{"id":149066,"date":"2020-11-16T10:28:12","date_gmt":"2020-11-16T15:28:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=149066"},"modified":"2020-11-16T11:58:08","modified_gmt":"2020-11-16T16:58:08","slug":"to-be-an-infiltrator","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/11\/16\/to-be-an-infiltrator\/","title":{"rendered":"To Be an Infiltrator"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

\u201cUntitled\u201d, 1988 by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, framed photostat, 10 1\/4 x 13 inches. Published in Photostats<\/em>, Siglio, 2020. Copyright Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Courtesy Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation.<\/p><\/div>\n

Time the substantial we,\u2009\/\u2009epochal and great, as only we can see it, our particular.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2014Alice Notley<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

No one wants to be defined by history\u2019s contingencies, by catastrophe, but attempting to ignore how they shape us would be as ludicrous as trying to stop the clock. What if instead we broke down the chain of events leading to them, undoing their fatal sequence and leaving their parts open for reassembly? Is this what\u2019s at stake in Felix Gonzalez-Torres\u2019s photostat works? In the book Photostats<\/a><\/em>, they appear as coded messages awaiting decipherment, but they\u2019re equally apt on gallery walls as reminders that no matter how open or walled-off any space may be, it escapes neither interconnectedness nor time\u2019s inexorable march.<\/p>\n

Unlike the stars, we do not write, luminously, on a dark field (Mallarm\u00e9). Yet Gonzalez-Torres\u2019s inscriptions do act as constellations, as celestial alphabet. Events worth remembering, the count of years\u2014they are light beams orienting us as we go on forgetting. Each cluster of dates and references displays its own oblique associative logic. The larger narrative it may or may not point to can be searingly legible or obscure to varying degrees. Regardless, those gaps between elements in each of the clusters are openings inviting us to fill in the blanks by bringing in our own associations, personal histories, and biases.<\/p>\n

I took apart dates and historical events and remembered or discovered what occurred then that might have had a bearing on him. Let\u2019s not forget he was a transplant, a politically minded one, who identified specifically as American but was born in Cuba and raised in Puerto Rico: two places with a complex relationship to the U.S. I wonder with whom in the art world he would\u2019ve spoken in Spanish and how his conversations would\u2019ve taken shape according to what he\u2019d say in one language and not the other. Did he think of this? Am I projecting? He carefully avoided labels. <\/p>\n

Apropos of not making art about<\/em> being gay, Gonzalez-Torres said to Ross Bleckner in a BOMB<\/small><\/em> interview<\/a> that his work was about love and infiltration. \u201cIt\u2019s beautiful; people get into it. But then, the title or something, if you look really closely at the work, gives out that it\u2019s something else.\u201d To look closely at Gonzalez-Torres\u2019s photostats involves taking a deep dive into history\u2019s ash heap, getting lost in the process, knowing there\u2019s no one way to read the works. Oddly rhyming shards emerge, resonant shards that seem to prove the existence of a universe in which the future\u2019s already happened.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Lest Chile become \u201canother Cuba<\/a>,\u201d the Nixon administration encourages a military coup against the democratically elected Salvador Allende in the early seventies. Weeks after Allende\u2019s overthrow in 1973, the Weather Underground bombs the ITT Corporation\u2019s offices in New York and Rome for its involvement in the coup. In 1974 Hans Haacke makes an artwork exposing the Guggenheim Museum\u2019s trustees\u2019 ties to the Kennecott Copper Corporation and its attempts to undermine Chile\u2019s economy after Allende\u2019s regime expropriated its mines. In 1975, a killer shark in a film symbolizes a miscellany of sociopolitical anxieties. A Gonzalez-Torres exhibition opens at the Guggenheim in 1995.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

In 1983, Bowie asks an MTV host<\/a>: \u201cI\u2019m just floored by the fact that there are so few black artists being featured \u2026 Why is that?\u201d One of 285 music videos<\/a> featured that year is in Spanish: the Italian disco duo Righeira\u2019s \u201cNo tengo dinero.\u201d In 1985, the Organization of Volunteers for the Puerto Rican Revolution claims responsibility<\/a> for shooting a U.S. Army recruiting officer: \u201cYankee jails are becoming filled with \u2026 our patriots; \u2026 prepare your cemeteries because we\u2019re going to fill them with your mercenaries.\u201d In 1987, Harvard University is awarded the first new-life-form patent for the cancer-prone, transgenic OncoMouse.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

