Mario García Torres. Forget Aesthetics
Mexican-based artist Mario García Torres (b. 1975, Monclova) uses video, photography and sound to explore the boundaries between memory and truth, reality and fiction, linking back to the history of Conceptual art. Interviewed by Aram Moshayedi, he discusses his first US survey show at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (through February 17), featuring 45 works created over the past two decades as well as a new augmented reality installation titled Illusion Brought Me Here.
“MARIO GARCÍA TORRES: ILLUSION BROUGHT ME HERE,” WALKER ART CENTER, MINNEAPOLIS. THROUGH FEBRUARY 17, 2019.
ARAM MOSHAYEDI: The last time we saw each other was outside of Puerto Escondido in June 2018, at a gathering at Casa Wabi you organized in anticipation of your forthcoming retrospective exhibition at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Does it make sense for us to start our conversation by discussing the impulse behind that encounter?
MARIO GARCÍA TORRES: It does make sense. The gathering in Puerto Escondido came together precisely because of the retrospective nature of my show at the Walker. It was conceived as a celebration of collaboration, but also an acknowledgment of the collaborative nature of works of art – any work of art.
How so?
Let me try to explain. Even though an artist may initiate specific projects, the realization of a work of art has to do with many other factors. In my case, I don’t think my works are dictatorial gestures, but proposals that take shape only when the work becomes a conversation with someone else. Meaning the works exist only by virtue of the fact that they can have a function in a larger framework. For that to happen, there has to be a dialogue with someone.
How did you decide who to invite?
The event in Puerto Escondido set out to bring together all the people who have shaped the works I have made over the last 20 years. Of course it was an ambitious idea, but we managed to get together a representative group that has helped make the works in different ways, that has contributed to the conceptual side of works or to their actual making. There were curators (like yourself), friends, scriptwriters, musicians, and photographers. It was a reunion of people who had met before in works of art, even though some of them hadn’t actually met in person.
It was a meaningful gesture to bring these people together, making it possible to meet someone in person after having experienced their craft in various manifestations. You were vague about the details until we all arrived in Puerto Escondido. How has the work been implemented at the Walker? How does it try to represent that occasion?
Well, I wanted to keep it as an event. I knew it would become a work of art afterwards. In a way, I wanted to keep the nature of the gathering as the work. That is why I explained what I intended, and asked you to keep shaping the form of the work with me, only after you were all together there. At the Walker that gathering, which also includes people who were not with us on those specific days, is represented through an augmented reality installation titled Illusion Brought Me Here (n.d.). All of you “hang out” – some alone, some in groups – throughout the exhibition’s galleries.
I look forward to being reunited with myself there. In a way, it’s also how I feel about being reunited with specific artworks that I have had a curatorial hand in helping to shape. I’m thinking about the work I Am Not a Flopper, for instance, which you made for the Hammer Museum in 2014.
I hadn’t thought about that! But you are right. You can meet yourself at the Walker in the form of a hologram. You can even take a selfie with yourself! And you are also able to see David Dastmalchian, who played Alan Smithee in the monologue we presented together at the Hammer. The piece, which we exhibited in the form of a video in Los Angeles, this time is presented as a stage work. So it kind of inverts the piece. You can see on stage what you once saw in video documentation.
Do you also think about the bringing together of past works as an opportunity for you to be reacquainted with them? Is it like seeing an old friend, when you show a work again after some time has passed?
Oh, yeah. It is a beautiful but strange feeling to see all that work again, displayed together. In fact, we reinterpreted some of the works in a deeper way. We have tested the ideas that provoked works to happen in the past. For example, a piece that I made in 2005 – my very first film, One Minute to Act a Title: Kim Jong Il Favorite Movies – has been remade using the films that Kim Jong Un (the son of Kim Jong Il) likes the most.
I understand your impulse to reinterpret your work for this occasion. To an extent, it is about looking back at your own output over time, to see how it has changed and how your thinking has evolved over the years. Is this a gesture toward rejecting the conventions of a retrospective exhibition?
Well, yes. Retrospective shows attempt to settle what the work is about, and that troubles me a lot. Because I want to be able to keep changing. But my interest in reinterpretation is also to make the point that works are not stable things. I think it is important to conceive of works as sets of instructions, and what is seen in an exhibition most of the time is just one specific rendering. So, if a survey is a review of works from the past, why not put them to the test again? Why not see if they still function, and what they mean today? One Minute to Act a Title: Kim Jong Il Favorite Movies is a work of art as a test, to see what would happen if one had the same idea, but ten years later. Plus, there are few opportunities to make a work of art about a dictator and then, within one’s lifetime, see the regime change hands!
A lot has happened since you made One Minute. Alongside changes brought about by world events, you too are a different person, and perhaps your ideas about your work have changed. So it would seem misguided to think that the work is fixed, that it means today what it did in the past. Artworks are often turned into historical artifacts by museums, despite original intentions that are somehow to make a work of art that can be part of an enduring present. Exactly. Not even the artist thinks of the work in the same way. I also like what you previously said about there being a more personal perspective. In a way, it feels like a survey of the work is a moment to see how your thinking has evolved, and a moment to question what you have done so far. The revisiting of One Minute investigates whether the initial decisions behind the piece still work today, but also what has happened in museum culture over the past 13 years. We have definitely changed many things. I guess we will see what happens.
It seems like an appropriate moment to ask: do you have any regrets?
Since 2003, every time I go to a hotel and there is hotel stationery, I sit down and think about my life as an artist. Most of the time I make a promise, written on the paper. I usually write the same line: I promise to make my best as an artist, at least for the next [period of time]… The only part that changes is the time span of years, depending on the enthusiasm I have that day. After I do it, I send it to the collector who owns this piece. I guess for me it is easier to make a promise, looking into the future, than it is to ponder regrets from the past.
From my experience as a curator I know that it can be difficult to edit or exclude certain works from an exhibition of this scale. It is almost always impossible to present a complete and comprehensive view into an artist’s practice or a body of work. How did you and the curator at the Walker, Vincenzo de Bellis, negotiate some of these difficult decisions? Would you say that the works are being employed in a specific way to narrate a tendency within your broader practice and its relationship to the history of art? Or did you also want there to be a kind of openness to the curatorial framing?
Well, yes, you are right. It is very tough. But I suppose it is also something that takes shape in a more organic way. This is only the second time I’ve done this kind of show. The first one, with Sofía Hernández Chong-Cuy at Museo Tamayo in 2016, was an exercise that was very much grounded in the context of my own country. This time, I would say, the museum – its history, its collection – became the context in which to work. So the overview in the show is rather broad, but if there is a diagonal perspective it would be related to the history of ideas, the history of Conceptual art, which is extensively documented by the Walker’s collection. I had never shown in Minneapolis, so that also gave it a wider view. The show will travel afterwards to Wiels in Brussels (from May 17 to August 18, 2019). By contrast, that city has been present in my work, there are many works of mine that have been exhibited there in the past. In Weils, the show will definitely need to take another path. But anyway, that is a broad sketch; there are many ideas and common themes that crisscross and run throughout the works on display.
I have one last question. In Illusion Brought Me Here, can you make my hologram a bit taller?
[laughs] Forget aesthetics. All decisions are conceptual here.
Aram Moshayedi is Curator at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.