Felix Gonzalez-Torres

Felix Gonzalez-Torres combined the impulses of Conceptual art, Minimalism, political activism, and chance to produce a number of "democratic artworks"--- including public billboards, give-away piles of candies, and stacks of paper available to the viewer as souvenirs. These works, often sensuous and directly audience-centered, complicate the questions of public and private space, authorship, originality and the role of institutionalized meaning. 

Felix Gonzalas- Torres- 'Untitled' (Portrait of Ross in LA) 1991

The image above reminds me of a Beuys Fat piece. Here Torres fills a corner of the exhibition space with sweets. He wanted to create a participatory piece. The act of taking away became amplified in this piece. Torres' life partner who passed away from AIDS that year was reflected in the piece. One  hundred  and  seventy  five  pounds  of  sweets, representing  the  body  mass of  his  deceased  lover, were  poured  in  the  gallery  corner  like  a  minimalist  artwork. 

The  body  weight  of his lover disappered  as the audience  were  encouraged  to  select  from the  sweet  corner, which  withered  away  by  the  act of audience consumption during the course  of  its  exhibition. By  allowing   the  artist to place a piece of his artwork into their mouths, audience  members  were  directly  implicated  as they ingested the symbolic equivalent of a lover's body. This ritualistic gesture engaged the audience in a physical interaction  with  the  love  life  of  the artist, corroding  not  only  the  binaries of self and other, but  of subject  versus  object of art,  as a piece of the artwork literally melted into its participating  audience.

His work clearly appeals to a large audience for its combination of formal restraint and emotional lushness. The theme of lovers is comingled with themes of mortality, loss and absence which surface in the later work.