ARTIST SAYS I LIKE PEOPLE TO PLAY WITH MY ART (48)
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This morning the air is warm and brings the tiniest tint of tea rose. A hint of mint would have fitted well with today’s photo, but it wasn’t to be.
Alt Text says this
week’s image is ‘a paper with text on it’. I say it was the blurb I once read
before entering an art exhibition that I was later escorted out of.
Once upon a time I took a trip to an art gallery. I wore my smart jeans and my lime green jacket and was up for having my lunch out. I loved the sound of the exhibition when I read the blurb in this photo. The words “play with it please” and the permission to take a sweet from Felix Gonzalez-Torres Untitled (Portrait of Dad) appealed to me and I was excited to see the works. As did the whole quote from the artist:
“I don’t necessarily know how these pieces are best displayed ... Play with it please. Have fun. Give yourself that freedom. Put my creativity into question, minimise the preciousness of the piece.”
Entering the gallery and seeing the huge pile of mints against the wall immediately reminded me of my grandad and the way he used to offer me a mint from his pocket when I saw him at the seafront. I didn’t really like those mints at the time. I preferred fruit sweets or chewy spearmint sweets. Standing in front of this display I felt a sudden rush of nostalgia as I realised they were more than wrappered mints, they were tokens of love.
I am not 100% sure what encouraged me to sit in the pile of mints, I think perhaps it was the word “rearrange”, so sit I did. I took a sweet to eat and pocketed two for later. I was completely lost in the moment and it felt wonderful. And then I heard the crackle of static on walkie talkies...
Setting this down as a poem seemed appropriate and it features in ‘Gallery 2, a gallery of the unspoken’, in my poetry collection Welcome to the Museum of a Life. I see now I misremembered how the quantity of sweets was calculated for the art, but I still like the poem for the memories it captures. I also see now why I ask readers to seek permission before having their photo taken in the huge jar that is installed in Gallery 4, a gallery of dreams.
UNTITLED (PORTRAIT OF DAD)
after Félix González-Torres
In the far corner, against a white wall,
a metre wide pile of mints
half a metre high
and the title: “Untitled” (Portrait of Dad).
I am halted by wrappers
stuck sticky-tight to striped mints.
I’d have liked them cool and refreshing,
not buttery
not body-warmed, offered in hot hands
from trouser pockets.
One sweet for each day of a father’s life,
tokens of love with unspoken words.
Artist says: I like people to play with my art,
so, I sit down in the pile of wrappered mints
eat one and pocket two.
Then I start to shape the edge, curving it
to resemble the mouth of a conch shell.
I picture Grandad leaning on the wall
at Neptune’s Jetty;
cap on, eyes to the horizon.
I replay the scene,
walk towards him smiling,
knowing he’ll dip his hand in his pocket
and this time I will take the humbug.
Artist says: I like people to play with my art.
And that invitation to touch
had me eager up all the flights of stairs.
A man is talking into a walkie-talkie
heading straight towards me.
Artist says: I like people to play with my art,
yet this is not allowed.
I am escorted from the gallery;
my lime-green jacket
watched down every stairwell.
Text from photo: Works by Felix Gonzalez-Torres can be replicated in a number of places at the same time. They invariably make use of common material which are easily obtained. The artist said:
I don’t necessarily know how these pieces are best displayed ... Play with it please. Have fun. Give yourself that freedom. Put my creativity into question, minimise the preciousness of the piece.
Fittingly, Gonzalez-Torres offers the viewer the opportunity to participate and rearrange his work: you are invited to walk through his bead curtain or take a sweet from Portrait of Dad. His work breaks the taboo of prohibiting physical contact with an artwork. The sweets are replaceable, as long as their overall weight is maintained (the weight corresponding precisely to the weight of Gonzalez-Torres father). They are a copy of an object, and are endlessly replaceable, in the same was as a photograph.
Gonzalez-Torres initially trained as a photographer and was fascinated by the technology and materiality of the photographic medium. A photograph offers us a trace of the visible world imprinted by light as it is reflected onto a prepared surface. This closely relates to the actual subject of the framed photograph Untitled (Jorge) by Gonzalez-Torres, as it shows light reflected off the surface of water. The glimmering strands of the bead curtain and the glistening pile of white sweets, like this photograph, make light manifest, and illuminate the area around them. These objects are imbued with new meaning and a fragile beauty once installed within a gallery space.
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