The dangerous fear of AIDS

This news shocked. The Art Institute of Chicago has rewritten one of Felix Gonzalez-Torre's famous 1991 candy piles, Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), with new text that omits the work's touching background: Ross Laycock was the artist's life partner and died of HIV in 1991. Gonzalez-Torres' work is considered one of the greatest confrontations with this traumatizing time - and his own fate. The artist himself also died of HIV just five years later. Without this background information, however, the work is just a mountain of sweets that you can help yourself to and satisfy your basic consumerist attitude. The sweets represent Ross's ideal weight, which decreases over the course of the exhibition and becomes a symbol of the person who slowly disappeared and died.

The critics of this decision point out that the illness and homosexuality of the artist - the cornerstones of his emotionally and physically charged work - have been negated for several years, as for example in 2017 in the press release of the large overview show in the David Zwirner gallery, which is his estate represents. Even then, a critic of POZ magazine, which is aimed at people living with HIV and AIDS, wrote that the disease had been eradicated and alienated admirers of the artist. But the comment had no consequences. Something could change now: "The erasure of Ross' memory and Gonzalez-Torres' intention in the new work description is an unscrupulous and banal maliciousness," summarizes a Twitter user the current debate. But how does the museum in Chicago react?

"In coordination with artists and their estates, we constantly update signage to present different contexts," is the reaction. "In this case, we took the visitor feedback on the previous label as an opportunity to revise the text." Because individual visitors prefer not to know anything about AIDS and homosexuality or to recognize the next case of "appropriation" of the fate of their own identity in the signage do you think a public institution is slacking off and watering down its art-historical mission? The museum as a scientific institution thus makes itself unbelievable.

Anyone who separates the biography of Felix Gonzalez-Torres from his work not only censors the artist's work, but also declares AIDS and homosexuality to be something that visitors to the museum should not be bothered with.

What's next? Will there be a sterile wall text next to the video "Heidi" by Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy that is only about Disney and the Swiss mountains, because the topic of abuse is not a nice topic? If we liberate art from its important, provocative content, which often means also from the biographies of the artists, we end up with mere decoration - and pass over those who once had the courage to turn their longings, fears and trauma into an experience for all transform.