A joyful insouciance accompanied the opening of the first large-scale Felix Gonzalez-Torres exhibition in Brussels, with gallery-goers posing for pictures in front of mounds of candy, seemingly, through the haze of a communal sugar high, unable to view the work as anything other than a Pop hoax. There was no apparent meditation on what the piles might mean or, more important, what it means to take from them. Yet reflection often takes place after the fact, so we can be hopeful that this monumental resurrection of Gonzalez-Torres’s oeuvre will spur at least some introspection on finitude and consumerism.
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