Learning Specialist, Marco Hermosillo: Art comes in a lot of forms.
This is an installation by the Cuban artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and an installation is a work of art where the artist wants us to engage with the art. So if you’d like, feel free to grab one of the candies that make up this installation.
You may be wondering what a pile of candy has to say about society. To understand that connection, we have to think about when Gonzalez-Torres came up with the idea for this installation. This work was made during the early 1990s and the peak of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
Archival News Audio: Every day, it seems there is a new story about AIDS—the mystery disease that strikes mostly homosexual or bisexual men that destroys the body’s immune system, and for which, neither a cause nor a cure is known.
Marco Hermosillo: Today, there are many treatments and preventions for HIV and AIDS, but during the 1980s and 90s, many people were falling sick and dying of AIDS. Gonzalez-Torres himself would go on to die from this condition. But even before that, he was regularly losing friends, chosen family, and even his partner.
Scientists tried to respond by developing new medicines. And to test them, they designed studies that divided people into groups. One would receive a medicine with an active ingredient, and the other would get a “placebo,” which is a fake medicine, like a sugar pill. And this is where the work’s title comes from: “Untitled” (Placebo).
One of the ways Gonzalez-Torres explained this artwork is by saying that, “beautiful things can be very deceiving,” which, to me, gives these candies another layer of meaning. Knowing the context behind this work now, what do you think it says about society?