This text is from the publication Permanence Through Change: The Variable Media Approach, published in 2003 by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technology.

The following are excerpts from "Preserving the Immaterial: A Conference on Variable Media," which took place at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, on March 30-31, 2001 between Andrea Rosen, Nancy Spector, and Jon Ippolito. The introductory text by Nancy Spector articulates how the preservation challenges of the conceptual and installation works by Gonzalez-Torres are similar those facing new media art.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres's practice was incredibly generous. He invented forms of candy spills and paper stacks that to some extent emulated Minimalist sculpture, but were entirely mutable. Viewers are invited to take pieces of candy from the spills or sheets of paper—photographic works or text-based pieces—from the stacks. The owner of the work is responsible for replenishing it during the run of an exhibition.

In 1995, the Guggenheim in New York exhibited a survey of Felix Gonzalez-Torres's work that filled half of the museum. As part of this presentation, we installed Untitled (Public Opinion) (1991) for the first time, along with a number of his other replenishable works. This piece is made of an ideal weight of 700 pounds of cellophane-wrapped licorice candy. Gonzalez-Torres's art is highly metaphoric and also has incredible personal and political meaning. My understanding of Untitled (Public Opinion) is that the licorice has to be shaped specifically like a missile, because the piece was made during the Gulf War crisis. Gonzalez-Torres made a number of works around the same time that responded pejoratively to the political atmosphere. Another piece, Welcome Back Heroes, made of Bazooka bubble gum, bears militaristic references to the bazooka rocket launcher and to Americana visible in the comic strips included with the candy.

Now that Gonzalez-Torres is no longer alive, when questions arise during reinstallation, curators must make decisions by proxy. For example, when installing Untitled (Public Opinion) at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, although the candy was available, there was concern over viewers' mouths turning black. On the spot, I had to make a bizarre curatorial decision whether the substitute brown candy would convey the artist's intent.

Untitled (Public Opinion) wasn't acquired in physical form. When we purchased the work, we didn't buy the candy, only the right of ownership. Gonzalez-Torres's former gallerist and estate executor Andrea Rosen was in the process of translating the certificates that accompany his replenishable works. The contemporary versions of these certificates try to capture the various, open ended scenarios surrounding the re-creation of these works, ensuring the artist's desire to convey that meaning is never secured in any one way and that the owner has the responsibility to reinterpret the work each time it is fabricated.

The following are excerpts from "Preserving the Immaterial: A Conference on Variable Media," which took place at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, on March 30-31, 2001.

Andrea Rosen: We were recently speaking about difference between right and responsibility. What is an owner's right and what is an owner's responsibility? Is it the owner's responsibility to reproduce the work, or is it simply their right to do so?

That was a big question for Felix, and at the very root of his work. Unlike artwork that must address the notion of permanency in a later incarnation, questions of permanency are inherent to Felix's work. One of the very important conceptual content issues within Felix's work is our obsession with permanency, our obsession for concretizing work. This is what is so interesting about the variable media initiative. Is it possible for us to move away from the obsession of storing and preserving, to move away from the monument? Felix was absolutely conscious of these things.

He realized that only the potential for change is permanent. On one hand, like any mortal human being, he was interested in generating his ideas, his sense of meaning. On the other hand, he struggled to include freedom for change within his meaning—not only the meaning, but the form as well. And if both meaning and form have the freedom to change, what is intrinsic to the work, and what is not intrinsic to the work? Felix's rules are that viewers must be allowed to take pieces of the replenishable works.

Part of the responsibility of installing the work is to figure out how that's possible. Museums on occasion would ask him, is it OK if people didn't take parts of the work—sheets of paper, candies—at the opening, because they were afraid the works would be eliminated before the exhibition even began. Felix was very strict about these rules, and yet he would say yes, it's OK. As his friend, confidante, and representative, I asked, "Why did you give in? This is so important to you. This is the intrinsic nature of the work."

