Jamie Hilder
Reading Mario García Torres at the Berkeley Art Museum
- Mario García Torres: Je ne sais si c’en est la cause, What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger, and Some Reference Materials
- Berkeley Art Museum, February 22 to May 17, 2009.
In his two slide installations Whatever Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger (2007) and Je ne sais si c’en la cause (2009), Mario García Torres documents works that had previously been inadequately documented: Martin Kippenberger’s Museum of Modern Art Syros (MOMAS), a project Kippenberger created while he vacationed in Greece in the early 1990s, and the murals and mosaics Daniel Buren made at the Grapetree Bay Hotel on the US Virgin Island of St. Croix in the early 1960s. Recognizing that methods of documentation necessarily influence a work’s character, Torres inserts himself into both histories, using the process as both homage to the artists and a critique of art historical discourse. He positions his approach against that of the “institutional researcher”—the art history Ph.D. candidate or critic trying to break new ground—who has, up to this point, failed to record these significant works to an acceptable standard. The installation of Torres’s pieces evokes a didactic mood: the regular clicking sound of the projectors and the darkness of the gallery signal a space of learning to anybody who began their art history education prior to PowerPoint.
Torres attaches narratives to both pieces. In Whatever Doesn’t Kill You…, it comes in the form of subtitles on the slides describing his project in Syros: how he found a municipal wastewater treatment plant on the site where MOMAS operated and how he installed work of his own inside the plant. The account of his and Kippenberger’s work is preceded by a description of Syros that covers the bare historical facts one might find in a tourism brochure—how the main industry is ship building and textile based, how it is rumoured that the pre-Socratic thinker Pherecydes invented the sundial there—and Torres’s own observations about the island’s character. The transition between the treatment of Syros and that of MOMAS is awkward, though: In the early 1800s the island saw the beginning of the Greek State and, with it, the birth of several modern institutions. / Among them was the Archaeology Museum which displays some of the archaeological findings of Syros. / Bumping into what once was a modern art museum in these latitudes could be claimed an archaeological discovery as well. / The following tale is actually not an ancient one, as this narrative might suggest. / But one that could be telling about the way culture has been publicly discussed in the last few decades.
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About this Article
Reading Mario García Torres at the Berkeley Art Museum was first published in Fillip 11 in Spring 2010. For more articles from this issue, see the Table of Contents.
Jamie Hilder is a Vancouver-based artist and critic whose work addresses issues surrounding performance, urbanism, and economics.
Notes
The views expressed in Fillip are not necessarily those of the editorial board or the Projectile Publishing Society.
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