In a much-published interview, Tim Rollins asked Gonzalez-Torres what he would like from his students. He replied that he would like them to be generous. It was a revealing answer from an artist who placed such a high priority on generosity in his own work. The celebrated paper stacks and the arrangements of candy described by the artist as having an ideal height or weight and from which the visitor was invited to take one (or more) elements to be replaced as necessary from an endless supply, function as symbolic generosity while alluding to another, impossible generosity: the hope of endless renewal, a secular realization of divine grace. This is the language of prayers and a gesture approaching transubstantiation, but like the wily priest, Gonzalez-Torres' gifts create obligations. The 'gift' work seems to fulfill an unkept promise of the 1960s, the decommodification of art, but they are not precisely that. Gonzalez-Torres proposes a transaction as old as the ritual of gift-giving: to accept an element of his work is to be implicated in its realization, and in its future.
Lewis Baltz / Texts, 2012 / p. 133-134