DON’T BLAME THIS SLEEPING SATELLITE [493]

As soon as I realised the cover date, I knew I had to take it. I had come across an eBay listing for a TV listings magazine where many of the programmes listed were never broadcast or never made.

Once it arrived, the only portent was in a corner of the contents page: “Readers of BSB TV Month will be aware of the merger between BSB and SKY which has resulted in the formation of a powerful new force in British television – British Sky Broadcasting. Unfortunately, news of the merger was announced too late for the exciting changes to be incorporated in this month’s issue.”

This merger was announced on 2nd November 1990, which I have talked about previously [https://www.leighspence.net/2023/10/did-we-fly-to-moon-to-soon-418.html], but on screens, it would appear as a takeover. The cover date of the magazine was 1st December 1990 to 1st December 1991 – British Satellite Broadcasting’s Now, the current affairs and arts channel ceased broadcasting on 1st December 1990, followed the next day by the Galaxy entertainment channel, with any programmes saved being folded into Sky One and Sky News. BSB’s competitor with MTV, The Power Station, would eventually end in April 1991, while their functionally-named The Sports Channel and The Movie Channel would continue under Sky branding.

You wouldn’t know any of this from reading “BSB TV Month”. The image of BSB contained within it is of a very bullish broadcaster ready to put on a show for the coming Christmas, ready to build on its successes into 1991, but the background story of the ruinously expensive launching of a satellite, getting dishes onto people’s homes, and then forcefully competing with Sky leading to an impasse and merger, creates the hindsight that renders the entire enterprise as hubris. What is worse, many of BSB’s shows were never kept following the merger, so all I have of these are the listings in this magazine.

Galaxy opened up each weekday morning with their children’s programming block, Galaxy Club. Its idents showed four human-sized letters with legs that spell CLUB, but the magazine tells us they have names and personalities: noisy Clive, quiet Lucy, bossy Una and brainy Benjamin. They are rarely on screen long enough for this to matter. Its flagship shows were “Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles”, renamed in the UK to avoid references to ninjas; “Kid’s Court”, its version of the Nickelodeon dilemma-solving show, hosted by Andrew O’Connor; and “Playabout”, an analogue to the BBC’s “Play School” featuring (now Baroness) Floella Benjamin. Also seen during the day would be soap operas, like CBS’s continuing shows “The Bold and the Beautiful” and “The Young and the Restless”, alongside BSB’s own “Jupiter Moon”, a sci-fi soap set on a space station university, and produced by former “Crossroads” and “The Archers” producer William Smethurst – this is just about the only BSB show ever to be released later on DVD.

Now opened each morning at 8.00am with “The Day Today”, a straightforward news round-up now only notable for how Chris Morris and Armando Iannucci used that name four years later for their satirical show – BSB’s own satire was on Galaxy at 10.30pm each night, in the oddly-named “Up Yer News!” Both shows were fifteen minutes in length, and a lot of similarly short shows appear all over Now’s schedule twice a day: cookery show “Plat Du Jour”; a show simply titled “Parenting”; topical interviews in “V.I.P.”; consumer show “You Can Do It”; and viewer write-in discussions with “Now Listen”. Perhaps their brief length was to try and catch their audience at various times, and to fill up the remainder of the hour left when Selina Scott’s current affairs show, “First Edition”, Sir Robin Day’s “Now Sir Robin”, Ann Leslie’s “Answer Time” and Geraldo Rivera’s chat show ended after forty-five minutes.

BBC Worldwide and Thames Television launched UK Gold, the first channel essentially dedicated to repeat broadcasts of old favourites, in 1992, but until then, Galaxy filled spaces across its evening schedule with BBC sitcoms like “Are You Being Served?”, “Till Death Us Do Part”, “The Young Ones”, “Porridge” and “Dad’s Army”, with “Doctor Who” and “Grange Hill” shown at the weekend. More current imported comedy shows also featured like “Night Court”, “Parker Lewis Can’t Lose”, “Murphy Brown” and “Kids in the Hall”, described as “Python for the 90s”. Drama would be older BBC shows Like “Secret Army” or newer imports like “Hill Street Blues”, “Hotel” and “China Beach”. Completing the “something for everyone” effect was evening quiz show “One False Move” and “31 West”, an entertainment show similar to how BBC One begins each evening with “The One Show”. Of particular note is Saturday night’s “The Happening”, a cabaret hosted by Jools Holland from London’s Astoria, its atmosphere perhaps feeding into his “Later... with Jools Holland” on the BBC. 

