In 1991, Cuban American artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres exhibited “Untitled
(Go-Go Dancing Platform),” a blue platform upon which a go-go dancer
performs once a day. Since then, popular interpretative narratives of
the work have focused on its political stakes in the affective climate
during and following the AIDS crisis. While
these interpretations of the work’s employment of a dancer highlight its
simulation of nightlife work as its impetus, its use of performance as a
constitutive material is rarely addressed. This thesis expands the
conceptual interpretation of “Untitled (Go-Go Dancing Platform)” by
articulating its employment of queer time as a performing material,
introduced by the performance of the go-go dancer. I argue that the
physical contact between the live dancer and the material platform
produces its own temporal space – what I am calling “disco time” – that
sidesteps the concept of chrononormativity as described by Elizabeth
Freeman. Further, the state of the work in the absence of the dancer (as
it exists a majority of the time) is considered in relation to its
photographic documentation, arguing for a queer historiography that
embeds the past and future as always within the present.