Mario García Torres (born 1975) is a critically acclaimed visual and conceptual artist. He has used various media, including film, sound, performance, ‘museographic installations’ and video as a means to create his art.
García Torres often mentioned untold or ‘minor’ histories, as departing points for his work. He has re-created historical exhibitions and has even ‘completed’ unfinished artworks, often blurring original and reenactment, past and present, while questioning universal ideas about truth, certainty and time –all core ideas in the development of his body of work. During the early 2000s García Torres stopped dating his works; In so doing, he undermines the narrative of an oeuvre and career as a progressive evolution over time. n.d. (no date) often accompanies, since then, the work's title, and has become a signature of the artist.
His work has been shown at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Hammer Museum in Los Ángeles, and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam among many others. He has participated in international biennials like the Venice Biennale, the São Paulo Biennial and the Documenta in Kassel. His work is collected by institutions like the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Guggenheim Museums; the Tate Modern in London; and the Pompidou Center in Paris.
Biography Mario García Torres was born in the Mexican city of Monclova in 1975. The interest of Mario García Torres for art started a very young age, as he accompanied his mother in their hometown's museum, where she volunteered as a guide. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Monterrey in Mexico in 1998. While a student in Monterrey, he started getting interested in conceptual art. García Torres cited a group of his professors that were linked with American abstract expressionism as an influence in that direction. Before continuing his studies in the United States, and earned his Master of Fine Arts by the California Institute of the Arts in 2005, as a Fulbright grantee, the artist worked as an "electronic arts curator" at the Museo Carrillo Gil in México City. In 2007 he received the Cartier Award at the Frieze Art Fair. He is a member of the Artists Board of SOMA -a Mexico City arts organization.
Early work The work that first attracted attention to the artist negotiated obscure events associated with conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s, with the use of a variety of media. His early work, based on past events around the history of conceptual art, tried to create new ideas and meanings through them. García Torres used minor events for the creation of his narratives, as he believed that "some of them still have the potential to trigger questions both regarding their own nature, and regarding historiography".
In "In Some Places I Had Seen Before Moving to L.A.", he presents locations around L.A. in an attempt to reproduce the image he had about the city, based in what he saw in films or conceptual art works. His first solo exhibition in the United States presented "What Happens in Halifax Stays in Halifax". It was triggered during a conversation about art concepts with Jan Mot, and was initiated as a historic research project covering a 1969 art project which was assigned to NSCAD University students in David Askevold's class by artist Robert Barry. García Torres' work consisted of black and white slides and produced a reunion of the 1969 project class.
García Torres' Share-e-Nau Wanderings (A Film Treatment) was the artist's first attempt to approach the life and work of Alighiero Boetti, by creating a series of fictitious fax sheets, describing García Torres' imaginary trip in Kabul.
The project would occupy seven years of research and the production of a number of works. "¿Alguna vez has visto la nieve caer?" is a 50-minute slide show of black and white photographs of Kabul, taken by as anonymous photographers, and accompanied by sound. The project comprised photographs taken in the seventies, but the artist placed his work after the September 11 attacks, in an attempt to mingle different times and trigger the audience to question what it sees. With "Tea", García Torres documents in film his journey to One Hotel, the hotel operated by Alighiero Boetti in Kabul, further exploring his knowledge of Kabul and Boetti while tackling the also tense political climate in his own country. This was an important part of his contribution to Documenta 13.
With "Je ne sais si c'en est la cause", and "What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Stronger" García Torres gave documentation for two past works: Martin Kippenberger's Museum of Modern Art Syros, and Daniel Buren's in-situ mosaics in Saint Croix. His work "My Westphalia Days" is a road movie containing fictitious events of the four-day disappearance of Michael Asher's trailer, which was presented in Skulptur Projekte Münster since 1977.
"Unspoken Dailies", is a 66-minute feature film, showing actor Diego Luna reading the film's script written by García Torres for the first time while being filmed in an artist studio in Mexico City.
Monologues and lectures In 2007, García Torres created what would become the first of a number of theater monologues. Alan Smithee, the pseudonym directors used to disown projects they were dissatisfied with, is personified in "I am not a Flopper". The work is a monologue which García Torres co-wrote with philosopher Aaron Schuster, and is an effort to discuss created and invented concepts. I am not a Flopper was first presented as a stage piece in London where played the character. Years later it was presented as a video work at the Hammer Museum, where David Dastmalchian did the monologue.
In 2015, inspired by Seth Siegelaub, an independent curator, gallerist, and publisher who was influential to the emergence of Conceptual art in the 1960s, the artist co-wrote with Alan Page "The Causality of Hesitance". Centered on Siegelaub's interest in theories about time, this "thought-provoking performance" spans a range of topics, from the psychology of hesitating to the contradictory aspects of economic progress. "The Cordiality Paradox" is a performative speech carried out by ‘an actor and a robotic tortoise,’ that takes on two philosophical paradoxes – conceptual notions in the foundations of mathematics – and enlivens them for the layperson through an anecdotal narrative recounting life-changing moments and encounters. The piece is "a nonstop operation that could have been either a philosophical treatise or the chatter of a confused mind" according to Noemi Smolik.