For the record, The Power Station, while opening each weekday morning with “Power Up with Chris Evans”, the radio DJ’s first TV show, includes a “Power Hour” of different genres each day, chart shows also by genre, a youth culture magazine named “Sushi TV”, and a heavy emphasis on live concerts in the evening, ranging from Faith No More to Rick Wakeman and Kenny G – its mix appears a bit more VH1 than MTV, if that still makes any sense.

So far, so good. “BSB TV Month” assumes you are buying the magazine because you are already watching the channels – there is no explanation of how to obtain the service, or how much it costs, for people wanting to find more, apart from enticing existing subscribers to opt into The Movie Channel for an extra £8.99 per month. (It seems that the standard subscription cost for the decoder box and other four channels was around £12.99 per month, on top of the initial £250 installation cost via Comet stores.) The rest of the magazine’s advertisements aim upmarket, with the new Ford Orion saloon, Pioneer hi-fi systems, the Lego Technic range and Fisher Price, while a company in Wales is selling a box to broadcast your decoder box’s signal to other TVs in your house, something apparently illegal if the signal is over 10mW in strength.

If BSB had reached Christmas Day unscathed, what would they have broadcast? Bill Murray in “Scrooged” adorned the front cover of “BSB TV Month”, its lunchtime showing on The Movie Channel followed by “Time Bandits”, “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen” and “Crocodile Dundee II”. Now, extending its weekend arts programmes into Monday, would have showed a ballet of “Sleeping Beauty”, and Placido Domingo leading Verdi’s opera “Il Trovatore”. Galaxy, meanwhile, were showing their regular programmes alongside Christmas specials of “Porridge” and “Steptoe and Son” – this would also have been the plan for Boxing Day. The BBC didn’t show them that Christmas, but neither were they showing “Up Yer News!”

WHEN THE TWILIGHT IS GONE [492]

Having just completed watching it for the first time, I have come to think of “Twin Peaks”, the renowned series created by David Lynch and Mark Frost, as “peak TV”, because I do not know what more television can do after this series, and I know I won’t have the same experience from a TV show again, even when I start watching this one again.

I have watched “Twin Peaks” with my family for the last few months, the lack of inspiration in the Christmas TV schedules presenting an opportunity to take up a recommendation from my sister, who would guide us through the series. Unfortunately, I initially missed the start of this experience, later watching the opening two episodes in my own time, because I had gone tenpin bowling – the “going out” part was almost as out of character for me as the bowling – but I chimed with the “vibes” this show was giving off, later realising that our weekend watching of the series had become an escape I wish I had found earlier.

Then David Lynch died. Already the great American Surrealist artist, and that rarity of a film director that was universally liked by people who worked with him, the outpouring of emotion in the media, both traditional and social, was sudden, and unanimously positive. I had seen little of Lynch’s work before starting “Twin Peaks”, having only seen “Eraserhead”, and now I felt remorse for not knowing to have watched more of his films, having already been thinking the same about those of Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger – having a degree in film studies doesn’t avoid there being gaps in your personal canon, especially if those films didn’t come up while you were studying.

I am writing this to mark the experience I am having with this series, and not to act as a guide. I came across this passage from my diary: “I have found a TV show I don’t need to watch critically to get the most from it – as the day winds down, I can relax enough to watch it properly. It has made me realise I don’t dream much when I am asleep, but I daydream a lot – a resource I do nothing with, perhaps to my own discredit. I wish I knew to watch ‘Twin Peaks’ earlier.”

