In 1996, Dora García created an installation called Perplexity, which consisted of delimiting a space in an art gallery with a ribbon on which the word “perplexity” could be read. In this simple way (and in the case of Dora’s works there is an inversely proportional relationship between the ease with which her works can be described and their conceptual complexity), the artist pointed out the limits within which her work is situated: presenting reality as multiple and questionable and exploring the relationship between artist, work and public. In other words, Dora points out, acts like a film director who tells stories (or simply selects them), triggers a situation, places us in a scenario or makes us participate in a game whose rules are very similar to reality and for that very reason allow us to question it.
Selected Stories is the title of this exhibition, which could be defined as a mini-retrospective, as it brings together a selection of works spanning the period between 1991 and 2007. Due to the markedly procedural nature of Dora García’s works, the presentation of these works is done in a format that the artist herself defines as “off mode”, that is, showing the elements that form part of the works but in an “uninstalled” way.
Selected Stories presents a tour of seven works: Contes Choisis (1991) is an installation presented at the De Appel Foundation in Amsterdam in which the portrait of Guy de Maupassant contrasted with two enigmatic sculptures define a narrative and fictional substratum. All the Stories (2001- ) is a work in progress whose ambition is to bring together “all the stories of the world. The reader who decides to read them aloud becomes a performer of All the Stories and, when he or she has finished, all men and women, all time and all places, will have passed through his or her lips. The difficulty lies in that almost every day new stories are added to this list.” The Closed Room consists of a room that must remain closed. When someone enters this room it disappears and the work fades away. The Crowd is a performance that starts from the need to create expectations and in which the public plays an essential role. The Prophets is described in this way by the artist, “[The prophets]… every day they come into the museum and pick up the photocopies with the prophecies that there are for that day and that I had sent in advance. During the next hour, they hand them out to the museum visitors and carry out the prophesied tasks that I wrote specifically for them on the papers they are distributing. They never know in advance what these tasks may be, nor in the way in which they will be presented to the visitors the next day. The tension generated by these “ready-to-wear” prophecies (…), the suspicion that the events that take place are partly staged, and the constant threat of an uncontrollable reality…”. The Beggar’s Opera is the project that García presented at the Skulptur Projekte Münster’07 and consisted of a series of performances by an actor who plays a beggar, Filch, inspired by the beggar’s apprentice in John Gay’s opera, which in turn inspired Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera. Filch is a character who moves freely through the streets of Münster, sufficiently marginal to be able to say what he thinks at all times. His adventures, encounters and observations were noted in the logbook www.thebeggarsopera.org as well as a series of monologues that were performed at the Metropolis Kino in Münster and which are now compiled in a publication. Finally, C (Film Told twice), a proposal created specifically for the CASM, is a commented screening of Beckett’s film Film (1964) based on the notion of subjective camera. The commented screening will take place every Wednesday at 7 pm in the CASM Auditorium.
Constantly moving between the borders that separate fiction and reality, Dora García’s performances (performances with actors who follow a series of instructions) explore their limits, which are none other than the limits between reality and its representation. By investigating the construction of fictions, Dora García’s work offers a self-reflective vision of the individual and their environment, in which recognition plays an essential role.
“Art is for everyone but only an elite knows it,” says one of her “golden phrases,” true statements or declarations of principles with which she makes her position public and with which it is easy to identify. “The difference between ordinary and extraordinary is in that little extra thing.” That is precisely what makes her work extraordinary.
Montse Badia
