by Gina Twardosz
When I’m alone, I often think about how easy it is for someone to go missing. It’s even easier to lose someone.
The museum is always empty in the early morning, and I feel self-conscious about the sounds my shoes make on the linoleum. My steps are haunting me. I’m chasing myself, moving faster and faster throughout the galleries. I don’t stop and look around today because I’m searching for someone.
I walk toward the space where he usually lies, and after a few circles, I realize they’ve moved Ross from his spot. I frantically search for someone to give me answers. A security guard nearby pretends he does not see me, but I approach him anyway. I ask him if he knows Ross. Where did he go?
“The candy?” he asks after a beat.
“Yes,” I relent, “the pile of candy.”
(Untitled) Portrait of Ross in L.A. is a pile of colorfully wrapped candy on the floor of the modern wing. It is one of the only pieces on display that encourages interaction. Viewers can take pieces of Ross with them, while the museum replenishes each piece to ensure the pile’s weight remains around 175 lbs. Much like a real person, Portrait of Ross is static yet in motion. Ross is alive even though he is dead.
The titular Ross is Ross Laycock, the artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ lover, immortalized after he succumbed to AIDS-related complications in 1991. Our consumption of Ross is sweet, but it comes with the price of information: AIDS consumed his body ferociously, and we are complicit in this consumption. The world’s antagonization of victims throughout the 80s and 90s caused thousands of queer people to die painfully. The collective is culpable for his loss.
But Ross is decidedly not rocks or slips of paper; Ross is candy, a treat. There is unexpected pleasure and joy even when there is loss. However small, this pile is a monument—a shimmering proclamation of love. I like to dig my hands in Ross and feel the crunch of his wrappers. I visit Ross whenever I need to be reminded that there is still love in the world. I’ve seen students race up the stairs on field trips in pursuit of this “secret” candy. They devour Ross, and this is sort of bittersweet. AIDs was treated as a plague, and patients were shunned or isolated. Now, children are eager to touch and take Ross.
I often take a piece of candy whenever I visit the museum. However, I find that I must first contend with citizens on patrol who, instead of reading and engaging with this particular art piece, choose to march over to me as I select my piece of candy and chide me for touching the art. A guard stands adjacent to the artwork, unflinching and unmoving as I take a piece. He must’ve overlooked my transgression, and this stranger must rectify it.
Don’t touch that! My heart races despite itself, even though I’ve done nothing wrong. I feel like a hardened criminal caught red-handed. I try to explain, but my mouth is dry.
“It’s all right,” I try to say, “it’s all a part of the experience.” My face is red, and I see their eyes wander to the guard as if begging him to intervene and punish me for the crime I’m not committing. It must be thrilling for them to view an injustice and try to put a stop to it. This might be the only time they ever get to do this. We are so often voyeurs to the horrors of this world. But the problem is that some people perceive injustice as the loss of a piece of candy, not the loss of a life.
In the 1990s, no one was any closer to solving the AIDS crisis. Keith Haring had died; Ross died, then Felix Gonzalez-Torres; in 1993, auteur Derek Jarman created Blue, his eulogy, months before his death. By 1994, AIDS had become the leading cause of death for all Americans ages 25-44. One would think that every work of art—film, book, show, or play—around this time would be in protest of this community’s suffering and neglect, but if this were true, then the AIDs pandemic wouldn’t have claimed so many lives.
Instead, Michael Mann’s Heat premiered in 1995. It says nothing about the AIDs epidemic, but it is born out of this tumultuous time in history and thus cannot be excluded from the world in which it exists. Aren’t blockbusters supposed to mirror our violent world back at us, providing an adrenaline rush without actually endangering us? The total impossibility of a well-planned bank heist is the closest cisgender heterosexuals can get to danger. In this culture that decries violence, many are isolated from it, though they still comment. The masses crave a thin-lipped morality where good triumphs over evil, although they alone get to decide what is evil.
It’s not a crime movie, claims Michael Mann, even though it’s a game of cat and mouse between cop and crook. “Its plot is driven by a crime story and a police story to a certain point, and then it breaks into a kind of chorus. In that chorus, we see slices of these different people’s lives.” It’s a story about humans, our humanity, or lack thereof. Detective Vincent Hanna and the thief Neil McCauley hate each other, but the opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference.
I discovered Heat late in my life. I assumed it would be nothing but guns and bad comebacks, and while it was all this, something was stickier. It didn’t lie down and accept its genre—it pushed back.
“So you never wanted a regular type life?” says Vincent Hanna at the infamous scene at the diner. Hanna has been doggedly chasing McCauley up to this point, and now they sit down as though they were two old chums.
“What the fuck is that?” exclaims McCauley, “barbecues and ball games?”
McCauley’s life as a career criminal is a little queer. “His lifestyle is obsessively functional,” says Mann. “There’s no steady woman or any encumbrance. Neil McCauley keeps it so there’s nothing he couldn’t walk away from in 30 seconds flat.”
In contrast, Vincent Hanna is the straight man with a traditional life. A wife, albeit his third, and a steady career—he is Law trying to put the world in Order. He will do anything to put McCauley behind bars, yet the two are sitting down to dinner civilly. This tension between discipline and desire begins to transcend traditional norms. Hanna is excited by McCauley. A hunting dog ceases to be without something to hunt. Yet this yearning is illicit—without criminal action, Hanna would be out of the job, but he cannot openly condone crime (or maybe that’s another essay). They give each other purpose.
However, their relationship cannot last in this straightforward, morally robust world. Their “marriage,” as Michael Mann describes it, must end. So, McCauley dies by Hanna’s hand.
Heat is a lonely film. These characters connect only for a moment before their existence threatens the norm. Hanna cannot even truly mourn McCauley; it makes me think that Portrait of Ross in L.A. is so radical because it is love personified—tangible grief. It is a protest against erasure and indifference. It’s art that holds us accountable: It is now someone’s job to replenish Ross and keep him alive, immortally.
Maybe the difference between these two pieces of art is a matter of killing versus dying.
My mother used to take me to the Art Institute when I was a teen. This happened much later, after we had put back the pieces of our lives, trying to make sense of the mess that had preceded my first period.
When I was seven, my mother tried to kill herself. I wasn’t there, but she did it in my bed. I know this because my half-brother arrived home early from school to see police cars and an ambulance loitering in front of our small two-bedroom rental house. Cops stood around while my mother lay on a stretcher in the ambulance, like she was a criminal. To think that one’s own life could be a crime.
I often wonder what my life would’ve been like without her, and whether it would've been any different from what we have now. I wander the halls of the museum, chasing her ghost, even though she is very much alive. I am always trying to get back to that moment of non-memory, to constantly try to rescue her from a time when she was almost left behind. Bifurcated into before and after, I find it hard to reckon with a near-tragedy that wasn’t mine—a story that isn’t even mine to tell. It is easier to think about her than talk to her. I suppress my love inside me; I create no art, I only witness it.
As I leave the Art Institute, I ask the woman at the information desk if she knows when (Untitled) Portrait of Ross in L.A. will be back on display. She doesn’t know, and that’s that.
But the memory of the sweetness persists. Like a living archive, the remembering and forgetting are in me, both tangible and intangible. The world carries on.
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Gina Twardosz (she/her) is a writer from Chicago, IL. She writes about herself to reach other people. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize twice.