His reply consisted of, "Oh, it's OK, people have rules, and you have to have rules." His response is true. You do have to bend to the rules of the existing structure. But his flexibility was, I suspect, partially due to pain, which he confessed a few years later, caused when he witnessed his works being physically diminished. The rules excuse was great for him. He was likely thinking, [laughter] "Yeah. The only time I will see the work is at the opening, and if I don't have to see them diminished, all the better."

There's a malleability to his intention: how do you create a certificate that's supposed to be about defining the work and yet is an open-ended document?

Jon Ippolito: This is an issue we have seen raised by museums over the course of this day of looking at case studies. But in this case, it's part of the artist's intent to call upon museums and other heritage/legacy organizations to examine how they make decisions and what they decide cultural heritage to be. Untitled (Throat) consists of one of Felix's father's handkerchiefs (of which there turned out to be a fairly plentiful supply). On this handkerchief, cough drops are displayed (one of the few candy pieces from which you can't take the candies). The originals were Luden's honey-lemon cough drops in a blue and yellow opaque wrapper. To preserve the work, storage was questionable. If you remember from my questionnaire, there are four different strategies for preservation: storage, the default museum model of putting the work in a crate with mothballs, or storing it on disk; emulation, which is making the work look the same by different means; migration, merely bringing the work up to date; and finally, reinterpretation, taking a lot of liberty in recreating what the work could possibly mean.

We inadvertently tried at the Guggenheim to store Untitled (Public Opinion). I say inadvertently, because we just ordered too much for a particular session. You never know how many candies viewers are going to take? So you usually order a certain amount, then you realize you're running out and you have to order another 2,000 pounds. Although not specially made, the candy is usually part of a Halloween party mix, along with candy corns. Because the company has to specially sort out a batch, a minimum order of 2,000 pounds is required. When the exhibition toured abroad, we went to the drugstore, bought the latest Luden's honey-lemon candy, same type, but they look completely different. They have a clear cellophane wrapping with white lettering on it—a totally different look from the original. Yet, in some ways, migration—choosing the up-to-date standard—seemed to connect to the relevance of this work for Felix. His father died of throat cancer, and this was the only type of candy that helped him feel any better. We posited some potential allegiance to the brand of Luden's honey lemons over the physical look of the piece. Was that right? I'm not sure. Beyond that, an even more radical possible strategy of reinterpretation would be to use inhalers, patches, Claritin, or a new drug that didn't exist in Felix's time but is the functional equivalent of what cough drops were in 1991.

Felix's work doesn't favor one strategy over another, but instead forces museums into an awkward position of having to determine what the meaning is in a way that hanging a painting on a white wall doesn't.

AR: And what their role is, too.

Nancy Spector: What's so paradoxical or problematic with his work is that form and content are so perfectly married. To try to sort through those questions is complicated. If you're replacing something because it looks the same, then the meaning might shift. Or inversely, inhalers might be the perfect drug, because they serve the same purpose that the candies did, but because they look so utterly different, this decision could be a gross misinterpretation of the look of his work.

Because he's not here, this becomes the responsibility of and dilemma for the curator of the museum that stores the work. How do you begin to separate the formal from the conceptual?

AR: Felix had this incredibly subversive side, as well as being extraordinarily generous and deeply sensitive. He was interested in infiltrating the structure and was continually questioning it. How do you infiltrate the structure and make museums question what their role is, or what the role of an owner is? He was also interested in the idea of owner as collector. So often collectors, like museums, are interested in the objectification of his work, freezing it in time. But Felix really wanted people to be more involved, even in terms of their right to choose whether the work is still relevant.

NS: We borrowed a piece from the Museum of Modern Art called Untitled (Placebo), which is a spill of silver candy. It was for a museum in Spain, and we didn't import the candy because it's manufactured there. For whatever reason, the candies were much smaller and a completely different flavor, but it turned out that Felix liked them better than the ones he originally chose. This comes up again and again with different artists. My memory is that Felix nevertheless made a decision of liking something better. It's an open-ended question, once we know about the artist's choice—he made choices again and again, as pieces were installed more than once during his lifetime in many cases—how does that impact what we choose today? Does it matter?