"Untitled" (March 5^th) #2, 1991, by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, consists of two lightbulbs hung from a wall at 113 inches, their white cords intertwined. Among its myriad allusions, the work remembers the artist’s partner, Ross Laycock, who lost his life to AIDS in January of that year. However, this reference is intentionally coded, perhaps to protect the work from an overly romantic connotation, or to encourage the varied evocations of the work's common materials. "Untitled" (March 5^th) #2, which holds Laycock's birthday in its name, is a poignant work of love and loss; renewal and the promise of a kind of immortality. The work is an exploration, in rigorously formal terms, of the universality of partnership and community, and the boundaries of our public and private lives.

 

 “When I first made those two lightbulbs, I was in a total state of fear about losing my dialogue with Ross, of being just one.”
— Felix Gonzalez-Torres

 

The effect of "Untitled" (March 5^th) #2 relies on both lightbulbs shining as one. Hanging so close together, the glow of each bulb fuses with the other, in one, unified light. The great tragedy of "Untitled" (March 5^th) #2, then, comes in the viewer’s realization that one lightbulb, inevitably, will dim, and die out, before the other. But all is not lost—as with Gonzalez-Torres’ candy works, made of individually-wrapped sweets, the lightbulbs are replaced as soon as they burn out; the light is always replenished.

 

"Untitled" (March 5^th) #2 is Gonzalez-Torres’s first work to use lightbulbs, anticipating his “light strings” series of 1992-1994.ⁱ Works from the edition are represented in major museum collections, including The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Cleveland Museum of Art; The Art Institute of Chicago; and The Tate, London. The work draws on the formal minimalism of Dan Flavin’s fluorescent lights, and the perhaps phallic referent of Jasper Johns’ lead lightbulbs, as suggested by Robert Storr.ⁱⁱ Concurrent with other artists in his generation, coming of age in the 1980s, Gonzalez-Torres continued to expand the list of acceptable media for artwork—lightbulbs, stacks of paper, piles of candy—and as a conceptualist in the lineage of Joseph Kosuth, Gonzalez-Torres took “the jump from the ‘pure’ forms of the 1970s” to forms that showed a more human touch; more imperfection, more variety.ⁱⁱⁱ The vulnerable intensity behind Gonzalez-Torres’s work is the key to this “jump,” as the simplicity of his forms creates space for an emotional resonance that all viewers can relate to.

 

 “In the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres beauty is also a life force, affirming the presence of intense intimacy, closeness, our capacity to know love, face death, and love with ongoing yet reconciled grief.”
—bell hooks

 

"Untitled" (March 5^th) #2 strikes a balance between public and private, a line Gonzalez-Torres continuously presses throughout his work. While the artist’s love for Laycock is particular, the sensation of love, the emotional experience of intwining one’s life with another’s, is universal, as is the grief of that inevitable loss. Gonzalez-Torres relies on the audience to observe the light in "Untitled" (March 5^th) #2, and empathize with its emotional themes. The work is both a record of Gonzalez-Torres and Laycock’s love, and a mirror for the audience’s own emotions.^iv

 

Gonzalez-Torres found the tension between public/private, and artist/audience essential, not only for himself, but for any artist working in America in the 1990s. “At this point in history,” he said in 1993, “how can we talk about private events? Or private moments? When we have television and phone sinside our homes, when our bodies have been legislated by the state?... our most private practices and desires are ruled by, affected by the public, by history.”^v

  

This frustration with the false boundary between public and private likely held particular resonance for Gonzalez-Torres as a gay man, as government inaction, fueled by homophobia and stigma, exacerbated the toll of the AIDS epidemic on his community. For Gonzalez-Torres, for Ross Laycock, for the 29,850 Americans who died of AIDS in 1991—public discourse directly impacted personal lives, and ignoring lived reality through “the escape hatch of formalism” in art, to quote Robert Storr, was inconceivable.^vi For Gonzalez-Torres, who himself passed away from AIDS in 1996, aged just 39, "Untitled" (March 5^th) #2 was about confronting his own fears, and inviting the audience to confront them, with him.^vii As author and activist bell hooks writes of his work, “[o]nce we embrace his vision of the collapse of public and private, the convergence of the individual and the collective, we open ourselves to the possibility of communion and community.”^viii

 

ⁱ The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation, “Works: Light Strings,” accessed Apr. 2023, online.

ⁱⁱ Robert Storr, “When This You See Remember Me,” in Julie Ault, ed., Felix Gonzalez-Torres, 2016, p. 25.

ⁱⁱⁱ Storr, 13.

^iv Storr, 9.

^v Felix Gonzalez-Torres, quoted in Ault, 358.

^vi Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Mortality Attributable to HIV Infection/AIDS Among Persons Aged 25-44 Years – United States, 1990, 1991,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, Jul. 2, 1993, online; Storr, 12-13.

^vii Nancy Spector, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, exh. cat., The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1995, p. 183, 191.

^viii  Bell Hooks, “subversive beauty: new modes of contestation,” in Ault, 180.