Mario Garcia Torres

Secrets and Lies

The young Mexican artist brings his aesthetics of

information to the Frieze Art Fair

mario garcia torres puts a single 35mm slide in his pocket and

repeats the act by sliding it in and out of various pockets for about a

month. A slice of blank emulsion, it takes on the scratches and wrinkles

of everyday use, acquiring the patina of a forgotten thing. Come

exhibition time he projects the slide, a scruffy document of inattention.

It’s an artwork, sure, but whether we could say that an artist made it is

another question.

Chance, erasure, inaction: all standbys of art in the twentieth

century, at least since Dada. At mid-century, Robert Rauschenberg

rubbed out a Willem de Kooning drawing and exhibited it, while at

about the same time his sometime collaborator John Cage wrote 4’33”

(1952). Ian Wilson, Douglas Huebler, Martin Creed, Andrea Fraser and

Tino Sehgal have all explored immateriality in their work. Garcia Torres

is part of a generation of younger artists (he was born in 1975) that

comes to conceptualism long after its endgame bandwagon has rolled

into the sunset. He forgoes tendentiousness for a playfully sensuous

approach to the project.

In September 1969 the artist Oscar Neuestern was the subject

of a detailed profile in ArtNews. Written by a certain Kiki Kundry and

called ‘The Ultimate Non-Act’, the piece portrayed Neuestern as a

young goofball mystic who supposedly sought the absolute through

complete withdrawal. ‘True transparency’, he said, ‘is possible only in

the ultimate non-act.’ So who is this forgotten master of Minimalism?

Nothing in the survey books, no results on Google. In fact, this guy

never walked Prince Street, where he supposedly had a loft, nor

anywhere else. The piece was an elaborate canard with any number of

conceptual artists as its target. Looking back in the light of the current

practice of some artists – Neuestern refused to allow his work to be

reproduced – the satire is wonderfully prescient.

Rather than view the piece as an attack on the tradition he

admires, Oscar Neuestern’s scentless corpse presents Garcia Torres

with some gorgeous raw material. He has exhumed his name for his

show at the Kadist Art Foundation, Paris. “The show will be extremely

flat”, he suggests, “to imply that I have been working without much of

an effort.” Hence stuffing a 35mm slide in his pocket for the month

leading up to the show. Neuestern will make an appearance as a slide

show, a succession of projected images of varying opacity. Another

work will revisit Rauschenberg’s erased de Kooning: the viewer will hear

the barely audible sound of someone rubbing out a drawing.

Given his lighthearted yet heady approach, it’s not surprising

that Garcia Torres laid his foundations with a pun. Asked about the

first work that might mark a transition into some kind of maturity, he

mentions Graphite on Paper (1997), a conversion of information into

an object. “Instead of a drawing, it’s just a mound of graphite on a big

sheet of paper. It’s stupid in a way, but it became a way to talk about

art, to make a little twist of the text on the label.” He made the work

while he was a student at the Universidad de Monterrey, a time and

place he acknowledges with a dismissive shrug, discernible even over

the phone.

words craig burnett