Torres was a staunch atheist, this piece carries no such promise of redemption. The work is perhaps illustrative of the sombre mood that hung over New York after the emergence in the 1980s of the AIDS epidemic.
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Fig. 8. Felix Gonzales-Torres: Untitled (March 5 ). 1991
Yet although Gonzalez-Torres始s sculpture acknowledges the possibility of loss, it does not deal with the element of strategy inherent in forming partnerships.
Whilst we would like - and indeed have been conditioned over centuries - to think of love as the ultimate connection between two individuals, entailing an altruistic disregard for personal gain, there are, on the contrary, those who would portray love as a lone, tactical endeavour. In A Lover始s Discourse: Fragments, Roland Barthes inverts the romantic ideal of love as togetherness and, in short bursts seemingly
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