Untitled (Beginning) 1994

Felix Gonzales Torres

I’ve often thought of all the ways I could die as a child. In doing this I was attempting to figure out the limitations of my body and my threshold for pain, but when I realize that my grandparents would die I could only think about how they could live. I thought about all the memorials to preserve their lives, and I concluded by wanting them to live in a museum their ashes in a drawing there forever. I was 16 when I realized this solution, and that’s why I’m so interested in the idea of commemorating. Felix Gonzales Torres’s work does such a haunting job of this and I’m drawn to the work. Its charged and considerate of its audience. They function as the most banal celebrations, humble like domesticity, and beautifully timeless. The weight of those bead curtains can’t be felt in a photograph. You have to know what it is like to penetrate a threshold feel them on your body. In knowing this you may accomplish a resolve to the same concerns I had as a child, a concern transmitted from one’s self to those around you, one of compassion, a passage to the other side.