Following social media outcry, the Art Institute of Chicago amended the descriptive label to one of the most eye-catching works in its modern and contemporary collection last week.

How that contentious label text and its replacement came to be, however, is a case study in the behind-the-scenes considerations and pressure points in art curation.

“‘Untitled’ (Portrait of Ross in L.A.),” a 1991 conceptual work by the late Cuban American artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres, is a huge cluster of candies in variously colored wrappers — sometimes heaped in a pile against a wall or corner, sometimes pooling out on the floor, other times neatly arranged in a geometric shape. In a breach of the usual unspoken museum convention, patrons are invited to take a candy, depleting the pile over time.

When the Art Institute displayed “‘Untitled’ (Portrait of Ross in L.A.)” between 2015 and 2017, the placard explained that “Ross” was Ross Laycock, Gonzalez-Torres’s life partner, who died of AIDS-related complications in January of that year. After his diagnosis, the couple spent time in Los Angeles, renting an apartment there as Laycock’s health declined. The original placard observed that the artwork’s largest size at any given time — specified by Gonzalez-Torres to be 175 pounds — “can be seen to correspond to Laycock’s ideal body weight,” while its gradual shrinking “parallels Laycock’s weight loss prior to his death.” The accompanying audio guide also included this context.

The Art Institute next displayed “‘Untitled’ (Portrait of Ross in L.A.)” briefly in 2018, then acquired the artwork earlier this summer as part of its permanent collection, reinstalling it in July. In 2018 and this summer, it was accompanied by a vaguer description — though the audio guide, which discusses Laycock and the AIDS crisis at length, remained unchanged.

“The ideal weight of the work, 175 pounds, corresponds to the average body weight of an adult male. As visitors choose to take candy from the work, the volume and weight of the work decrease,” the placard read in part.

On Sept. 28, museum subscriber William Scullin tweeted pictures of the two placards from 2017 and later side by side.

“When I don’t renew my @artinstitutechi membership for the first time, it’s because AIC desecrated “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) by Felix Gonzalez-Torres,” he wrote. “The erasure of Ross’s memory and Gonzalez-Torres’s intent in the new description is an unconsciable (sic) and banal evil.”

Scullin’s tweet promptly went viral, with the vast majority of the outrage directed squarely at the Art Institute. Critics accused the museum of gay erasure. One user compared the change to Nazi book burnings.

The pictures weren’t taken by Scullin but his friend, Zac Thriffiley, an English teacher at Beacon Academy in Evanston who first noticed the change. Thriffiley, also an Art Institute member, said that whenever he hosts visitors from out of town, he always takes them to see “‘Untitled’ (Portrait of Ross in L.A.).”

That’s precisely what he was doing when he noticed the placard change on Sept. 24.

“(My friend) read the description and said, ‘I don’t get it.’ I said, ‘What do you mean, you don’t get it?’ That’s when I read the (new) description,” Thriffiley said.

The following day, Thriffiley sent a letter protesting the change to the Windy City Times and posted photos of the old and new placards side by side on Facebook. He also contacted the Art Institute’s engagement department, inquiring after the change.

He heard back from the department on Oct. 4, after the tweet had gone viral, which noted that the museum had changed the text the previous week, restoring some of the previous details.

“They didn’t offer any explanation at all as to why the description was originally changed, or why it was changed back,” Thriffiley said.

The Art Institute confirmed in a timeline to the Tribune that it replaced the label on Sept. 29 with new text incorporating more biographical information about Gonzalez-Torres and Laycock. The museum stressed that curatorial decisions are guided by the cooperation and participation of an artist’s estate.

“In concert with artists and their estates/foundations, we continually update labels to introduce different types of context. In this case, we heard visitor feedback to the previous label and took the opportunity to revise the text,” an Art Institute representative wrote.

In this case, the estate in question is the New York–based Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation, which fields exhibition requests and licenses copyright permissions to exhibit Gonzalez-Torres’s work. When Gonzalez-Torres died in 1996, he left his artistic estate in the hands of Andrea Rosen, an influential art dealer and his personal friend.

The foundation’s statement of purpose online states its “commitment to foster(ing) expansive thinking, and to uphold(ing) Gonzalez-Torres’s intention to maintain space for diverse and changing points of view and questioning around the work.”

In a phone conversation and written statement shared with the Tribune, a spokesperson for the Gonzalez-Torres Foundation once again asserted this plurality as being central to Gonzalez-Torres’s ethos and work.

“Gonzalez-Torres often spoke about how his work set up possibilities for deep questioning, and audiences’ active roles of keeping his work in the present: As he told an interviewer in 1995, ‘We need our own space to think and digest what we see. And we also have to trust the viewer and trust the power of the object. And the power is in simple things. I like the kind of clarity that that brings to thought. It keeps thought from being opaque.’