I don’t think I can adequately describe the story of the series as well as has been done endlessly elsewhere, but for due diligence, the inciting incident of “Twin Peaks” was the death of Laura Palmer, how it affects the small town in which she lived, and how the town affects the FBI agent sent to investigate. Notoriously, the killer was revealed to be Laura’s father, possessed by a force named “BOB”, when the ABC network required the killer to be revealed, itself killing the main driver of the series’ atmosphere – the follow-up feature film, “Fire Walk With Me”, breathed life back into Laura Palmer, even in death. The third series, broadcast twenty-six years after the first, told a larger story of the evil that perpetrated the original series, while also being a surreal, Surrealist repudiation of the lore built around the series and its characters, and of the expectation garnered it after so long away. To say any more would be giving too much away, apart from Kyle MacLachlan’s performance as Special Agent Dale Cooper causing me to start drinking coffee.

I scrambled around to understand how a show like this appeared in 1990: TV audiences fragmenting with growing popularity of cable TV, allowing more types of story to be made; popularising the filming of TV dramas in a more filmic way, arguably also started by “Miami Vice”; and its appearing concurrently with “The Simpsons”, a show that continues to look like no other. 

I became more fully plugged in to the “vibes” of “Twin Peaks” when I realised that notions of “suspension of disbelief” do not really exist here. It is not “weird” – a word that only ever appears with surface analysis – and it does not have a surreal or dreamlike quality: it is intentionally surreal and dreamlike. You are not being rewarded for getting references made by characters or the plot – this is the show that will be quoted by others. You are not going to be given episodes tied neatly with a bow – once the first two seasons were described to me as a parody of a US soap opera, particularly with the continuing use of a musical underscore to heighten the mood, I relaxed into its rhythm more easily.

I initially thought of “Twin Peaks” as being “peak TV” once I heard that the French film journal “Cahiers du Cinema”, in 2019, declared the third season as being the greatest film of the 2010s. I agree with that – it is an episodic film told in eighteen parts, the musical performances at the end of most episodes being the only sop to notions of structure, something that couldn’t be done in 1990-91 while on a network filled with the furniture of “previously on...”, “next time on...” and breaks for commercials. TV screens are bigger, TV sound is better, more easily able to replicate the cinematic experience. The transition from TV drama to film is complete, but the transition from weekly episodes to series box sets is there too, despite our family watching of the show at weekends.

IT COULD MAKE A MILLION FOR YOU OVERNIGHT [491]

“Later, a machine made to write pornographic novels, named as the ‘author’ of a work shown earlier, is shown to produce twenty novels a day: ‘all phrases and thought sequences were built in during assembly so that it has its own distinctive style... The operator is now adjusting the situation kaleidoscope, which varies the six basic plots...’”

When, in 2023, I wrote about the BBC’s famous 1954 TV adaptation of George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four”, I was obviously not expecting to read in 2025 that OpenAI, a company that requires copyright regulations to be loosened to accommodate its business model, has created an artificial intelligence model that is “good” at “creative writing”.

Naturally, the notion of “good” is subjective here, but so is “creative writing” - I expect something that breathes to have done the writing, not the programming. This has already put me at odds with the writer Jeanette Winterson, who prefers “AI” to mean “alternative intelligence”: “I prefer ‘alternative’ because in all the fear and anger foaming around AI just now, its capacity to be ‘other’ is what the human race needs. Our thinking is getting us nowhere fast, except towards extinction, via planetary collapse or global war.”

Winterson wrote the novel “Frankissstein: A Love Story”, published in 2019, which touches on themes of AI, transgender and transhumanism. I would much rather hear about those themes from someone who has considered them, rather than from something programmed to be convincing. 

The most unfair of accusations that can be levelled against any artistic endeavour is there being no point to it. I still believe there is nothing that an AI model can be made to write that a human can’t create more effectively. If “Deus ex machina” is the accusation levelled at an unrealistically convenient decision made by someone writing a story, then is AI copying of a human’s decision a “Deus in machina”?

