Strategies of Representation:
Ghostly Returns in the Work of Félix González-Torres and C. Ree

This thesis examines the work of Félix González-Torres and C. Ree and their strategies of representation made manifest via objects, photography, architecture and metaphors that remain open to ghostly returns by resisting identarian foreclosures. Haunting, or the appearance of ghosts, has conceptual power to occupy space between certainty and categorization, favors heterogeneity, multiplicity and indeterminacy, and ruptures narratives of dominance. C. Ree, a contemporary artist living in San Diego, recycles imagery and concept to create a type of haunting embodied in the form of a water leak, posited as a disorienting force calling attention to the built environment and, by extension, exposing the invisible structures of power and whiteness, also built and constructed. Similarly, González-Torres subtly abstracts embodied imagery, in favor of an absent presence that eludes dominate protocols of identification. Both artists rely on a slippage, a duplicitous recognition/misrecognition, of a haunting subject inscribed in the formation of identity itself.