Straightening

cultural knots
since 1949

Amy Sherald
 Mario García Torres

How the Mexican artist turned to the discipline

44 ArtReview
The vanguard art of the 1960s and 70s is generally thought of as cere- while installing at Documenta in 1972; in the film, the Arte Povera
bral, rational, systemic, self-contained. But consider that the first artist dances in said hostelry, increasingly rapidly, to banging
edict in Sol LeWitt’s 1968 manifesto ‘Sentences on Conceptual Art’ is electronic music whose rhythms – and Merz’s movements – relate to
this: ‘Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap the integers in the Fibonacci sequence; Merz seems to be dancing his
to conclusions that logic cannot reach.’ Remember that Dan Graham way towards infinity.
was really, really into astrology. Note that the brainiac progenitor of Ask García Torres, as I did recently by email, where this urge to
conceptual art, Marcel Duchamp, was outed in John F. Moffitt’s 2003 dilate the past and see it as changeable and expansible comes from,
book Alchemist of the Avant-Garde: The Case of Marcel Duchamp as being and he says, appropriately enough, that what he thinks today about
active in alchemy and all manner of off-beam esotericism. Entertain that is different to what he thought a decade ago. “I would have said
the possibility that Bruce Nauman’s 1967 neon The True Artist Helps the that repeating acts was done with the faith that they were just forms,
World by Revealing Mystic Truths might not be even halfway ironical. For containers, whose meanings would become very different if displaced
the past two decades, it’s been part of Mario García Torres’s artistic in time. Today I’d say they were ways of believing in myself, finding
project to crowbar open our understanding of this art-historical a way to legitimate myself as an artist, looking for like-minded
lineage – suggesting that stylistics such as Conceptualism, Arte people, even if they weren’t in the same time and space. I guess there’s
Povera and institutional critique are more complex, or based on something of transcending my condition, breaking notions of time
different assumptions, than widely assumed – and use such revi- and geography, and believing through the work I could do the impos-
sionism to microcosm wider complexities, obscured stories beyond sible, like checking into Boetti’s hotel.”
known frames, hidden potentiality, unfixity. One way of framing García Torres’s own ‘history of influence’, then,
See, for example, a cornerstone work in A History of Influence, the is that he engaged with a certain type of artist, and playfully reread
Mexican artist’s current retrospective at Kassel’s Fridericianum: and complicated them, until he became a peer. (“Nothing gives you
2010’s ¿Alguna vez has visto la nieve caer? (Have You Ever Seen the Snow?). permission to be an artist,” he notes.) Of late, his work has accordingly
This slideshow-converted-to-video follows García Torres’s attempts leaned less on historical artists, though it’s still magnetised to the
to find Alighiero Boetti’s One Hotel, which the Italian artist ran in recent-ish past. The (again undated) two-screen film Cayendo juntos
Kabul between 1971 and 1979, long thought destroyed. Through en el tiempo (Falling Together in Time) travels back into the early 1980s
travels and archive-delving – and a bit of fictionalising – García via voiceover and archival footage, to tell a story that suggests
Torres ‘finds’ evidence of its historical existence, at least. As he zooms an infinitude of near-mystical synchronicities – between, for
in on photos of the alleged hotel, his eye and his voiceover catch all exam-ple, the Van Halen song Jump (1984), the story of Muhammad Ali
kinds of chance details; at one point, he even claims he’s potentially stopping someone from leaping off a building, the rappers House
found Boetti himself, seen in reflection, photographing the frontage of Pain, blue-eyed-soul outfit Hall & Oates, vintage synthesisers,
of his own establishment. For another work (pointedly undated, thinkers Carl Jung and Arthur Koestler, and a trucker stuck in a traffic
like a number of the artist’s projects, as if jam near Manchester – rewriting the past
above ¿Alguna vez has visto la nieve caer?
unhitched from linear time), Merz, Rzemmmm, (Have You Ever Seen the Snow?) (still), 2010. © the artist,
through seemingly magical linkages. When
Zeeeeerm, Emrzzzzzz (At Fibonacci Pace), García Documenta and Fridericianum, Kassel the film ends, it feels like García Torres (or
Torres found and animated a photo of Mario facing page Merz, Rzemmmm, Zeeeeerm, Emrzzzzzz you the viewer, with a bit of effort) could go
Merz in a Kassel bar that the latter frequented (At Fibonacci Pace) (stills), n.d. © the artist on like this forever.

