing color attuned to light as possibility, but also by urging for actions of solidarity that can move from the artistic to a Collective of those affected by loss and war. The piece was part of The Workspace: Felix Gonzalez-Torres, curated by Laura Trippi between September and November of 1998 at The New Museum of Contemporary Art, in New York. The 20-by-68-inch (50 cm by 172 cm) work is composed of four parts—or panels—each 20 inches by 16 inches. The first panel is green, followed by red, black, and finally white. They are the colors of the insignia of the Palestine flag, summoned just as Palestinian territorial sovereignty was being disputed.
In the exhibition, “Forbidden Colors” is the only one with its own wall. On her side wall black photostats are montaged with white letters that talk about the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and, seemingly unrelated texts, “gogo boots” and “Barbie.” The national health center symbolically responsible for the neglect of the HIV/AIDS crisis is juxtaposed with words and phrases of joy associated with the queer nightlife often instead blamed for the crisis. “Forbidden Colors” thus sheds attention on two “unspeakable” topics: the AIDS toll on human subjects and Palestinian freedom. Gonzalez-Torres builds in the curatorial space a solidarity of relation “enlivened” by gogo boots and the luminosity of the Palestinian colors.
In the 2015 exhibition of “Forbidden Colors,” in Belfast, Northern Ireland, the neighboring room guides the viewer to an installation of the aforementioned “Untitled (Lovers-Paris).” The incendiary hanging lightbulbs at a near horizon, in the next room, accompany the Palestinian colors as if to gesture toward a radiation of light soon to come. This is a dissent visibly grounded on the forbidden, a topic excluded from dominant narratives of its present. Now, then, more than any time “Forbidden Colors” urges our contemporary present to harness the “forbidden” as a point of departure for an end of Palestinian erasure.
“Forbidden Colors” was produced at a time when Palestine was called the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and when Jerusalem had been proclaimed the capital of the PLO. At the same time that the rights of those living with HIV/AIDS was being questioned in the United States and the United Kingdom, Gonzalez-Torres’s 1988 piece calls for an affinity-making with the Palestinian population: how to create points of solidarity through shared dispossession. How to repair the loss of kin, land, and home. And whether reparative moves can begin through an artistic representation.
As a request, but also clarification, the artist wrote a short introduction to this exhibition insisting that “by reactivating history we can help define our position in this landscape of 1988.” Gonzalez-Torres critiques hegemonic forms of power by bringing to light the censorship of the Palestinian flag, uplifted in 1993, and reinstated in 2023. In 1988, a decade not too far from our ours, his words are haunting and timely:
“This work is about my exclusion from the circle of power where social and cultural values are elaborated and about my rejection of the imposed and established order. It is a fact people are discriminated against for being HIV positive. It is a fact the majority of the Nazi industrialists retained their wealth after war. It is a fact the night belongs to Michelob and Coke is real. It is a fact the color of your skin matters. It is a fact Crazy Eddie’s prices are insane. It is a fact that four colors red, black, green and white placed next to each other in any form are strictly forbidden by the Israeli army in the occupied Palestinian territories. This color combination can cause an arrest, a beating, a curfew, a shooting, or a news photograph. Yet it is a fact that these forbidden colors, presented as a solitary act of consciousness here in SoHo, will not precipitate a similar reaction.”
The colors provoke us. Could they also mobilize us? Their combination—forbidden, occluded, and at risk of becoming completely obscured—can serve as coalitional mobilization invigorated the disenchantment of a damaging world. The text accompanying “Forbidden Colors” (1988) reminds us that a “solitary act of consciousness” can connect one and many others that share similar feelings of loss and absence, creating a constellation of convergences of repair.
“Forbidden Colors” appeared before the 1993 Oslo Accords and the Arab Israeli Peace Process. The four panels perhaps foreshadowed a horizon of consensus or ways to generate reparations, how to halt an avalanche of violence, war, and destruction. In turn, today, given the recent wave of false representations of the conflict over Palestine and the number of cases of lives that have been lost, the artist’s work and words can be re-read in our present: “Initially, these four fabrics, or four colors, establish communication with every viewer, informed or not,” Gonzalez-Torres mentions. In this way, these forbidden colors as remnants of life itself become coordinates of non-violent encounters that urge for the nurturing of the Palestinian population.
Such a solidarity feels even more urgent today, when those supporting the destruction of Palestine have often tried to leverage the Western queer community against the Palestinian people. Gonzalez-Torres refuses this cleavage. His vision of repair posits how to be in commonality amidst failing states, a damaging world, and neoliberal techniques of voided exceptionality. In other words, following Muñoz, could one come into solidarity from a shared experience of harm—be it the migratory experience, seropositivity, racial and sexual exclusion, or the loss of a loved one? Brightened by the use of the photographic camera’s light, these fabrics of green, red, black, and white are sites of solidarity making that one can see, feel, and enter in an equivalence of relation. The aesthetic realm puts these four pallets in motion: to heighten the radiation of “forbidden” forms of life and end the catastrophe across the Atlantic.
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Jorge Sánchez Cruz