My presentation of Klaus Barbie as a Family Man drew upon an interview where the artist noted that our culture was able to award perpetrators of horrendous violence such as Barbie a level of respect which he as a gay man could never earn. Gonzales-Torres indicated that works such as this one were his way of dealing with his resentment of an ideology which privileged heterosexual relationships. Art, as he put it, allowed him to “get that out of [his] system in a healthy way.” By acknowledging his personal, emotional investment in his use of an image connected to the holocaust, the artist raises ethical concerns about making art with the documents of other people’s suffering.

My reading of the piece proved provocative for our group. Although Matthias Waschek could also see catharsis at work here, Carol Armstrong felt I was giving too much power to the artist’s voice. Moreover, Carol insisted that she, for one, did not receive aesthetic pleasure from viewing such an artwork and therefore rejected both mine and the artists’ understanding of the piece as cathartic. My response to Carol’s critique was that all aesthetic experience is by definition sensual, and that we look at art because it stimulates us and thereby gives us pleasure. Although this may be the negative pleasure of the sublime, we ultimately go to museums because we like to. The ensuing discussion was lively and involved many of the symposium’s participants who drew upon issues raised by other explicitly political works in the exhibition.