Final Essay First Trimester

With this essay I would like to examine two different artistic strategies that could be considered queer. I'm very curious to find out what a queer artistic strategy could look like opposed merely depicting queer content. In order to take a closer look I chose two texts that each examine a specific strategy. The first text is called Körper ohne Körper. Queeres Begehren als Methode by Renate Lorenz and engages with the work of Félix Gonzáles-Torres. The second text is Frauen sehen Frauen by Elisabeth Bronfen and examines the gaze on the female body.

In her text Körper ohne Körper. Queeres Begehren als Methode Renate Lorenz describes the work of Félix Gonzáles-Torres (1957-1996) as quiet and minimalistic. They combine personal and political aspects and stimulate a reflection about love and loss. The artist himself is HIV positive and loses his partner Ross 1991 to AIDS. He doesn't address this topic directly but relates his work more to minimal and concept art.

One of the works Félix Gonzáles-Torres exhibits after the death of his partner is called Untitled (Ross) and consists of small bonbons wrapped in shiny silver paper that are piled up in the corner of a gallery. The institution only acquires a certificate of the artist with the instruction to arrange the bonbons in a certain way and maintain its total weight by filling them up during the course of the exhibition. There is no political statement to be found. Nothing that places the work in the context of current debates about sexual identities, no norms are being challenged or altered and no body discourses are being mentioned. So what makes this a queer work? According to Renate Lorenz the works of Félix Gonzáles-Torres are representations of bodies without bodies. These small bonbons don't have a fixed affiliation, they reflect queer subjectivities without depicting them. The title of the work Untitled (Ross) and the weight of the installation (which is about the weight of Ross) refer to a person: in this case to Ross Laycock, the deceased partner of the artist. The body is represented as a linguistic sign added to the visual. By thinking the visual together with text the artist picks up strategies of concept art. He doesn't use a visual signifier that points to an individual body or creates a resemblance to a person. Instead he breaks with the tradition of using a title that duplicates or explains the visual signifier. (Lorenz) Through this omission of visualizing Ross as another gay man or AIDS patient, the work doesn't allow the viewer to take on a voyeuristic position and scrutinize if the body of Ross shows signs of AIDS or if he looks desperate or at ease or if he is attractive. Félix Gonzáles-Torres doesn't refer to identities and he doesn't take the traditional position to represent marginalized social groups. He finds his way of representing in referring to absent subjects which are not predetermined by identity or gender leaving room for projected desires. (Lorenz) Queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz states that Félix Gonzáles-Torres doesn't refer to identities but he connotes them. There is no rational understanding or direct knowledge to be deducted from the work. It can't be understood without the question "What is this?". While the naming of Ross in the title refers to an emotional bond, loss, AIDS, love and sex and see minimal and concept art in the formal approach. In order to examine this link Lorenz uses the term fantasy. With the help of fantasy those bonbons resembling queer identities can be linked to queer history. It would be a matter of productive fantasy to connote identities rather than to refer to them. Connotated identity doesn't call on fixed categories but rather creates a kind of collective subjectivity that consists of various images, experiences and impressions. The viewer is encouraged to eat the bonbons and therefore reduce the weight of the work until its threatening disappearance - an analogy to disappearance of the dying body. By sucking on the bonbons also a sexual component comes into play. There is more than a visual perception to the work. So the situation of the viewer perceiving the work is the following: A randomly mixed group of bonbon sucking people with various social affiliations and genders engage individually and collectively with a work composed of many small pieces that's introduced as a gay body. Based on this experience and visual impression they tie their knowledge, their experiences and their images. Lorenz states that this produces a mode of putting oneself in touch with the work. So Untitled (Ross) doesn't intervene in the economics of representation by confronting us with different bodies but by omitting exactly that. From the audience he takes away the position of the understanding gaze and asks them to take on a position of empathy, one that moans with him about his loss. (Lorenz)

Körper ohne Körper. Queeres Begehren als Methode, Renate Lorenz