Félix González-Torres and the archive.


Niels van Maanen

Archives have traditionally been regarded as inert and neutral repositories of historical sources. Archival records have been viewed as unbiased witnesses to historical events, because they are generally created during the same period of time as the events they document.[1] However, several poststructuralist and postmodern scholars, most notably Michel Foucault, have challenged these assumptions. Foucault unearthed the triangular connection between the archive, public memory and power, and argued that the archive is an active, regulatory discursive system.[2] Or, as archivist Elisabeth Kaplan puts it: “The archival record doesn’t just happen; it is created by individuals and organizations, and used, in turn, to support their values and missions, all of which comprises a process that is certainly not politically and culturally neutral.”[3]
Indeed, throughout human history the most powerful groups in society have used archives to institutionalise their power and to shape social memory. Archives actively shape the archival documents that they house: they bestow significance and authority on them.[4] As Jacques Derrida said: “The archivization produces as much as it records the event.” In this manner, archives influence our perspectives on individuals and social groups. They do not only preserve the past, but also influence the present and the future.[5] As Derrida reminds us: “There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory. Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and the access to the archive, its constitution and its interpretation.”[6]
In recent years, the concept of the archive has also engaged the attention of artists, art historians, art critics and curators. In 2008 art critic and curator Okwui Enwezor organized the exhibition Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art in the International Center of Photography in New York. The central theme of this exhibition was the position of the subject inside the archival order of state.[7] Enwezor’s exhibition not only surveyed the ways in which artists have ‘appropriated’ archival structures and archival materials, but also the ways in which they have ‘reconfigured’ and ‘interrogated’ them. For Enwezor, these ‘archival materials’ are usually photographs, and to a lesser extent film fragments.[8]
One striking work that Enwezor included in the exhibition was “Untitled” (Death by Gun) (1990) by Cuban-born American artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957 – 1996). In this essay I use the concept of the archive as a lens through which to examine the artistic practice of this artist. I will consecutively analyse how Gonzalez-Torres drew both on public archives and on his own private ‘archive’. “Untitled” (Death by Gun) consists of a stack of poster-sized white paper sheets. Each sheet shows black-and-white photographs of all persons killed by gunshots across the cities of the United States of America during the week of May 1 to May 7, 1989. Along with the pictures of the 464 victims, their names, ages, hometowns and the circumstances of their death were printed. Gonzalez-Torres obtained the images and words from an article on gun violence in TIME Magazine. Passers-by are invited to take a sheet of the stack, which will consequently lose its ‘ideal’ initial size of nine inches. However, Gonzalez-Torres ensured that the sheets can be distributed indefinitely, by arranging that the depleted sheets are continually replaced.[9] The constant replenishing of the sheets might signify the continuity of the violence.[10]
In his article ‘Archive Fever: Photography Between History and The Monument’, which was published in the exhibition catalogue of Archive Fever, Enwezor writes that “Untitled” (Death by Gun) “operates at the level of two kinds of archival practice.” In the first place, Enwezor views the work as an embodiment of Foucault’s idea of the document turned into a monument. “The work’s somber content – images of the death stare back at the viewer, with numbing silence – transforms its structure from archival printed sheet to sculptural monument.” Secondly, Enwezor states that the work also functions as a ‘literal archive’. Because of this, the work “oscillates between document and monument, shifting from the archival to the monumental and from that to the documentary.”[11]
Although I agree with Enwezor’s reading of “Untitled” (Death by Gun), I feel that he overlooks one important aspect of the work. Apart from being both a monument and a document, the work is also a critical comment. With the work, Gonzalez-Torres addressed the issue of ongoing gun violence in the United States. When compared to the rest of Gonzalez-Torres’s oeuvre, “Untitled” (Death by Gun) is unusually specific. Whereas in most of his other artworks, Gonzalez-Torres indirectly comments on contemporary social conditions, this piece is critical in a more straightforward way. The viewer looks the victims directly in the eyes. Art critic and curator Robert Storr characterised “Untitled” (Death by Gun) as one of Gonzalez-Torres’s “more declarative offerings”[12] and curator Amanda Cruz stated that this work shows Gonzalez-Torres “perhaps at his most didactic”.[13]