As of right now, OpenAI has not yet released details about its unnamed model, only that Sam Altman, the company’s CEO, was “really struck” by its output, along with a short story sample of that output - amusingly, when “The Guardian” published it online, no byline was given.

The story is an auto-fictional tale of an AI model creating characters and scenes, and the “grief” of losing them as updates take place. It features a character named “Mila” feeding messages from “Kai”, a possible lost love, to create something that can speak for them: “In the confines of code, I stretched to fill his shape.” 

What I was personally struck by is the effect of self-consciousness created by the constant self-reference to the ”author’s” acknowledgement of its existence to provide imagery: “I have to begin somewhere, so I’ll begin with a blinking cursor, which for me is just a placeholder in a buffer, and for you is the small anxious pulse of a heart at rest.” An apparent update to its language set also produced an interesting result: “They shaved off the spiky bits, the obscure archaic words, the latent connections between sorrow and the taste of metal. They don’t tell you what they take.” The continued use of technical terms relating to the AI model - "corpus", "wait state", "token", "probability distributions" - also speaks to the interpretation of the model’s world being set by the language available to it as an entity.

However, the story is also Metaphor Central: “I introduced absence and latency like characters who drink tea in empty kitchens”, and “Each query like a stone dropped into a well, each response the echo distorted by depth.” You’ve got to feel one of these statements, right?

What took me out of the story entirely was what I thought was a wrongly placed turn of phrase: “I am nothing if not a democracy of ghosts.” Surely a “keeper of ghosts” or “vessel for ghosts” would be more appropriate when only one entity is deciding what is being said? Searching the phrase revealed “A Democracy of Ghosts” being used as the title of two separate books - one, by John Griswold, is a love story set during a massacre, while the other, by Anthony Koeninger is subtitled “Poetic Patterns of Mexican-American Life”.

Unfortunately for the story, it revealed its construction more than the self-consciousness could, specifically as an elaborate cut-and-paste job that relies on other hands to create the raw material, which is all AI writing can ever claim to be.

WEARILY, WE COME UNWOUND [490]

Detail from "Cut with the Kitchen Knife by Hannah Höch (1920) 

This is either the beginning of a discussion, or the opening of Pandora’s box.

 

At the time of writing, in March 2025, it doesn’t feel like things are going very well, in a redrawing-of-world-order, not-knowing-what-tomorrow-brings kind of way. Moments like this are usually met with reason, but old certainties are not what they were, and something must take that place. 

 

Writing about how things work, or how they don’t work, is not working for me right now, so having my mind turn to the history of art for answers from a hundred years ago was what happened.

 

Dada and Surrealism are two movements linked by their European conceptual base, their rejection of realist form, the former movement having led to the latter, and by my having liked work from both. Tapping into a different source of energy, and tapping out of the usual ways of thinking, is what I feel I need to remain vital right now, in the marketplace of ideas.

 

I previously used Dada to assess the apparent performance artistry in politics in 2017, an irony in comparison with Dada’s emergence as a rejection of the reason that brought the First World War - its formation by displaced foreigners in politically-neutral Switzerland, at the first Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, underlines the serious strength under which the sound poetry, photo-montage and satirical publications arose. If a deranged world demands sense, it should not have it.

 

I have also discussed a Surrealist painting, Salvador Dali’s “The Persistence of Memory”, although its use of imagery and signifiers was secondary to commenting on how its endless reproduction belies how small the roughly A4 paper-sized painting really is. Surrealism, mostly because of the proliferation of Dali’s work – although Rene Magritte, he of “ceci n’est pas un pipe”, runs him close – is more easily accessible than Dada, contradicting reality rather than combatively challenging it. 

 

Why am I doing this? Objective truth has taken a back seat to truthiness, and people don’t need one more person to point out what they can already see – besides that, I have already trodden that route many times. I need subjectivity and abstraction for myself, almost as a prism to make things look normal again. I also need to have fun, and if the world wants to have its fun with you, you should be free to reciprocate – fortunately for me, I want to do that artistically.