In 2012, García Torres presented a working version of "Have You Ever Seen the Snow", as part of the "Artists on Artists" series at Dia Art Foundation in New York. The lecture became latter a slide show piece presented afterwards at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, and latter became a fundamental part of the artist contribution to Documenta 13, Kassel.
"Five Feet High and Rising", is a work in the form of a lecture where García Torres tracks a somewhat esoteric cultural history of rivers. The piece, which also exist as an installation presented at the Sharjah Biennial in the United Arab Emirates in 2017, chart and merge different stories of movement, migration, and fragmentation while drifting through a combination of images and popular music that make reference to small and large waterways. In 2013, García Torres gave a short lecture where he argued against the use of the word "Latinamerica", in the context of the Art Basel Miami Beach.
As his participation to "An Inquiry: Modes of Encounter", an exhibition at the Times Museum, in Guangzhou, China, in 2019, the artist wrote "If Only I'd Thought of The Right Words" a monologue for an Artificial Intelligence character. The project was made in collaboration with the Chinese tech company Sogou. In the video piece, the avatar speaks randomly as if she has been left alone at a live TV news broadcast.
Other lectures that are considered works of art are "Like You, I Dig, I Dig In, I Dig Into, and I Dig Up Art Too", presented at the a LUMA Westbau symposium in Zürich, Switzerland and "Practical Demonstrations of Unique Quantic Systems As Mechanism to Produce Resonances in the Terrestrial Atmosphere", a "performatic lecture" made in collaboration with artist and musician Sol Oosel, and presented at the Torcuato di Tella University, in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Museographic essays In 2014 García Torres started creating what he called "museographical essays"; large installations in which a very diverse number of objects and media are included. "R.R. and the Expansion of the Tropics" is a narrative of the last three decades in South Florida, combining elements on social issues in the area, climate change, and Robert Rauschenberg. An earlier work of this type was his contribution to the 2014 Berlin Biennial, for which he displayed a large number of elements in an underground room at the Ethnologistches Museum surrounding the work and legacy of musician Conlon Nancarrow. "Sounds Like Isolation to Me" also included a collaboration with Berlin pianist Nils Frahm.
"The Party Was Yesterday (But Nobody Remembers It)" was an atmospheric display created by García Torres where the memory of the events that conformed the little-known Mexican Museo Dinámico (Dynamic Museum -not to be confused with the initiative of the same name in Dakar, Senegal) were recovered throughout the display of newly created original artworks and documents from the time. During the 1960s, Manuel Larrosa and Miguel Salas Anzures created what is claimed to be the first contemporary museum in México, transforming a series of nonconformist houses designed by Larrosa into ephemeral exhibition spaces. The exhibitions included both, interventions of avant-garde theater and film directors of the time like Alejandro Jodorowsky and Juan Jose Gurrola as well as works by prominent artists like Manuel Felguerez, Lilia Carrillo and Vicente Rojo.
For "The Strange Things My Eyes See" the artist created an exhibition in the ruins of a utopian building designed and built in the 1980s by Agustín Hernández Navarro in Santa María Ahuacatitlán, México. Upon entering the derelict space, visitors encountered a scene with a number of objects, elements that had originally been part of the building itself, transformed into bronze. Regarded by the artist as "a conceptual framework", it constituted a subtle intervention that suspended notions of perception and the laws of physics. The project prompted the German gallery neugerriemschneider to open a temporary satellite space in México.
Music Although he does not consider himself a composer, music has had a recurrent presence in García Torres’ practice over the past two decades. According to Caroline Dumalin he "uses sound to transmit ideas, and also examines its circulation, exploring the social and geopolitical circumstances that have influenced its particular resonance in a given time and place." In 2004 he published "I Promise Every Time" –a collaboration with Mexican musician Mario López Landa, which was released by White Cube Gallery as a CD. It is the musical version of an older work, which consists of a written vow in which the artist pledged to "do his best as an artist".
From then on, he went on to collaborate with a long list of musicians, in order to record music for films and installations, often taking the role of lyricist and producer. Some of the García Torres’ works that feature original music are "Tea", "Je ne sais si c'en est la cause", "The Day Mankind Faded Away", "The Disjunction of Time"', "Il auriat bien pu le premettre aussi" and "Silence's Wearing Thin Here". Some works that include several tracks each have been published as EPs or LPs: "Um Cabo La, Um Porto Ca" (2013), "The Schlieren Plot" (2015), "We Make the Weather" (2014) and "Silence's Wearing Thin Here" (2018).