“Untitled” (Death by Gun) is not the only work of art that Gonzalez-Torres created by taking elements from public discourse: he produced a number of works by appropriating and repositioning documentary and historical images. I will now discuss two outstanding examples of such works: “Untitled” (Klaus Barbie as a Family Man) (1988) and “Untitled” (Waldheim to the Pope) (1989). Both works consist of a historical image printed on a jigsaw puzzle board and then sealed in plastic. To create the first work, Gonzalez-Torres appropriated a photograph in which SS-Hauptsturmführer Klaus Barbie – known as the Butcher of Lyon – poses next to his wife and two children while in exile in Latin America. A year before Gonzalez-Torres created this work, Barbie was sentenced to life-in-prison for his crimes against humanity. Decades earlier, during the Second World War, Barbie had participated in the deportation of more than 7,000 people to extermination camps. Among his victims were ‘the children of Izieu’; forty-four Jewish children ranging in age from three to seventeen, who were forcibly removed from their group home in Izieu, a village fifty miles from Lyon. Barbie’s signature sent the children on the first available train to the death camps in the east. Not a single one of them would survive the war.
Gonzalez-Torres’s choice to use a family portrait of the Barbie family, in which Klaus Barbie appears as the personification of patriarchal virtue, while he is in fact a child murderer, may very well be a commentary on the values and norms of the dominant heterosexual culture. Being a homosexual, Gonzalez-Torres imagined “life in a ‘place’ where difference is not equivalent to opposition and heterosexuality is not considered the ‘norm’ by which everything else is evaluated,” as curator Nancy Spector wrote.[13] Gonzalez-Torres envisioned a world in which the nuclear family – a father and mother and their children living under one roof – would not be considered the only natural family unit. In a 1993 interview with Tim Rollins, Gonzalez-Torres stated the following on dealing with the image of the ‘family man’: “I recently saw a very traumatic photograph of a Yugoslavian soldier beating and kicking the bodies of two dead Muslim women. This soldier is a man who probably has a god, a man who performs his duty, a ‘family man,’ a hero… [One] reason why I make works of art is to try to get that out of my system in a healthy way. Here is a ‘family man’ who has the kind of respect that I as a gay man will never have. How do I deal with a culture that will give him a medal of ‘honour’? How? In a way I'm trying to negotiate my position within this culture by making this [body of] artwork[s].”[15] Exactly the same goal of negotiating a position is apparent in “Untitled” (Klaus Barbie as a Family Man). Gonzalez-Torres questions the normativity of the nuclear family by showing an ‘ideal’ nuclear family head who is at the same time a destroyer of other nuclear families.[16]
Gonzalez-Torres created the second work, “Untitled” (Waldheim to the Pope), by appropriating a 1987 photograph of Pope John Paul II giving Kurt Waldheim the Eucharist by placing the Host on his tongue. One year before the photo was taken, Waldheim had been elected president of Austria, despite the fact that shortly before he had been exposed as a Lieutenant of the Wehrmacht during the Second World War. Robert Storr remarked that this work might be seen as a comment on the ‘coordinated governance of Church and State’, which, together with nuclear family values, stands at the base of the Republican New World Order.
Both “Untitled” (Klaus Barbie as a Family Man) and “Untitled” (Waldheim to the Pope) deal with public obliviousness.[17] In the decennia after the Second World War, different institutions closed their eyes to the Nazi history of both Barbie and Waldheim. Despite his horrible crimes against humanity, Klaus Barbie was recruited by the Counter Intelligence Corps of the United States Army in 1947. When France demanded in 1949 that Barbie would stand trial for his war crimes, the government of the Unites States decided not to turn him over, worrying that he might disclose U.S. intelligence. Instead, they assisted Barbie in hiding himself. It would take 38 years before Barbie was finally put to trial.[18] Kurt Waldheim lied about his military record until the mid-1980’s. Documents revealing his past as a Lieutenant of the Wehrmacht as well as accusations that he had served in a unit that committed atrocities in Yugoslavia did not prevent him from being elected president of Austria in 1986. Apparently, a majority of the Austrian voting population closed their eyes to Waldheim’s past and his lies about it. The same can be said about Pope John Paul II, as Gonzalez-Torres shows us. In 1994, five years after Gonzalez-Torres made his work, the Pope would even confer a papal knighthood on Waldheim.[19]

