Narcissus in and on the Work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres

Resumen

Relying on psychoanalytic readings of narcissism by Freud and Lacan, and touching on literary interventions by Ovid and Rilke, this essay considers the ways in which late-twentieth-century Cubanborn artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres repeatedly staged aspects of narcissism in his installations featuring pairs of mirrors and marble pools as well as his signature paper stacks and painted “portraits”. Specifically, I investigate how narcissism figures within the artist’s exploration of subjectivity and sexuality through a temporally inflected critique that juxtaposes synchronic and diachronic spectatorial experiences. By executing pictorial projects that demand the viewer to see both at once and over time, Gonzalez-Torres productively underscored a range of binaries —such as depth and flatness; the permeable and the permanent —through works that not only dissect the desire at work within spectatorship but also, quite literally, open doors onto new possibilities for the critical examination of the complicated relationship between self and other. Finally, in exploring the myth of Narcissus, this essay considers the aural aspect of the myth, and thus takes stocks of the ways in which Echo subtly figures in the work of Gonzalez-Torres as well.