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 and the way he approaches his art. 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.

Diese kleinen glänzenden Bonbons haben keine festen Zugehörigkeiten, sie repräsentieren queere Subjektivitäten ohne sie darzustellen und die inszenierten Räume stehen für ein Begehren nach pluralen, nicht klar von einander abgrenzbaren Zugehörigkeiten jenseits von Normen und abgrenzender Identifizierung.113