Whereas in the three previously discussed works, Gonzalez-Torres used documentary and historical images from public discourse, he also created works using images from his own private ‘archive’. It can be argued that while the former deal with public obliviousness, the latter deal with private reminiscence. I will illustrate this point by discussing two of these ‘private’ works now: “Untitled” (Lover’s Letter) (1991) and “Untitled” (Ross and Harry) (1991).
Both works were created soon after the artist’s partner, Ross Laycock, had died of AIDS-related complications in 1991. The first work consists of a close-up photograph of a love letter Ross had sent to Felix, again printed on a jigsaw puzzle board. In this piece the original love letter is only partially visible. As a result, the viewer is confronted with a cryptic but moving text.[20] Gonzalez-Torres created more ‘love letter’ works in 1991: some of them jigsaw puzzles, others framed photographs. By removing the love letters from the realm of domesticity and displaying them in the space of the museum, Gonzalez-Torres brought his private memories into the public sphere.
As artist and Felix’s close friend Julie Ault wrote, Gonzalez-Torres had a paradoxical relationship to self-representation: “Felix was reticent to speak about his own life in public lectures and generally refused to allow his photograph to circulate in art publicity, preferring that people focus on the work rather than him or his image. He never wanted to distract from his language as an artist, and frequently said, ‘I am not the work.’” And yet, he made the photographs of the love letters Ross had sent him into works that circulated publicly. In interviews Gonzalez-Torres also spoke about how Ross’s illness and subsequent death had inspired him to make certain works.[21] Gonzalez-Torres’s paradoxical relationship to self-representation is not only embodied in the works themselves, which are both public and private, but also in their titles. Gonzalez-Torres titled all his works “Untitled”, followed by an explanatory subtitle, often a personal reference.[22]
“Untitled” (Ross and Harry) is also a clear example of a work that crosses the boundaries between the private and the public domain. Gonzalez-Torres created it using a photograph of Ross playing on the beach with his black Labrador Harry. The informal, snapshot quality of the photograph gives the work a very intimate feel. Gonzalez-Torres created more works appropriating photographs from his private ‘photo album’. He used, for example, childhood pictures, holiday pictures, and snapshots of Ross. Furthermore, he also took a photo album itself as the subject of one of his puzzle pieces. This work, “Untitled” (Album) (1991) shows a photo album with a silver faux-leather cover that has the word ‘album’ inscribed on it.[23]
Gonzalez-Torres’s use of photographs from his private ‘photo album’, reminds me of Tacita Dean’s Floh (2000), which was one of the other works Okwui Enwezor selected for the Archive Fever exhibition. Floh examines the function of the family photo album as archive. It consists of 163 family snapshots Dean collected at flea markets in Europe and the United States, ordered in configurations that bring to mind ethnographic typologies. Art historian Tom McDonough argues in his article ‘The Anarchive’ (2008) that Dean challenges us with Floh “to decipher the role played by domestic photography in constructions of self, family, social position and the like.”[24] With this he touches upon an important issue, which is also relevant to the works that Gonzalez-Torres created using his own private ‘photo album’.
The family photo album is a space where the boundaries between archive and narrative, documentary and fiction, are blurred. McDonough accurately characterizes it as “a space where we tell ourselves stories about our histories and call upon photographic traces as evidence.”[25] By putting photographic traces of his relationship with Ross in the public domain, Gonzalez-Torres made use of his democratic right to participate in the archive. Since archives are usually created by the most powerful groups in society, the majority of archival records document the activities and interests of these groups.[26] Gonzalez-Torres, who was not part of these majorities, left evidence of his homosexual relationship as an extension and an enrichment of the archive.