“In this way, we are always happy to see the work of Gonzalez-Torres inspiring impassioned discourse. The Art Institute’s conscientious choice to present diverse information simultaneously — in the wall label as well as the accessible audio guide — sets an example of trust in the viewer to take an active role in their experiences, interpretations, and contributions to the work.”

The new label strikes a middle ground between the 2015-2017 placard and the now-removed text.

“Regardless of its physical shape, the label lists its ideal weight, likely corresponding to the average body weight of an adult male, or perhaps the ideal weight of the subject referred to in the title, Ross Laycock, the artist’s partner who died of complications from AIDS in 1991, as did Gonzalez-Torres in 1996,” it reads.

The text also resolves the 2015-2017 label’s slippage around the phrase “ideal weight.” Gonzalez-Torres’s candy works — and there are 20 of them, all of which are interactive, depleting and repleting over time — almost all mention an “ideal” or “original” weight or height. (Gonzalez-Torres let exhibitors puzzle over what “ideal” or “original” meant in that context.) The text also corrected his birth year to 1957.

Joshua Chambers-Letson, a performance studies professor at Northwestern University, has published extensively on Gonzalez-Torres, most recently in his 2018 book “After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life.” Despite having their own qualms with the contested placard text, Chambers-Letson disagreed with the arguments at the heart of the online criticism.

“Felix left a lot of responsibility in the hands of the people who exhibit the piece, and he was very generous in allowing spectators to produce any meaning that they need to in relationship to the work,” Chambers-Letson says. “I don’t think the AIC made that decision in bad faith.”

Chambers-Letson also pushed back against criticism that the label text had “erased” Laycock from the piece.

“I can understand that person’s reaction, but also, Ross is in the title. Felix secured for the rest of all time that there would be a reference to Ross (in the work).”

Of Gonzalez-Torres’s 20 candy works, three are “portraits.” “‘Untitled’ (Portrait of Dad),” made the same year as “‘Untitled’ (Portrait of Ross in L.A.),” uses the same “ideal weight” specified in the latter: 175 pounds. Meanwhile, the weight for “‘Untitled’ (Lover Boys),” also from 1991, specifies an “ideal weight” of 355 pounds, or roughly the combined weight of two people about that size.

Given this, the Art Institute’s initial conflation of Gonzalez-Torres’s use of “ideal” with “Laycock’s ideal body weight” could be seen as suffusing the artwork with charged language around body image and physicality — a valid reading, to be sure, as Laycock was a dedicated runner whom a friend remembered as being in “perfect shape.” But not the only reading.

“(Gonzalez-Torres) knew how to be strategically oblique in order to infiltrate spaces where he might not otherwise be able to work,” Chambers-Letson said.

When asked how he balanced artist intent versus interpretation, Thriffiley, the teacher whose photos spurred the original change, acknowledged the challenge, “especially with an artist like Gonzalez-Torres.”

“His (“Untitled,” 1989) in the same gallery is a mixture of events from his personal life, events from American history, and more recent events in queer history. It’s a deliberate blending of the very personal and a larger community and history,” Thriffiley said.

During an Oct. 3 visit to the Art Institute’s Modern Wing, the room around Gonzalez-Torres’s extraordinary work of art seemed pretty, well, ordinary, though a nearby guard observed that the area was seeing higher-than-average foot traffic. A teenage couple stifled giggles when they saw the pile of candy slouched against the wall. A family visiting from out of town veered around the work in a huge crescent moon, heads bowed in respect, as though “‘Untitled’ (Portrait of Ross in L.A.)” was a tombstone. Few stepped forward to take the candy, until the guard assured them — and then reassured them, multiple times — that it was allowed.

Nearby, Dat Ly, a hobbyist photographer visiting the Art Institute from Calgary — coincidentally, the city where Ross Laycock was born — egged them on. Ly had visited the work earlier in the summer, when it was accompanied by the now-defunct label. He’d returned to snap instant photos of the moment visitors realized that they could, in fact, take the candy. Some figures do so leaning on their back heel, uneasy at the transgression. Others are an excited blur.

“It’s always hesitancy, at first. Because you know, you’re so used to going to a museum, you can’t touch anything,” Ly said. “Usually, it’s the security guards or people who are familiar with it who say, ‘It’s OK to take the candy, guys. It’s part of the thing.'”

That “thing” changed for Ly when he compared the removed label — which he’d photographed on his phone — to the new one in live-time.

“That section … woof,” he said. “Yeah, it does change the way I look at the art now. It’s more serious. I don’t want to say the first one is vapid. But it makes out the work to be more fun.”

And why not both?

Hannah Edgar is a freelance writer.

Originally Published: October 5, 2022 at 8:20 PM CDT