The most visually striking pieces are the two most simple in Keep the Shadow, Ere the Substance Fade: Mourning during the AIDS Crisis.* A stack of large white paper framed by a thick black border sits on the ground. On the wall beside it hangs a large photograph that features two squares of color, one made with bright-red blood and the other with white milk. The stack of paper is Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s “Untitled” (The End) (1990) and the painting is Andres Serrano’s Milk/Blood from Bodily Fluid series (1986). Caught up in an exhibit the addresses the process, memory, and legacy of mourning the AIDS crisis, these works stand apart, seeming almost out of place. Rather than capturing a story or serving as a relic, these pieces sit in startling narrative silence.

In their simplicity, rigorous geometry, and striking colors, these works are reminiscent of Piet Mondrian’s infamous rectangular compositions. Mondrian’s most famous paintings consisted of black lines that carved out spaces that he would fill with red, blue, yellow, or white. Through this stringent system, Mondrian aimed to capture something universal and utopian. By eschewing figures, background, and narrative, these ascetic paintings aimed to transcend the individual.

“Untitled” (The End) and Milk/Blood give Mondrian’s visual lexicon new life and fresh expression. Most prominently, the materials of these works break free from the confines of Mondrian’s oil paint and canvas. From a distance, Serrano’s Milk/Blood bears a proximate resemblance to the tools of Mondrian’s compositions. Bound within a frame, the photograph features two equally sized squares separated by a faded black boundary. Standing before the work, however, the differences between the artists tools becomes apparent. Serrano’s “paint,” captured in the photograph, lacks the opaque thickness of oil paint and the shiny lacquer of the work is actually a frame of sheer glass. Of course, the photograph documents “paint” made of milk and blood, materials much more violent in nature compared to Mondrian’s conventional oil paint.

While lacking the tacit violence of Serrano’s materials, Torres’s stack of paper retains the tangible quality of Milk/Blood. Traditional for Torres’s process pieces, the audience is allowed to take a piece of paper from the stack with the assurance that the museum will indefinitely replenish the work. Set on the floor, however, “Untitled” (The End)’s austerity seems to ward off potential participants. As if guarded by a polarized barrier, the rectangular stack of paper looks like a minimalist sculpture made out of paper desk pads. Beside Milk/Blood, the sheets of crisp white bordered in pure black also recall Mondrian’s geometric rectangular compositions.

The use of nontraditional materials imbue both Serrano’s and Torres’s pieces with a sense of tactile intimacy. Serrano’s work quite literally uses the materials of the human body. To see Milk/Bloodis to catch a glimpse of another person’s (or possibly more than one person) material existence. This intimacy is undercut by the suggestive violence of the piece—where did these fluids come from? Where are the bodies that these materials belonged to?

Torres’s work is much more friendly. It invites participants to interact with the piece, to change the piece by removing a piece of paper. In theory, the piece allows the viewer to enter into a new form of dialogue with an artwork. Moving past the austerity of Mondrian’s alarm-protected canvases, Torres’s piece welcomes the viewer to become a participant, almost begging the viewer to feel the cool, crisp paper.

Often thought to be objective and untainted by the individual, geometry offered Mondrian a path to transcend the corporeal. Both Torres and Serrano seem to harness the austerity of Mondrian’s sacred geometry and insert an explicit reference to the human realm. In the end, these contemporary artists move towards a sensibility of tangibility—they ground artistic expression in the material existence of everyday life. Eschewing the paint, canvas, steel, and such of traditional art forms, these artworks frame the stuff of life as artworks.

These works make use of what one can see, feel, and presumably taste. In “Untitled” (The End), Torres makes use of paper, a typically mundane material. For its fullest expression, participants touch, make contact, and alter the physical existence of the work. Similarly, Serrano’s piece captures tangible materials. Like pieces of paper, these corporeal traces often feel rather familiar. Ultimately, these works make the familiar strange by corralling the quotidian into a sense of grand geometric harmony. They take up the geometry made famous by Mondrian and flip it on its head—this visual vernacular is used, not as a way to escape the somatic or the physical realm, but as a way to put the materiality of everyday life on display.

However, these works do not eschew Mondrian’s ultimate aim: a taste of the universal. After all, each piece of paper forms a larger whole, each participant in “Untitled” (The End) becomes part of a larger collective, the circular loop of participants played on repeat. In theory, the process piece remains both ephemeral—always open to change—and transcendent of time. In the work’s entailment of museum replenishment, it promises its continued existence. In Milk/Blood, the bodily fluids could be from a variety of people. These liquids, fundamental to human survival, connect us to a sense of baseness or a “ground zero” of human existence. Just like “Untitled” (The End) makes an impermanent material seemingly infinite, Milk/Bloodcontains the memory of the ephemeral stuff of human life and promises its longevity between panes of glass.

At first, I did not understand how these pieces had made it into an exhibit on mourning. I knew that Torres had a complex history with AIDS, eventually dying at a young age from AIDS-related complications, and yet, I sensed that both “Untitled” (The End) and Milk/Bloodmust communicate something about death as artworks in themselves. After sitting with these pieces for a while, studying their geometry, their materials, and their puzzling narrative silence, it suddenly hit me—Will these works exist long after I am gone? After all, they promise the infinite existence of quotidian materials. In the far future, the stack of paper will be forever replenished, at some point this will be done by folks who have not yet been born. Hanging on some other wall in some other museum, Milk/Blood will preserve the materiality of bodies long gone. These works make the ephemeral immortal. One only has to look to the Louvre or Saint Peter’s Basilica to witness how long artworks can live. Speaking in the transcendence of Mondrian, these artists confront us with the frightening abyss of death. In the end, they will live far longer than any of us.

* Photography is not allowed in the exhibition, therefore, I have attached links to licensed images of these artworks.

Featured Image by Jonathan Harris.