During the anglo excitement over Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl show, his use of a light blue flag as a symbol of Puerto Rican independence made me wonder about another Puerto Rican artist’s use of light blue: Felix Gonzalez-Torres.
Gonzalez-Torres was, of course, not from Puerto Rico, but he was soaking in it. He was born in Cuba and evacuated to Spain as a child. He went to college in Puerto Rico in the late 1970s and early 1980s and began his art practice there before moving to the USA. And he traveled back and forth while participating in the Whitney Independent Study Program.
Light blue is a color Gonzalez-Torres used often—in mirrors and a stack, on painted walls, the go-go dancing platform, and especially in the curtains. There was a lot of talk about how the light blue Puerto Rican flag had been banned on the island for a while. In 1988 Gonzalez-Torres made Forbidden Colors, a work explicitly about the Israeli ban on the Palestinian flag.
Gonzalez-Torres had spoken at length to Tim Rollins and others about the particular blue he chose for his artworks, and its associations with the Caribbean. And I wondered if there could have been a specific Puerto Rican political reference as well.
tl;dr: probably not.
The 1993 conversation with Rollins is on the Foundation’s website [pdf]. There’s more about blue before, and more about politics after, but this is the core:
TR: Getting back to how you make decisions. I wanted to ask you how you chose the blue that you use. What’s the difference between your blue, Felix Gonzalez-Torres blue, and Yves Klein blue?
FGT: First of all, my blue is not an international blue, as Yves Klein’s was. Mine is just a light blue that you can get anywhere, in any hardware store.
TR: It’s more specific. It’s not just light blue.
FGT: Actually, I change it all the time. It’s a light blue that I change all the time.
TR: It’s close to the blue [the Italian architect] Aldo Rossi uses, that’s why I know.
FGT: Really? It just has to be light blue.
TR: Okay. Why is it light blue? Is this a baby blue for boys? A robin’s egg blue?
FGT: It’s more like a Giotto blue in the Caribbean — saturated with bright sunlight.
TR: It’s lighter than Giotto’s blue.
FGT: But when you go out in the Caribbean sun the colors get very washed out. It’s almost like what Giotto’s blue would look like in Last Year in Marienbad — a memory of a light blue. For me if a beautiful memory could have a color that color would be light blue. There’s a lot of positive dialectic, you know, in blues.
blue (bl50) n. 1. a. Any of a group of colors whose hue is that of a sky on a clear day. b. Anything of this color.2. the blue. a. The sky.-adj. blu-er, blu-est. 1. Of the color blue. 2. Having a gray or purplish color, as from cold or bruise. 3. Informal. Gloomy; depressed. 4. Puritanical; strict. 5. Indecent; risqué: a blue joke. — blued, bluing. 1. To make blue. 2. To use bluing on. — idioms. once in a blue moon. Rarely. out of the blue. At a completely unexpected time.
(The American Heritage Dictionary, 2d college ed.)TR: It’s very baby blue, you know, the blue of your first flannel blanket (if you’re a boy). You don’t use a royal, rich, velvety blue, you use this innocent blue.
FGT: That’s a good word for it — an innocent blue.
TR: Is it a gay blue?
FGT: No. You know, I really didn’t have much of an investment in light blue as a kid because we didn’t have that kind of luxury of choice. You just got whatever you got: either blue or pink or whatever. If you got a blanket at all you were lucky— forget about what color it is.
TR: You paint whole walls with it
FGT: Yeah.
TR: So it’s a big deal.
FGT: I love blue skies. I love blue oceans. Ross and I would spend summers next to a blue body of water or under clear, Canadian blue skies.
TR: I’ve heard a lot of grumbling, Felix, about the lack of overt political or Latino content in your work.
FGT: (laughing) Well, I just want to start by saying that the “maracas” sculptures are next! I’m not a good token. I don’t wear the right colors.
In 2006 El Museo del Barrio had an important show of Felix’s Puerto Rico-era work [pdf] which, despite its clear precedents for his NYC work, he excluded almost entirely from his official CR. None of it relates, overtly, at least, to Puerto Rican politics or identity. Forbidden Colors‘ premise could have traces back to Puerto Rico. Except that PR’s ban wasn’t based on differently colored flags; it was the whole independence movement and symbology. And Wikipedia, at least, notes that light blue (azul claro) didn’t become associated with Puerto Rican independence until the early 2000s, via historical associations that are debated at best. FWIW, azul claro is also linked to the flag of pre-Revolutionary Cuba in which Gonzalez-Torres was barely born (November 1957). But while he made some works about being shipped off to Spain as a kid, there’s not much specific Cuba content in his work either. Except for maybe his foundational embrace of capitalism. Nothing more Cuban ex-pat than that.