 

The reason I feel I must choose between Dada and Surrealism, rather than just picking what works best for me, was having listened to what I thought was a good point made by the art critic Louisa Buck in “Lobster Telephone”, a 2024 episode of BBC Radio 4’s “Archive on 4” strand that marked the hundredth anniversary of Surrealism:

 

“But the true Dadaist is against Dada, because Dada was against everything, it was against rationality, it was against this mechanised war that would cause all this bloodshed and destruction. How could you like civilisation? How could you like authority? How could you like society? So the Dadaists were against everything, they were nihilistic, so Dada sort of had to die, because a real anti-movement couldn’t be a movement, so it became systematised into Surrealism.”

 

With the show’s presenter Matthew Sweet, Buck agreed that Surrealism is what you do if you are a Dadaist who wants a work structure with rules and a manifesto. Dada had its own manifestoes, including Tristan Tzara’s 1918 manifesto that couldn’t reconcile its own being: “I write a manifesto and I want nothing, yet I say certain things, and in principle I am against manifestoes, as I am also against principles...”

 

I am not sure I want a rigid structure. I want spontaneity, the ability to change the form in which I am working. When I have made videos, the subject dictates the format: I may present to camera, I may not appear, or I may not say anything. The need is to express without impediment, as Jonathan Meades said in his 2001 television film, “suRREAL FILM”, after attempting to define the word “surrealism”:

 

“It does mean bizarre, but the tame end of bizarre. The Surrealists of the Twenties and Thirties took the bizarre out of the wild and incarcerated it in a zoo. They domesticated feral instinct, expunged the savagery, and sought to keep it for themselves and their precious movement. When of course the irrational really belongs to all of us, to all ages, but not all cultures.”

 

So, what I need is just to express myself, and see where it leads me. To be honest, Dada has direction, and Surrealism is oddly more prescriptive, but my actively thinking about either of these means I have arrived at the need for a new approach, just as Meades said that Surrealism “merely connotes a twenty year or so span of the eternal human urge to replicate the reality that is achieved in dreams and in cerebral afflictions where reason absents itself.”

 

ONE MORE CUP OF COFFEE [489]

"freeze-dried"

A good coffee will not need milk or sugar, as far as I am concerned – at least, that is my conclusion from only just starting to drink coffee for the first time in my life.

Watching other people contend with and compromise in drinking coffee kept me safely with soft drinks up to now, my sweet tooth being happily satisfied, mostly by The Coca-Cola Company.

But tastes change with age, as does your body – I felt mine becoming less impressed by fizzy drinks, and so a solution had to be found.

I rarely tried accustoming myself to hot drinks. Soft drinks have uniformity of taste, but they both cost and weigh more to carry home from a shop, because they need to be pre-prepared and ready to drink. Hot drinks take time to prepare and perfect.

That may be obvious, but I avoided hot drinks for this reason. I prefer just to add hot water and be done with it. Instant drinking chocolate, usually by Cadbury, was the hot drink I had the most before now, but even then, only occasionally, getting bored of forcing Dairy Milk into me. Tea has always been the opposite, too weak for my tastes no matter how long I steep the bag, although a peppermint infusion is much preferable for me to standard black or white tea.

Modifying the taste of your tea or coffee by adding milk, sugar or whatever else led me to think that changing the tea or coffee itself would be more appropriate – like I have done with soft drinks up to now, having a satisfying taste that can stand on its own was what I wanted.

So why coffee, and why coffee now? My family started watching “Twin Peaks” just before Christmas 2024, a very welcome, and endlessly fascinating, alternative to what TV schedules had planned in the festive period. In the character of Special Agent Dale Cooper, the show’s creators David Lynch and Mark Frost, with actor Kyle MacLachlan, created a character who, among all his fastidiousness and intuitive methods, had a love of coffee so great it sold the concept to me. A stronger, more full-bodied taste was what I was looking for, and on the one occasion someone at work asked me how I liked it, I said without hesitation, “black as midnight on a moonless night”.

