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Have you ever thought you could eat art? While viewers are strictly prohibited from even touching most pieces of art on display in a gallery, here is a more-than-30-year-old artwork that encourages viewers to take pieces from it and eat it. What is it made of? A pile of colourful candies! This interesting piece of art comes with a heartbreaking backstory. The artwork called “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) consists of a pile full of shiny candies placed in the corner of an art gallery room. The artist behind this piece is Felix Gonzalez-Torres, a Cuban-born American visual artist (1957-1996).
The physical form of the artwork keeps changing, but the artwork comes with instructions from the artist to keep it at an ideal weight of 175 lb. This weight represents the ideal or healthy body weight of an adult male, a representation of Ross Laycock, the artist’s partner who died of complications from AIDS in 1991, according to the Queer Art History website.
Deeper Meaning Behind The Shiny Pile Of Candies
In 1990, Felix Gonzalez-Torres started a series of works that all consist of small, hard candies in various coloured wrappers. In each case, viewers of the art are invited to take a piece of candy to eat. As more and more people take a candy, the pile of candies diminish, representing the diminishing healthy weight of Ross after contracting the AIDS virus. But this does not end the pile of candies. The artwork also comes with the instruction that the candies are to be constantly replenished with an endless supply and brought back to an ideal weight of 175 lb. This piece of art was made in 1991, after the artist’s partner Ross died from complications due to AIDS on January 24th, 1991. Apart from keeping the memory of Ross Laycock alive, the artwork also addresses the destigmatisation of AIDS infection as a whole.
How Food Keeps Alive An Interactive Piece Of Art
Talking about how these shiny candies make this piece of art alive, Felix Gonzalez-Torres shared in an interview in 1993, “I wanted people to have my work…. In a way this “letting go” of the work, this refusal to make a static form, a monolithic sculpture, in favour of a disappearing, changing, unstable, and fragile form was an attempt on my part to rehearse my fears of having Ross disappear day by day right in front of my eyes,” Queer Art History website quoted.
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