"Untitled" (Portrait of Ross in L.A.)

Judged on the conditions, since the work is a set of rules realised at each installation. Its parts are few, and the subtractive test finds each load-bearing. Take away the weight and the pile is a quantity of sweets, not a body: the number 175 makes it a portrait. Take away the permission to take and it is a Minimalist floor piece with a sad title; the diminishing is the dying. Take away the right to replenish and it is one death with no afterlife; take away the parenthesis and the weight belongs to no one. The corner, the bright wrappers and the endless supply each do work. What gives is the matter: any candy of roughly the right kind serves. Necessary as a structure, loose as an object.

Score: 8.3 / 10

What it brings into the open can be stated and holds. A body loses weight in public, piece by piece, while strangers take something sweet from it: the wasting of men with AIDS around 1991, shown without an image of a sick body, a word of protest or a single figure. The public is implicated, as consumer and as communicant, each time it takes. Love survives as an obligation to restore what is taken, and the institution that owns the work owns that obligation. A portrait need not show a face. These are meanings, not moods, and they reach a life outside the world of art. What holds the axis: the disclosure leans on the title and the account of the weight, and without them a visitor takes a sweet and sees a cheerful heap.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The work refuses grandeur and offers something small and repeated: cellophane glittering in a corner, the moment of choosing and taking, the taste. The elevation, where it comes, is grief arriving late, when the visitor learns what the weight is and finds the sweet already in the mouth. That turn is real and recurs with each installation and each visitor, so its frequency is high; its height is modest. There is no terror and no transport, and the work seeks neither: its tenderness is nearer elegy than the sublime. It stands well below The Starry Night and the Water Lilies on this axis, and above Fountain, whose Sublime is 6.0. Its quiet height is renewed at each encounter.

Score: 7.4 / 10

The archetype is built into the mechanics, not summoned by allusion. A body is broken and distributed and taken into the mouth by the many, and then restored, and the cycle can go on without end: the pattern of the eucharist, and of the dying and returning god, made from a pile of sweets and a rule of replenishment. The work never names it; the taking and the restoring are the work. And the particular stays particular: one man, one weight, one year, one city named in the title. Held below the gate because one act, repeated, carries the pattern rather than a field of parts, and because the structure licenses the reading of communion without compelling it, as Las Meninas compels its play of seeing.

Score: 8.2 / 10

The inheritance: Minimalism and its floor pieces, Andre’s metal plates and the spills and scatters of Post-Minimalism; Conceptual art’s dematerialised object and its certificate; and portraiture itself. The departure turns each: the inert industrial unit becomes a gift and a body, the floor piece something visitors may carry away, the certificate a set of instructions for mourning, and the portrait loses its face and keeps its weight. The stake was real: an openly gay Cuban American artist, in the years of the culture wars over public funding and of the AIDS crisis, put a lover’s death into museums in a form too pleasant to object to. Held below the bar because the step from his own paper stacks of 1988 and 1989 was short, and because the swerve is in meaning and use, not in look.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Substitute another form for this content and nearly everything goes. A painting of Ross, a photograph of a heap, a fixed sculpture weighing 175 lb: each would lose the diminishing, the taking, the restoring and the shared responsibility, which are what the work knows. The form is the instrument. Weight stands for the body, depletion for dying, the visitor’s hand for the public’s part in it, replenishment for memory and love, and the certificate for the institution’s duty to keep that memory alive. The work knows these things only by being a pile from which one may take and which may be refilled. Held below the highest marks because a related form, the paper stack or another candy work, knows much the same, and because the work can be realised loosely and remain itself.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Evidence over promise: thirty-five years of return, and the yield has not stopped. The work has been read as elegy and as AIDS activism; as a queer counter-statement made inside the vocabulary of Minimalism; as a central case of art as relation and participation; as a problem in ownership and authenticity, since what the owner holds is a certificate and a duty; and as a problem in conservation, where its replaced matter has become a standard case. Each installation changes it, and it can be met at full weight, half gone or nearly empty, so that return is a different encounter. Held at 8.0 because the span is thirty-five years, not a century, and much of the writing concerns the candy works as a type rather than this one pile.

Score: 8.0 / 10

The field is American art of the late 1980s and early 1990s. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of several things at once: what a portrait can be; how a museum object can be owned, as instructions and an obligation; how participation can carry meaning rather than spectacle; and how political art can work by stealth rather than by statement. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the conservation of variable and replenishable works treats the candy works as a central case, and a generation of participatory and take-away works follows the model, Sunflower Seeds (7.7) among them, which names the candy spills as an ancestor. Discounted because the reach belongs largely to the candy and stack works as a type, of which this is the emblem rather than the sole bearer, and because the span is short.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Span: thirty-five years. Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: it lies in the conditions (the ideal weight, the wrapped candy, the taking, the right to replenish), fully legible and transmitted by the certificate and the owner’s practice. Nothing that makes the work has been lost; the candies were always meant to be eaten and replaced, so the replacement of fabric is the design, not a loss. Presence is wide and continuous since 1991; fame is presence, not proof. Against it: the work exists only when an owner installs and replenishes it, so its survival depends on institutional will and on a supply of suitable candy, and between installations it is a certificate. That dependence offsets the width of presence.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Command of the medium, and the medium here is chiefly decision. Credited: the weight, the one figure that makes the pile a person; the brightly wrapped sweets, which give the work its glitter and its disarming welcome; the corner, which gives the heap the look of a Minimalist spill; the parenthetical title, which keeps a private name inside a public “Untitled”; and the drafting of the conditions, which make the work transmissible after the artist’s death. These decisions are exact and load-bearing. What holds the axis: there is little making by hand, and the look of the heap varies with each installer and each candy. A narrow command, precisely used: above Fountain’s 7.3, whose decisions were fewer, and well below a painter’s command of paint.

Score: 7.6 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the most private, one man’s body and one man’s grief, and the most public, a museum’s property, a stranger’s hand, a conservator’s protocol. One law governs both: the body as a quantity given away and restored. The visitor gives the body away by taking; the owner restores it by buying more; the artist gave the law in writing; the dead man is present as a number. The bright wrappers obey the law, since the gift must be sweet to be taken; so does the title, which holds the name inside the anonymity. Nothing breaks it, the work’s life after the artist’s own death in 1996 included. Held below the top because the territory is a single mechanism: narrowness is not coherence.

Score: 8.5 / 10

The orders held in the one structure: the body and its illness; love and its loss; sexuality, and the politics of a plague years from any cure in 1991; commerce, in mass-produced sweets, consumption, ownership and purchase; the institution and its duties; and the sacred, through the structure of communion. They are integrated, because one act, taking a sweet, touches all of them at once. What holds the axis lowest is the form: a pile and a rule cannot hold history, labour, the state or the natural order except by implication, and the family appears only as the couple. A low mark on a small form describes the form. It stands above Fountain and the Water Lilies here, because more orders are held, and held as one.

Score: 6.9 / 10