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Mario Garcia
torres
Secrets and Lies
The young Mexican artist brings his aesthetics of
information to the Frieze Art Fair
words crAig burneTT
portrait AndreA spoTorno
mario garcia torres puts a single 35mm slide in his pocket and conceptual artists as its target. Looking back in the light of the current
repeats the act by sliding it in and out of various pockets for about a practice of some artists – Neuestern refused to allow his work to be
month. A slice of blank emulsion, it takes on the scratches and wrinkles reproduced – the satire is wonderfully prescient.
of everyday use, acquiring the patina of a forgotten thing. Come Rather than view the piece as an attack on the tradition he
exhibition time he projects the slide, a scruffy document of inattention. admires, Oscar Neuestern’s scentless corpse presents Garcia Torres
It’s an artwork, sure, but whether we could say that an artist made it is with some gorgeous raw material. He has exhumed his name for his
another question. show at the Kadist Art Foundation, Paris. “The show will be extremely
Chance, erasure, inaction: all standbys of art in the twentieth flat”, he suggests, “to imply that I have been working without much of
century, at least since Dada. At mid-century, Robert Rauschenberg an effort.” Hence stuffing a 35mm slide in his pocket for the month
rubbed out a Willem de Kooning drawing and exhibited it, while at leading up to the show. Neuestern will make an appearance as a slide
about the same time his sometime collaborator John Cage wrote 4’33” show, a succession of projected images of varying opacity. Another
(1952). Ian Wilson, Douglas Huebler, Martin Creed, Andrea Fraser and work will revisit Rauschenberg’s erased de Kooning: the viewer will hear
Tino Sehgal have all explored immateriality in their work. Garcia Torres the barely audible sound of someone rubbing out a drawing.
is part of a generation of younger artists (he was born in 1975) that Given his lighthearted yet heady approach, it’s not surprising
comes to conceptualism long after its endgame bandwagon has rolled that Garcia Torres laid his foundations with a pun. Asked about the
into the sunset. He forgoes tendentiousness for a playfully sensuous first work that might mark a transition into some kind of maturity, he
approach to the project. mentions Graphite on Paper (1997), a conversion of information into
In September 1969 the artist Oscar Neuestern was the subject an object. “Instead of a drawing, it’s just a mound of graphite on a big
of a detailed profile in ArtNews. Written by a certain Kiki Kundry and sheet of paper. It’s stupid in a way, but it became a way to talk about
called ‘The Ultimate Non-Act’, the piece portrayed Neuestern as a art, to make a little twist of the text on the label.” He made the work
young goofball mystic who supposedly sought the absolute through while he was a student at the Universidad de Monterrey, a time and
complete withdrawal. ‘True transparency’, he said, ‘is possible only in place he acknowledges with a dismissive shrug, discernible even over
the ultimate non-act.’ So who is this forgotten master of Minimalism? the phone.
Nothing in the survey books, no results on Google. In fact, this guy He escaped Monterrey to Mexico City, where he worked as an
never walked Prince Street, where he supposedly had a loft, nor electronic media curator at the Museo Carrillo Gil for more than four
anywhere else. The piece was an elaborate canard with any number of years. But he still wanted to be an artist, working, slowly, on a conceptual
artreview 68
Mario Torres.indd 2 11/9/07 10:25:55
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