In a playful and nostalgic way at the same time, Mario García Torres’ work tends to revisit conceptual art. In his first solo exhibition in Barcelona he investigates the secrets that accompanied a work by Robert Barry.
Like other artists of his generation, Mario García Torres (Mexico, 1975) is a direct heir to the discourses of conceptual artists of the 60s and 70s. However, the most notable aspect of García Torres’ approach is an almost detective-like or historiographical interest in exploring works, proposals or moments that are not very visible in conceptual art in order to, from a personal point of view, discover new readings and meanings.
With his work, García Torres shows the apathy with which art history is written by republishing the same data, descriptions and interpretations in successive studies, without subjecting them to critical revisions. In this way, a work based on instructions can go down in history as a simple statement without anyone ever taking the trouble to investigate the proposal, its processes, its participants and, why not, its results. In this way, works that at the time tried to integrate art and life, to put the emphasis on the process over the finished object, that resisted being shown (and recorded, presented and preserved) and that proposed to test the limits of the institution, were incorporated into history as simple statements, as records or as documents that could not be transmitted except when “deactivated.”
Based on these concerns, Mario García Torres intends to activate some of these proposals, to bring the potential of stories to the forefront or, in other words, to bring us closer to important but low-visibility moments. With a very conceptual approach, García Torres’ exhibition at Espai 13 is articulated around four works that, from different perspectives, bring up numerous issues that bring us closer to conceptual references from new perspectives. Something like “everything you always wanted to know about conceptual art but were afraid to ask.” In that sense, the most outstanding piece in the exhibition is “What happens in Halifax, stays in Halifax (in 36 slides)”, in which the artist did research on a proposal by Robert Barry from 1969 that consisted of a group of art students in Halifax (Canada) thinking up a shared idea and keeping it secret, even from Barry himself. García Torres’ interest was focused not so much on talking to Barry in the first instance, but with the students participating in the project. To do this, he had to locate each one of them and question them about an event that had taken place in their lives more than thirty years ago, with the aim of analyzing what it meant for them to participate in this proposal and, at the end of the process, contact Barry and find out what the piece meant to him, although this is an aspect that is secondary for García Torres. The formal result is a projection of thirty-six slides in which images of the locations associated with the project are combined with subtitles, giving rise to an essay that gives new meaning to Barry’s proposal.
Memory and its ambiguities, what is shown and what is hidden, what remains and what is lost, dematerialization and its historicization are treated in “Transparencies of the non-act”, about Oscar Neuestern, a little-known artist whose work was based on the concept of absence: interested in the visual, he did not allow his works to be recorded. It matters little whether Neuestern really existed, what is relevant is the reflection on radicality, authenticity, how history is written and how it transcends. The notions of secrecy, rumor, oral transmission, experience and its recording are relevant aspects to review the conceptual and are also aspects explored by current artists. We cannot help but relate the instructions to the works of Peter Liversidge or Dora García, the idea of secrecy, again with Dora García or the oral transmission of the works and the lack of records with Tino Seghal. Liversidge, García, Seghal and García Torres are part of a genealogy of artists who are heirs to conceptual art, aware of it and critical at the same time.
The lack of balance that sometimes exists between the importance of a work and its visibility, the experience of things and the way in which they are communicated and survive in history, the potential of stories, the stories that remain in the background and whose significance is discovered much later, the versions, adaptations and reenactments, the collective or participatory projects are just some of the themes explored in this exhibition that constitutes an intelligent review of some aspects of conceptual art; for this very reason, an intelligent work by Mario García Torres and, by extension, an intelligent choice by Tres, curator of the “Silenci Explícit” series.
