It was a profoundly disorienting encounter: in a room of Picasso paintings at the Fondation Beyeler, I suddenly came across a tall, muscled, black man in a pair of silver hot pants dancing silently and joyfully to music on his headphones. This go-go dancer atop a small, square white platform—both clubby stage and arty pedestal—was ringed by a crowd of silver-haired Swiss art patrons, dazzled and confused. If the white, incandescent bulbs that neatly rimmed the minimal stage alluded to the gay clubs (and their cultural politics), they also conjured the artist behind them, who turned ordinary strands of light bulbs into a series of now seminal contemporary art works—at once formalist and conceptual, poetic and political—in the 1980s and 90s. My encounter with Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s work “Untitled” (Go-Go Dancing Platform) (1991), should not have caused such surprise; I was, after all, at the Beyeler to see the second stop of his retrospective, deftly organized by Elena Filipovic for the Wiels Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels. But such is the arresting power of the Cuban-born artist’s seemingly simple works and interventions that they nearly always cause a moment of both mental and physical frisson, even when one has seen them before. Such subjectivity …