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 above Relationship of Urban Musicians According to Recorded Collaborations,
n.d., acrylic, silkscreen and wax on canvas, 170 × 131 cm.
Photo: Omar Bocanegra. © the artist

preceding pages Xoco Está Aburrido (Xoco is bored), 2012

48 ArtReview
 In Kassel, that work sits near a series of multipanelled, a previous presentation by García Torres in Kassel, in Documenta
silkscreened, flowchartlike canvases (2024–25) that, similarly, in 2012 – a year when he was, himself, supposed to be on sabbatical,
diagram quixotic relations within the history of music, making doing nothing. If the work sounds hokey in description, in person it’s
plenty of room for South American and Latin musicians: in García charming, a child-adapted variation on what its maker often seems to
Torres’s cosmology, for instance, it’s only two steps (via a New Order be saying: that there’s always wiggle room and possibility and differ-
sample) from Joy Division to Spanish rapper C. Tangana; disco is ence, even or especially where there seems to be little, materially, to
an important node in dance music, but so, here, are bandleaders engage with. (Plus, the artist notes, this doing-nothing character is
Tito Puente and Eddie Palmieri. These diagrams, semaphoring the the opposite of the goal-driven characters we’re used to seeing in the
delivery of facts, hitch the scientific affect and outward objectivity commercial, capitalistic world.)
of text-driven conceptual art to the telling of new stories, and so to a In a work like this, for all that it demonstrates García Torres
loosening of control: they don’t feel like the final word on something, beginning to outgrow a need to engage specific conceptual forebears,
more one way of organising a world, perhaps even creating a world there’s a transvaluing of dematerialisation and an engagement with a
by describing it. “A trick that the second movement of conceptual art hidden history of art: showing that nothing, seen through the widest
– in the 80s and 90s – played on me, lens, is really something, something
and maybe other artists, is that one These diagrams, semaphoring the spacious, endless. “I think we have
had to control meaning, control our delivery of facts, hitch the scientific affect been misreading conceptual art for
output and by doing that transmit a long time,” he affirms. “Most of
a clear, hopefully critical message,”
and outward objectivity of text-driven those works that presented them-
says García Torres. “I wanted to go conceptual art to the telling of new stories, selves as purely intellectual are very
exactly the opposite way, to create and so to a loosening of control much related, I would say, to ethe-
work where meaning was more real and sublime ideas. If we think
porous, that would lead me to more uncertain places, and where of the most pure, hardcore conceptual artworks – the most immate-
the work lived in people’s minds, in misunderstandings. I started to rial – they are nothing but the acknowledgment of the existence of
understand that pop culture was a place where all kinds of people a nonphysical world. They in fact inhabit that world. If we think of
could coincide.” statements where a work was a telepathic message, as with Robert
This thinking about expanded audiences has paid off in other Barry, or Lawrence Weiner’s statement that works need not be made,
ways, too. Housed in a little room that you must stoop to enter (unless they’re only pointing to the existence of that romantic, yet disrup-
you’re a child), the 2012 cartoon (animated by Tomoko Hirasawa) Xoco, tive vision of the world. I want to think that, more and more, my
The Kid Who Loved Being Bored, might function as a gateway to art for work goes in that direction,” says García Torres. A figure long adept
kids, though García Torres says he was aiming towards “the inner at placing other artists’ practices on different tracks is, evidently,
child of an adult”. In it, the titular Xoco – big-eyed, expressionless now doing the same for his own. ar
and turning up elsewhere in the show as a large plush toy sometimes
used in performances – discovers beauty inside boredom via his A solo exhibition of Mario García Torres’s work, A History of Influence,
imagination (and a wavering horizon line). This work leads back to is on show at The Fridericianum, Kassel, through 27 July

above Xoco, The Kid Who Loved Being Bored (still), 2012,
45 slides transferred to hd video, sound, 9 min 55 sec
© the artist, Documenta and Fridericianum, Kassel

all images Courtesy the artist and Neugerriemschneider, Berlin

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