In 1975, Cambodia\u2019s new leadership embarks<\/a> on a gruesome path toward self-reliance and \u201cclearing the country of the filth and garbage left behind by the war of aggression of the US imperialists and their lackeys.\u201d In 1968, the U.S. Embassy is attacked in Rio. Student uprisings against autocratic regimes, and the sentiment leading Peruvian students to shower Vice President Nixon with garbage while on a goodwill tour a decade earlier, sweep across Latin America<\/a>. In the 1987 Robocop<\/em>, a cyborg is developed after a self-sufficient robot designed for Detroit\u2019s urban pacification kills a trustee of the very corporation that created it.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a video<\/a> by Felix Gonzalez-Torres made in 1979, the year he arrived in the U.S. and portable music was born. Shirtless, he speaks to the camera in Spanish while writing on a blackboard. He remembers being put on a plane to Spain with his sister as a child. Remembers priests and not remembering his mother. He goes on half-remembering an upsetting story in which memories and stories are traps tangling him up, always the same old memories and stories tangling him up. He points to the blackboard: \u201cSee, that\u2019s you in the middle of that jumble, all tangled up.\u201d<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

In Bowers v. Hardwick (1986), the Supreme Court upholds Georgia\u2019s sodomy laws criminalizing oral and anal sex between consenting adults. A public drinking citation outside Hardwick\u2019s workplace, a gay bar in Atlanta, had turned into an arrest warrant allowing a police officer to walk into the defendant\u2019s home and discover him engaging in oral sex with his male partner. Justice Blackmun\u2019s dissenting opinion\u2014one of two\u2014is written by the openly gay clerk Pamela S. Karlan. Testifying during Trump\u2019s impeachment trial in 2019, she would quip<\/a>, \u201cThe president can name his son Barron, but he can\u2019t make him a baron.\u201d<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

\u201cUntitled\u201d (1988), 1988 by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, framed photostat, 10 1\/4 x 13 inches. Published in Photostats<\/em>, Siglio, 2020. Copyright Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Courtesy Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

At a televised press conference<\/a> in 1977, the anti-gay crusader and once beauty queen Anita Bryant prays that the man who just put a pie in her face \u201cbe delivered from his deviant lifestyle.\u201d \u201cWe can\u2019t stand the garbage you spout,\u201d he shouts back. The FDA licenses the first blood test for AIDS<\/small> in 1985. Rock Hudson, the first celebrity to publicize his diagnosis, dies of AIDS<\/small>-related illness that year. A 1949 screen test<\/a> had catapulted him to stardom: \u201c\u2009\u2026 for thirty days and nights, we took a steady beating. More than half my platoon were killed. I never expected to come out alive.\u201d<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

In 1952, Fulgencio Batista stages a military coup in Cuba. Recklessly corrupt, he is backed by the Eisenhower administration while the public\u2019s discontent, which will eventually lead Fidel Castro to overthrow him, keeps mounting. The American mobster Meyer Lansky, a.k.a. the \u201cMob\u2019s Accountant,\u201d has full control of Cuba\u2019s gambling casinos then. Batista dies in 1973, and so does Bruce Lee. Lee\u2019s poem \u201cThe Silent Flute\u201d was the basis of a screenplay for an eponymous film. An excerpt<\/a> reads: \u201cNow I see that I will never find the light\u2009\/\u2009Unless, like the candle, I am my own fuel,\u2009\/\u2009Consuming myself.\u201d<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Patient Zero (originally O for \u201cout-of-California\u201d) contracted what was considered a rare cancer in 1981. I write these words during the coronavirus pandemic. The irony of stating this isn\u2019t lost on me; only the readers of an inconceivable future would need to be reminded that the world as we\u2019d known it came to a halt in 2020. In various Classical texts<\/a>, Pand\u00eamos<\/em>\u2014the common to all people\u2014serves as Eros and Aphrodite\u2019s surname and is synonymous with sensual love. It is only just, Gonzalez-Torres\u2019s abiding demand that we partake of a radical poiesis at the intersection of love and the public.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

