IN 1996, the year Felix Gonzalez-Torres died, I made a version of his “Untitled” (Perfect Lovers), 1987–90, by hanging two identical battery-operated clocks side by side on my living-room wall. I had always admired his work, and, like friends who had foil-wrapped candies sitting on their bookshelves or a sheet of paper from one his stacks pinned to their walls, I too wanted to live with a Felix. –Glenn Ligon, “My Felix”

When I first read My Felix, I already had my own Felix hanging for a year and a half. Much of Felix’s work relies on ready-made objects like clocks, or endlessly replenishable piles of materials (candies, prints, papers, etc.) which viewers are encouraged to take home with them, as they interact with his work. Whether we take candy from an art gallery, or hang our own clocks just-so, anyone can have their own Felix—this rides the line between democratic access and entitlement. Felix is all of ours, but Ligon’s Felix is his—my Felix is mine.

When we first discussed a distinction between Walt Whitman and “my Whitman / our Whitman / each’s-own Whitman,” I thought of this essay. Not only because the language is so similar, but because Felix and Walt have instilled the same instinct in those who respond to their work: to claim and construct a personal relationship, beyond the work, with the artist as a force.

Working through the height of the AIDS crisis, and himself HIV positive, Felix’s work is both sharply political and deeply personal. His work encompasses sculpture, printmaking, public installation, viewer participation… it can be hard to tell where any specific Felix piece starts or ends. For example, Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) is a work of art that consists of “just” a pile of candy placed on the floor. The work is specifically noted as having an “ideal weight” of 175 pounds, the weight of Felix’s partner, Ross Laycock, at the time of his own HIV diagnosis. Viewers are encouraged to take a piece of the candy, which represents the weight loss Ross experienced due to AIDS complications, while making literal the metaphor of the “sweet taste he would leave in your mouth” after meeting him. Does the “artwork” start with the gallery purchasing the candy? Putting it into the pile? With a viewer taking a piece? Does the work end when the candy is eaten or thrown away? Is each wrapper in a landfill still part of the work?

In 2010, Ross was displayed at the National Portrait Gallery exhibition Hide/Seek, along alongside an 1891 portrait of Walt Whitman by Thomas Cowperthwaite Eakins.

In tribute to the response by volunteers and caregivers to the needs of people living with HIV and AIDS in DC, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority and the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities collaborated to engrave an excerpt from Walt Whitman’s poem “The Dresser” on the north granite circular entrance to the Dupont Circle Metrorail station. –WMATA Art in Transit, 2007

The exclusion of the last two lines of Wound-dresser by WMATA in its Dupont Circle installation is widely considered to be an overt act of queer erasure. 

…Ross 1983 (Many a soldier’s loving arms about this neck have cross’d and rested, / Many a soldier’s kiss dwells on these bearded lips.) 1865 Dupont Circle Metro Station 2007… “Untitled” 1989, Felix Gonzalez-Torres

Untitled, 1989 is the first in a series of text-based works by Felix. Described as portraits, the works were commissioned by collectors or institutions, with “short-phrase year-date” lists of events and objects, ranging in scale from global political moments to indecipherable personal sentiments. These works are mutable; collectors and curators are given the power to change the whole text of the work, adding and removing new dates and phrases at their own discretion with each new installation. For the retrospective Always to Return at Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, curators Charlotte Ickes and Josh T. Franco chose to include the final two lines of Wound-dresser, to (even if temporarily) complete the poem for DC’s public.

In another room of the exhibition, (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) and the Eakins portrait of Whitman were reunited, alongside another work by Felix: Untitled (Leaves of Grass), a string of lights.

Part of my reading to prepare for this conversation starter was supposed to be Michael Moon’s paper Memorial Rags. This work seems to have kicked off an entire sub-genre of Whitman criticism which reframes Drum-taps through perspectives of the AIDS crisis. I first saw it referenced in Russell Ferguson’s Out There: Marginalization and contemporary cultures,a book I got only for a series of photo essays by Felix. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to source the full Moon paper in time for this post. It’s obvious, though, that the construction of Walt Whitman as a forefather in both the stylistic development of “an American art” and as a figure in “an American queer canon” would suggest evidence of a lineage to follow him. Who gets to follow Walt? So much of his poetry demands that we follow him, that the reader of our time is as present as the reader of his time. As Whitman demands, we touch him through his books, Felix demands we take him, taste him through his:

People don’t realize how strange it is when you make your work, and you put it out to be seen and say, simply, “take me.” –Felix Gonzalez-Torres as quoted in his 1995 monograph by Nancy Spector

Whitman’s depiction of the Civil War throughout drum taps focuses on small interpersonal relationships, moments shared between him and soldiers, both living and dead. Out There summarizes Memorial Rags’s analysis of grief thusly: “Rather than looking beyond [Freud’s] ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ for other possibilities—Moon proposes fetishism, but a fetishism rescued from Freud’s 1927 account by making it a conscious means of extending our homoerotic relations, even with the dead…” Both Felix and Walt demand that we engage with their bodies in some physical way, even after their death. Felix does this through his candy portraits, Walt stresses this at the end of Song of Myself. 

To boil this down into more specific discussion questions (although I would also love to talk about this big nebula of connection between Felix and Walt, especially site-specific to DC):

1. How does the construction of Whitman as a canonical/spiritual/mythological object affect the construction of a queer lineage or tradition in American art?
2. How does homoerotic relation in Drum-taps color Whitman’s own beliefs around death, and the connections fraternal and/or erotic made at the brink of or across opposite sides of death?
3. What does it mean to construct a “my Felix”, or a “my Walt”? Is artist-as-force or artist-as-ghost a metaphor? A physical interaction? A spiritual event? Especially for those of us who recreated Whitman’s voice for response 1, how did you view the process of channeling Whitman?

And this threat of what’s call’s hell is little or nothing to me,
and the lure of what’s called heaven is little or nothing to me;
Dear camerado! I confess I have urged you onward with me, and still urge                                                                            you, without the least idea what is our destination,
Or whether we shall be victorious, or utterly quell’d and defeated.
–As I Lay with My Head in Your Lap Camerado, Walt Whitman

although they were still planning on going to that exotic paradise, it was hard to forget about those images of the night before: all those bodies left by the death squads.
–Fetishism, Felix Gonzalez Torres