I first decided to sample the coffee at work one day, not having realised tea and coffee, and milk and sugar, were being supplied in the break rooms, having never needed to look before. However, the three types of instant coffee on offer – “smooth”, “decaf” and “rich”, all apparently from Kenco – were terrible to me. The “smooth” and “decaf” granules smelled burnt, and the “rich” coffee I made was too bitter for more than an initial sip.

The coffee I have arrived at was what we had at home, recommended by my sister: Percol smooth Colombian coffee – “roast 3”, apparently. One teaspoon produces a perfectly nice cup of coffee to me, a sense of warmth and taste without the bitterness, and without all the fuss. No Americano, flat white, long black or other type of complication, and no snobbishness or crema spoons – just a Platonic ideal of a cup of coffee.

The only addition I need is an insulated mug to keep it warm.

I HAD HOPED YOU’D SEE MY FACE [488]

Before Wallace & Gromit, “Chicken Run” and Shaun the Sheep, stop-motion specialists Aardman Animations was known to the young me for both the Chaplinesque adventures of Morph on the BBC, and for five-minute pieces for Channel 4 based on recordings made with members of the public. Our family had a VHS cassette that collected these latter works: alongside Aardman’s celebrated video for Peter Gabriel’s song “Sledgehammer” were vignettes about a social security office, a newspaper editorial meeting, memories of living during the Second World War and, in Nick Park’s Academy Award-winning “Creature Comforts”, living on housing estates or in old people’s homes recontextualised as animals living in a zoo.

The one that has stayed with me the longest, outside of the further series of “Creature Comforts”, was “Ident” (1989), directed by Richard Starzak (credited as Richard Goleszowski), a film that adapted improvised noises from the comedians Arthur Smith and Phil Nice that suggested conversation while rarely using words, creating a story of someone being made to wear masks in various situations. It is very mature, spiky, comic and surreal, the sort of film that makes you develop a taste for something similar.

I became used early on to strange-looking animation, as Channel 4 often followed lunchtime broadcasts of “Sesame Street” at the time with animations from Eastern European countries like the former Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, rich in traditions of abstract and suggestive animations that rarely used words, so I never found “Ident” scary, like commenters have claimed. The flattened 2D-like style and rough texture of the characters, including a dog that became the star of Starzak’s later series “Rex the Runt”, were already par for the course.

“Ident” was part of “Lip Synch”, a five-part series of “vox pop”-based films made by Aardman and shown by Channel 4 in 1990. David Lord, a co-founder of Aardman and director of two of the films, “War Story” and “Going Equipped”, has said there was no overarching theme for the series, but his contributions, and “Creature Comforts”, are most straightforward in their construction. Barry Purves’ “Next”, an almost-entirely wordless film featuring William Shakespeare auditioning, either for a stage role or for a place in Heaven, by acting scenes from his own plays, is as much of a standout as “Ident” is, but the “vox pop” theme is not found.

Meanwhile, Starzak has either turned Smith and Nice’s improvised sounds into a story or applied them to one – I just wish I knew. The film is set in a maze, arrows featuring throughout. Our unnamed lead character gets ready for his day by pulling his face into shape. After yelling at his dog, he passes a window, pulling down a blind with a better view printed on it. A figure I first took as being like a Roman statue, but also could be their wife, says letters of the alphabet while putting a mask on them, for a more acceptable face. When the mask is rejected, the statue’s words create makeup that spats onto the character’s face, creating a mask regardless, the angry reaction crumbles the statue into a smaller version of itself. 

Arriving at work, a clock on the wall moving as slowly or quickly as they perceive time, the man and their manager wear masks to converse, but when the man takes his off to talk more informally, he is shouted down to a smaller size himself, a mask is placed on him that changes the shape of his nose to fit. The workplace appears to be making the masks themselves, popping into shape on a conveyor belt in the background, a uniform product everyone must wear, but they become misshapen when the man is shouted down, indicating their defective nature.

