Between the Fear of Loss and the Joy of Loving: Gonzalez-Torres at Stein and Tokas’ Grave, Paris

This talk begins with Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s photograph of the grave of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas to consider how Gonzalez-Torres and Stein mixed formal abstraction with material drafted from their variably illicit queer love stories to stage a form of queer portraiture. If Stein’s experiments affirmed traditional portraiture’s aim of representing the transparent truth of a subject, Gonzalez-Torres pursued methods where the subject performs as a shifting and changing being in a ceaseless process of becoming, unfolding, adding, subtracting, losing and creating. Centering life, care, and continuance, this mode of queer performance allows us to see how queer grief can counterintuitively function as the grounds for staging queer life and love’s surprising and vibrant endurance; even amidst a culture that “assaults” both in a range of violent and destructive ways.