Felix Gonzalez-Torres: dissolving oneself in the crowd The Performance of Politics

Starting in the mid-1980s, Felix Gonzalez-Torres created a series of works that reproduce images of crowds on puzzles, tableware, and wallpaper. He thus joined the long tradition of artists who recognized in the images of the crowd a fundamental motif of 20th-century visual production. This conference intends to address the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres based on the ambivalent nature of the crowd. On the one hand, its image may be associated with fear and annulment, as Gonzalez-Torres himself used it in “Double Fear”, included in The Politics of Relation, where he overlaid these images with enlargements of photographs of HIV taken with a microscope. On the other hand, the crowd is a powerful space to activate performative disidentification processes, one of the fundamental strategies in Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ practice though, on the other hand, and using very different aesthetic and political strategies, his main ambition was to dissolve himself in the crowd.