Sweets

I was intrigued by Bourriaud's discussion of the 1992 exhibition Work, Work in Progress in which the visitor/spectator/audience "had a crucial place, because his interaction with the works helped to define the exhibition's structure." In particular I want to touch upon his thoughts on the "piles of sweets" body of work by Felix Gonzalez-Torres. These are minimal interactive pieces where the audience is invited, or as Bourriaud says "authorised", to take sweets from the pile. For example, Untitled (Loverboys) (1991) is a mound of of sweets of exactly the 355 pounds, the combined weight of him and his partner. Like most of his work, this piece deals with the artist's pain of living with AIDS and the death of his partner to the disease. The gesture of taking sweets and lessening the pile's weight alludes to bodily degradation, mortality and loss. Bourriaud describes this as the audience "contributing to the break-up of the work." Superficially, yes. Yet I feel Bourriad is missing the point. To me Gonzalez-Torres work engages with the community to diffuse his suffering. The interactivity of the work enables him to release his burden onto willing others as well as re-affirming a sense of belonging in the wider community (as his homosexual community is continuously threatened by AIDS). Furthermore, the absence left by the subtraction of each candy becomes a new presence with (or even within the viewer). In this way, the artwork's meaning relies on its relation with the audience. Thus, I challenge Bourriaud by proposing that the the visitor does not "break-up" the work but complete it.