In a seventies Dick Tracy\u2013style commercial<\/a>, an orange Tic Tac\u2019s flavor \u201cfizzes in a rumba\u201d on the detective\u2019s tongue. When the American market begins calorie-counting later on, cunning replaces wit: Tic Tacs, which helped consumers \u201cget a kick out of life\u201d now become<\/a> the \u201cone-and-a-half calorie breath mint.\u201d In a 1972 Monty Python sketch, Spam\u2014ubiquitous in the UK during wartime\u2014is undesirable no matter how it\u2019s spun. Unsolicited email advertising is named after the sketch. The first deliberate spam<\/a> for a network\u2019s users to read is posted in 1994. Its subject: \u201cGlobal Alert for All: Jesus is Coming Soon.\u201d<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Attorney General William Barr sends<\/a> two thousand military troops to quell riots following the 1992 acquittal of the LAPD officers who\u2019d battered Rodney King: \u201cWe\u2019re not going to tolerate any of this stuff out in the streets.\u201d During the 1965 Watts Riots, fourteen thousand troops\u00a0descended<\/a> on Los Angeles.\u00a0<\/sup>The Insurrection Act\u2014conceived<\/a> as protection \u201cagainst hostile incursions of the Indians\u201d\u2014is invoked again in 2020. Trump summons the National Guard to control protests after George Floyd\u2019s murder. Immediately following, Attorney General Barr accompanies him to St. John\u2019s Church for a photo op. Heard again throughout American cities: \u201cNo Justice, No Peace!\u201d<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

\u201cUntitled,\u201d 1988 by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, framed photostat, 8 1\/4 x 10 1\/4 inches. Published in Photostats<\/em>, Siglio, 2020. Copyright Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Courtesy Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

The 1988 action thriller The Dead Pool<\/em> is the final installment of the Dirty Harry series, in which Clint Eastwood, a pro-gun self-declared libertarian, plays a maverick inspector. \u201cYou forgot your fortune cookie; it says you\u2019re shit out of luck,\u201d he snaps<\/a>, as he pulls out a Smith & Wesson Model 29 to shoot a robber at a Chinese restaurant. During the American Civil War, Smith & Wesson<\/a> became the most popular revolvers among soldiers of both sides using them for self-defense. During the 2012 Republican National Convention, Eastwood improvised a cringe-worthy pro-Romney speech while speaking to an empty chair.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

In defiance of the Civil Rights Act, Alabama\u2019s electors refuse to pledge votes to Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964, and the state\u2019s presidential election ballot has no Democratic contender. In the fifties, when gentrification causes artists and poets to move eastward from Greenwich Village, the area once known as Little Germany that later became home to Eastern European immigrants is rebranded as the East Village. On Third Avenue and Fourteenth Street<\/a>, where the Five Napkin Burger chain now thrives, there once stood, in the mid-\u201980s, the twenty-four-hour coffee shop Disco Donut. Above it was the lesbian bar Carmelita\u2019s Reception House.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

William James<\/a>: \u201cMany things come to be thought by us as past, not because of any intrinsic quality of their own, but rather because they are associated with other things which for us signify pastness \u2026 What is the original<\/em> of our experience of pastness, from whence we get the meaning of the term?\u201d car market crash smash hit big bang sudden great drop depression catastrophe collision black monday speculative dotcom bubble bankruptcy chapters steep revenue cling-clang loss economic stars recession collide crisis crack epidemic break dance financial thump-thump panic boom box bounce back behavior immunity herd cats \u2026<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

M\u00f3nica de la Torre works with and between languages. Her poetry books include <\/em>Repetition Nineteen (Nightboat Books, 2020) and <\/em>The Happy End\/All Welcome (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017). She is the coeditor of the anthology <\/em>Women in Concrete Poetry 1959\u201379 (Primary Information, 2020). A contributing editor to <\/em>BOMB<\/small>, de la Torre has also written for <\/em>Artforum, <\/em>Granta, and <\/em>The Believer. She teaches poetry at Brooklyn College and is on the faculty of the Bard M.F.A.<\/em><\/p>\n

Excerpted from <\/em>Photostats<\/a>, by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Siglio, 2020.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Felix Gonzalez-Torres\u2019s photostat works appear as coded messages awaiting decipherment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2076,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[67827],"class_list":["post-149066","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-featured"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nTo Be an Infiltrator by M\u00f3nica de la Torre<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Felix Gonzalez-Torres\u2019s photostat works appear as coded messages awaiting decipherment.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/11\/16\/to-be-an-infiltrator\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" 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