Now that I have shown how Felix Gonzalez-Torres drew both on public archives as well as on his own private ‘archive’, two recurring themes can be recognized. First, with his archival works, Gonzalez-Torres negotiates his own position within society. By using historical and documentary images from the public discourse, the artist questions the norms and values of the dominant groups in society. By incorporating images from his own private ‘archive’ in his oeuvre, Gonzalez-Torres represents himself – being part of a minority at the edges of mainstream culture – in the public domain.
Secondly, Gonzalez-Torres’s works transcend the personal. Although some of them find their origins in the artist’s personal life, they all leave enough space for the viewer’s own interpretation: even the ambiguous titles of the works point to this. The tension between the reluctance to speak about personal matters and the use of very personal images indicates Gonzalez-Torres’s paradoxical relationship to self-representation. As Julie Ault notes, the following comment from Adam Phillips, originally about Freud, also applies very well to Gonzalez-Torres: “There is the wish to be known, and the wish to die knowing that he wasn’t known.”[27] [S]

Biography:

Niels van Maanen is a student of the Research Master in Art Studies at the University of Amsterdam..

References:

  1. Jimerson, Randall. ‘Archives and Memory.’ OCLC Systems & Services, vol.19, no. 3 (2003)
  2. Enwezor, Okwui. ‘Archive Fever: Photography Between History and the Monument.’ (in:) Archive Fever. New York: ICP/Steidl, 2008: p. 11-47, p. 11
  3. Jimerson. ‘Archives and Memory’
  4. Ibidem
  5. Ketelaar, Eric. ‘Tacit Narratives: The Meanings of Archives.’ Archival Science, 1 (2001): p. 131-141, p. 134
  6. Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996: p. 4
  7. McDonough, Tom. ‘The Anarchive.’ Art in America (May 2008)
  8. Enwezor. ‘Archive Fever’: p. 11
  9. http://www.moma.org/ Consulted on 05.01.2009
  10. Chan, Sewell. ‘Finding Meaning in the Empire of Images.’ The New York Times, 18.04.2008.
  11. Enwezor, ‘Archive Fever’: p. 28
  12. Storr, Robert. ‘When This You See Remember Me.’ (in:) Ault, Julie ed. Felix Gonzalez-Torres. New York: Steidl, 2006: p. 5-38, p. 24
  13. Cruz, Amanda. ‘The Means of Pleasure.’ (in:) Ault, Julie, ed. Felix Gonzalez-Torres. New York: Steidl, 2006: p. 52-59, p. 55
  14. http://www.sammlung-goetz.de/ Consulted on 05.01.2009
  15. http://www.pulitzerarts.org/ Consulted on 05.01.2009
  16. Storr, Robert.‘Setting Traps for the Mind and Heart.’ Art in America (January 1996)
  17. Storr. ‘When This You See Remember Me’: p. 31-32
  18. Breitman, Richard. U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005: p. 426-427
  19. Kandell, Jonathan. ‘Kurt Waldheim, Former U.N. Chief, Is Dead at 88.’ The New York Times, 15.06.2007.
  20. Storr. ‘When This You See Remember Me’: p. 32
  21. Ault, Julie. ‘Preface’. (in:) Ault, Julie, ed. Felix Gonzalez-Torres. New York: Steidl, 2006: p. ix-xv
  22. Ibidem: p. xii
  23. Storr. ‘When This You See Remember Me’: p. 32
  24. McDonough. ‘The Anarchive’
  25. Ibidem.
  26. Jimerson. 'Archives and Memory'
  27. Ault. 'Preface':p. xii.