Felix Gonzalez-Torres at the National Gallery

Wandering through the East Wing of the National Gallery in Washington DC and being delighted by Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s “Untitled (Ross in L.A.), I couldn’t help but be struck by just how poignant his artwork remains, and has become.

The artwork is compelling, and relevant on multiple levels. It consists of a stack of paper, each screen-printed with silver rectangle. Actually, the wall card in the East Wing states it well:

Felix Gonzalez-Torres broke down barriers between art and its audiences by encouraging participation, broadening concepts of originality and authorship, and challenging notions of ownership.

His paper stacks call for the viewer to complete their meaning by removing a piece of paper from the whole. As viewers take sheets, the work slowly disappears; it is renewed as paper is added at the discretion of the owner, thus becoming a metaphor for cycles of life and death, regeneration and decay. The work is dedicated to Gonzalez-Torres’s partner, Ross Laycock, who died in 1991 from complications of AIDS, the pandemic that would claim Gonzalez-Torres five years later.

The most provocative aspect of this metaphor is how the power to bestow life and regeneration is at the sole discretion of the God-like owner. The second is that the media is described as “print on paper, endless copies”. So wonderfully capitalistic. As Gonzalez-Torres said himself in a 1995 Bomb Magazine interview when asked if he had ever accomplished anything as an artist; “I think with the stacks and with the candy spills and the light streams, pushing certain limits, like the limits of editions, the limits of the inclusion of the viewer, the collector, other people in the work. I feel very good about that.”

And part of the context what makes this artwork’s placement in the National Gallery, on Pennsylvania Avenue in the shadow of the U.S. Capitol, so of-the-moment apropos is its collector; Mitchell Rales. Rales is a billionaire businessman who has run into controversy surrounding the tax avoidance he has accomplished through his art collection. As he and his wife, Emily Rales, have amassed an expansive collection of highly regarded (and very expensive) contemporary art they have taken advantage of a tax break given for art made available to the public. They also founded the private Glenstone Museum, by their home in the nearby Maryland suburbs, where their art collection is displayed. The criticism stems from the limited access the public has to the museum and charges that it primarily operates as a personal museum while exploiting tax law. The U.S. Senate Finance Committee, which meets across the street from the National Gallery, has launched an investigation in 2015 into the tax breaks applied to private museums.

The Rales’ art collection is estimated to have cost around $1 billion so far, with tax breaks in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Not coincidently the Glenstone Museum has just reopened, in October 2018, after a $200 million expansion.

Standing there in the East Wing thinking about ownership of intellectual property and public access, another shrewd businessman came to mind; Martin Shkreli. Shkreli is the founder and former CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals and a long time hedge fund manager. Turing obtained the manufacturing license of a drug named Daraprim, an antiparasitic drug crucial in the treatment of AIDS complications. And immediately raised the price from $13.50 to $750 per pill. Perfectly legal and beautifully capitalistic. Drugs needed to save the lives of AIDS patients have been transformed into a monetized hedge fund strategy.

I played my part as viewer and took my sheet of paper home. But I kept reflecting back on Gonzalez-Torres’s quote where he referenced three persons; the collector, viewer, and other people. I know the collector and his role. The viewer, in his role, is passive and obedient. Who are the “other people” and what role can we play? I believe they are the ones who don’t quietly accept the status quo — that intellectual property valuable to all of society can be owned by businessmen and exploited for their limitless profit. For my part you can purchase sheets of paper from the artwork on Etsy — my storefront is MerchlinskyArt.

As Felix Gonzalex-Torres stated, “Without the public these works are nothing. I need the public to complete the work. I ask the public to help me, to take responsibility, to become part of my work, to join in.”