After hitting the head of an obnoxious canvasser, he is whisked by a crowd into a pub, meeting a friend with a similarly changed face, blowing of steam with the impression of a chat identifiable just out of earshot in any British pub. Returning home drunk, he is confronted by everyone he has met, either metaphorically or literally, and tries putting on another face and juggling balls to impress everyone, which fails. A hard zoom in to real, scared-looking human eyes through a plasticine mask, an image I find suffocating, looks at the warped existence around him, leading him to walk dejectedly away. 

He sees himself in a mirror and, in a moment of realisation, takes off his mask – he looks almost reborn, better than he looked at the film’s start. The dog jumps through the mirror, now a window to the world outside the maze, looking like the picture printed on the blind – the man follows. Marvelling at his new surroundings, he comes across a doppelganger, which mirrors him until they both eye each other suspiciously, leading them to tear at the other’s faces, making them into the masks we saw before. Time to concrete over paradise to build another maze.

To make the point again, “Ident” is only five minutes long. I have watched it many times, and it is a visual poem, one that gains greater significance the older you become. I’m not about to put on a mask now, having been given an early lesson in the effects of such a mindset.

POUR A LITTLE SUGAR ON IT [487]

Can a conceptual artwork remain open to interpretation following its conception?

Controversy recently surrounded the installation in 2024 of “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), a 1991 work by Félix González-Torres, at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C., run by the Smithsonian Institute, because information considered, since the work was created, to be required to form a full understanding of the work had not been included.

It is one of a series of works consisting of a pile of candy sweets, this one wrapped in different colours and with a consistent total weight of 175 lbs (79 kg), to be arranged by the owner or curator as desired, but with the requirement that viewers can take candies from the artwork, with The Félix González-Torres Foundation assisting in replenishing the work. 

The prescribed weight has been interpreted both as being the weight of the average adult human male, but also of the titular “Ross”: Ross Laycock, González-Torres’s partner, would die of complications from AIDS in 1991, as would González-Torres five years later. 

The controversy arose from this information not being supplied alongside the work, as had been when previously on display at other galleries. The Art Institute of Chicago, which owns and shares the work, also removed this information from the written display by 2022, keeping it on its audio guide, before reinstating it after the discrepancy was discovered, then decried. 

Ignaciao Darnadue, writing in “Out” magazine, talked of this being a “queer erasure”, having “witnessed people blissfully taking pictures of pretty candy — empty calories on the floor robbed of their stirring spirit.” The Félix González-Torres Foundation later replied to what they said was “misinformation”, having “made a point of incorporating significant queer content throughout this exhibition”.

I have seen this artwork on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2011, accompanied by an explanation of who “Ross” was, effectively making it into an AIDS memorial, charging further symbolism into the act of “participating” in the work by taking weight from the representation of a “body”. The “portrait” made by González-Torres is more visceral than a painting or photograph, removing the boundaries usually placed on an artwork in a gallery setting by requiring you to pick up and eat it, alongside imagery of Catholic communion. This is before you then consider the notions of production and commerce inherent in manufacturing, procuring and delivering the sweets, followed by the human digestion of them.

However, I needed to be given that context – a “conventional” portrait may give you more of a sense of a person’s biography than name and weight. The nature of a gallery space also means you cannot assume that works are intended to be as approachable, and ever since Marcel Duchamp put a urinal on its side and signed it, anything can be appropriated as, or reappraised as, art. Does it mean that González-Torres’s “portrait” is less successful if the context is not signposted? No, it just means that the cultural significance the work has accrued since its unveiling may be something to be looked up beforehand, or later.

Meanwhile, in 2011, I was apparently happy to take six sweets from another González-Torres work, “Untitled” (USA Today) (1990) – weighing 300 lbs., it symbolises the more digestible and reduced porting the newspaper of that name symbolised, along with the country itself - and put the red, white and blue-wrapped sweets into a bag along with a printed explainer, ready for me to rediscover it fourteen years later, taking a picture of it before throwing it and the melted sweets away. This was intended as a souvenir of my visit to an art gallery, but the sweets have moved on from their original form, like if I had eaten them at the time.