Spit or Swallow? Orality in the Art of Felix Gonzalez‐Torres

Abstract

This essay mobilizes a psychoanalytic understanding of orality to interpret Felix Gonzalez‐Torres's candy pile works. Focusing on two works from 1991, “Untitled” (Lover Boys) and “Untitled” (Lover Boys), both on display at the Metropolitan Arts Centre in Belfast in 2015, I follow the artist's suggestion that taking a sweet and sucking on it courts the participant's oral eroticism, to argue that this encounter also invokes the violence of oral sadism. The significance of this sexual violence is explored in the contexts of queer oppression, censorship and socio‐political conservatism in the United States in 1991 and Northern Ireland in 2015, and of mourning, sex and activism in the ongoing HIV/AIDS pandemic. The ambivalence of oral participation with the candy piles, it is argued, registers intersubjective violence at the intersection of multiple injustices, not least, the overlaps of homophobia and racism in the time of HIV/AIDS.