feAture Mario garcia torres
project based directly on his role at the museum. “I created, legally”,
he says, “a whole company that would sell services to museums and
galleries. The main idea behind it is that I wanted to have invoices, and
the invoices would become the only record of my activity as a curator.
Garcia Torres
It was a way for me to create a transition from my work into my own
work as an artist, this thing that I had been doing for the last few years.”
He presented this work in his application for the graduate programme
animates images
at CalArts.
Despite a burgeoning art scene in Mexico City (and the subject
of a survey exhibition at the MCA Chicago this summer that featured
with a peculiarly
his work), Garcia Torres felt he had to get out. “I always had a hard time
in Mexico, because there were very few people interested in my work.
What I was doing wasn’t fulfilling any interests of curators. So for me
sensual intensity
it was great to get outside and to be looked at as any other artist and
not a Mexican artist. Not that I did it for that reason, but it worked out
that way.”
of thought.
His time at CalArts was decisive. He went to study with
Michael Asher and he also met Allan Sekula and Charles Gaines,
whose instruction he describes as especially important. And it was in
He inhabits banality
California where he started work on the two pieces that ended up in
this year’s Venice Biennale, What Happens in Halifax Stays in Halifax (In
36 Slides) (2004–6) and An Open Letter to Dr Atl (2005).
as if it were a
Both take the form of projected images with subtitles, and both
open up historical events to a kind of analysis. The Halifax piece revisits
a long-buried moment in the history of conceptual art. David Askevold,
silky seraglio
at the time an instructor at Halifax’s NSCAD University, asked his
students to enact a Robert Barry project. ‘The students will gather
and agree on an idea,’ read Barry’s instructions. ‘They will keep it as a
secret.’ Inaction became the essence of the work. Any breach of loyalty, his essays to create a model of how to enjoy chewing over either
and slip in discipline, would erase the work. Garcia Torres arranged a insignificant anecdotes or big ideas. He is developing an aesthetics of
reunion of some of the students who participated in the event, and information, and it feels fresh and urgent.
then took some black-and-white photographs of Halifax’s mundane The same year that Oscar Neuestern was imagined into being
cityscape, sites associated with the project and the three students who by some cunning art critic, Alan Smithee was born, the culture industry’s
agreed to participate. Occasionally the image is nothing but a seagull most prolific and exuberant bastard. He’s a film director, infamous in
or the spindly branches of winter trees. All the images are overlaid by Hollywood, but one you’ve probably never heard of. Check him out on
the artist’s reflections on memory and immateriality.
imdb.com. He’s directed countless duds, from Mrs Columbo (1979) to
An Open Letter to Dr Atl has a similar look, but this time the Bloodsucking Pharaohs in Pittsburgh (1991). He is, in fact, the name that
image is an 8mm film of Barranca de Oblatos, a famous canyon near directors give to the films they wish to disavow. Garcia Torres will give
Guadalajara. Dr Atl, the pseudonym for Gerardo Murillo, is a painter this idea form, bringing Smithee to life so that he can appear in the talks
and national hero in Mexico (but unlike Diego Rivera or Frida Kahlo, programme at the Frieze Art Fair.
little known outside the country). He painted melodramatic landscapes As the misbegotten runt of Hollywood run amok, Smithee
– especially volcanoes – that might have been used to express, or forge, presents the artist with a tasty paradox. Instead of an artist sans work,
the soul of the young country. Barranca de Oblatos was one of his you have hours and hours of production and countless films that
favourite spots and the subject of many works. Thomas Krens, director would take a few lifetimes to create, and yet no artist. As Garcia Torres
of the Guggenheim Foundation, visited the site and called it an ‘instant explored the project, he realised that “it stopped being about cinema
postcard’. A member of the Guggenheim board visited the site and and started to be about creating in general. At the end of the project,
suggested that the august institution open a branch on the pristine rim it will be about how to conceive of a body of work created by a bunch
of the canyon. The combination of characters and incidents opens up of different people at different times.” (Garcia Torres has written Oscar
a discussion about art, tourism and landscape. Neuestern into Alan Smithee’s talk, as if the world’s most notorious
Garcia Torres’s film is shot through with delicate melancholy. hack was somehow familiar with a nonexistent artist of immateriality.)
The landscape flickers as if it might disappear at any moment, as if “The other important thing for me”, he says, “is the date. Alan Smithee
what we are watching is, in fact, an aged historical record that shows the was created in 1969, but today there are more than a few films that
valley in its virginal fragility. The artist suggests, like the Halifax secret, predate 1969. His authorship was retroactively applied. So it poses the
that action destroys as much as it creates. But this idea is sharper, question: do we need artists to create work?” Don’t miss Smithee’s talk
more poignant, a hint that he’d rather the Guggenheim take its culture for an answer to that conundrum.
industry elsewhere.
Garcia Torres trades in pretty dull images, but he animates them Mario Garcia Torres, winner of the 2007 Cartier Award, is presenting new
with a peculiarly sensual intensity of thought. He inhabits banality as if it work at the Frieze Art Fair, London, 11–14 October; work by Garcia Torres
were a silky seraglio. Haphazard and scruffy, the pictures complement is also on view at Kadist Art Foundation, Paris, until 18 November
71 Artreview
Mario Torres.indd 5 11/9/07 10:28:25
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