Untitled (Perfect Lovers) (1990)

I have always struggled with contemporary art. When I walk into a gallery of the 19th or 20th centuries, I feel at ease, as though I know the language—brushstrokes, compositions, subjects that whisper to me through history. But art of the last twenty years often leaves me unsettled. I feel like an outsider, standing just beyond the circle of conversation, unable to catch the thread.

This weekend I tried something different. I was gifted Themes of Contemporary Art: Visual Art After 1980 by Craig McDaniel, and instead of skimming, I gave myself to it fully. I followed its references, looked up the images, and tried to see what bound them together under its chosen themes. It was in the chapter on Time that I encountered Félix González-Torres’ Untitled (Perfect Lovers).

Two wall clocks, identical, hung side by side. At first, they look synchronized, twin faces keeping a single rhythm. But look closer, and the second hands slip. One heartbeat lags behind the other. The difference is almost nothing, yet it says everything.

The work was created in the 1990s, while González-Torres’s partner, Ross Laycock, was dying of AIDS. It has been read, rightly, as a memorial—two lovers, two lives once in sync, inevitably separated by the relentlessness of time and mortality. Where Baroque painters used skulls, snuffed candles, or hourglasses to remind us of death, González-Torres turns instead to two ordinary clocks, the kind you might find in a schoolroom or kitchen. The banality is the point: death and separation do not arrive in allegory but in the everyday tick of seconds.

One of the most cruel aspects of life I have encountered is this: when grief strikes, when despair crushes, I feel as if time itself should stop. Everything in me demands the world to still, to hold its breath in reverence for the enormity of loss. But the clock keeps ticking. The sun rises. The world continues, indifferent to my anguish. Perfect Lovers crystallizes this cruelty. Lovers may appear in sync, but only for a moment. The drift is inevitable. One will falter first. And time will not stop to honor the breaking of the heart.

Yet there is more here than cruelty. The very persistence of time—its refusal to pause—also carries a strange mercy. If time does not stop for grief, neither does it stop for joy, for laughter, for love’s brief ecstasies. It moves us forward even when we cannot imagine going on. The clocks keep ticking, not only as an elegy, but as a quiet insistence that life, however fragile, endures.

Philosophers have long wrestled with this paradox. Augustine admitted he could not grasp the nature of time—it stretches forward and backward yet is only ever present in a single instant. Heidegger went further: to be human is to live as “being-toward-death,” our days always slipping ahead toward finitude. González-Torres places himself in this lineage, but with a contemporary gesture. Instead of words or allegories, he offers two clocks that simply tick. Time embodied not in theory but in mechanism, in soundless motion, in the imperceptible drift of hands.

Psychologically, the work reveals the tension of intimacy. Lovers imagine themselves perfectly aligned, moving in step. Yet even in the best of relationships, misalignments emerge—different desires, rhythms, priorities. Sometimes we reconcile, sometimes we don’t. And in the end, mortality creates the ultimate dissonance: one partner must leave first. The beauty of Perfect Lovers is that it accepts this truth without dramatizing it. The clocks do not rage, they simply keep time, together as long as they can.

Standing before this work—even in reproduction—I felt something shift in me. Where once I might have dismissed contemporary art as barren minimalism, I now saw how it carries forward the deepest questions of the human condition. González-Torres is in dialogue with the past, with vanitas still-lifes, with Augustine’s puzzlement, with Heidegger’s finitude. He extends their legacy into the language of our own age.

And in doing so, he touched me in an unexpected way. Untitled (Perfect Lovers) forced me to confront my griefs, my longing for time to stop when sorrow overwhelms me. It reminded me that time will not pause—but it also reminded me that this unceasing flow is what allows life to go on, for love to find us again, for joy to return.

Perhaps this is what contemporary art asks of me: not to recognize myself immediately, but to linger in discomfort, to listen longer, to allow the ordinary to become profound. Two clocks on a wall, slightly out of sync, became for me a mirror of love, loss, and the inexorable passage of time.

I will approach such works differently now. With fresh eyes. With patience. With the hope that in their quiet ticking, they might teach me something I did not know I was ready to learn.