Reference Material: Mario Garcia Torres in Conversation

By Chris Fitzpatrick 4/13/09

Berkeley San Francisco-based independent curator, writer, and musician Chris Fitzpatrick met with Mario García Torres at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive to discuss his current solo exhibition, Je ne sais si c'en est la cause, What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Stronger, and Some Reference Material, which remains on view through May 17, 2009.

CHRIS FITZPATRICK: First, let's set the scene: In the entrance to the Matrix galleries at BAM/PFA, a vitrine contains documents and other substantive materials that informed your research, as well as an exhibition poster and vinyl record displayed on the wall. The entire space is filled with sound from a record player in the proceeding darkened room, visible in the light emitted by Je ne sais si c'en est la cause (2009), a dual 35mm slide projection on two different walls. A larger single 35mm slide projection, What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Stronger (2007), can be seen in the backroom at the far end of the galleries, announced by the corresponding poster in the entryway. All of these works center on two relatively obscure art-historical narratives: Daniel Buren's murals at The Grapetree Bay Hotel in St. Croix, damaged in Hurricane Hugo, and Martin Kippenberger's the Museum of Modern Art, Syros, now a waste treatment plant. How did you become interested in these particular subjects?


MARIO GARCIA TORRES: I guess the output of my work is a confluence of my general interests and situations I've found myself in. Both the work of Kippenberger and that of Buren have intrigued me at different times. Besides Kippenberger's critical position towards art institutions, I've been interested in his enterprise in Syros for a long time, which until recently was largely undocumented. The discussions around this institution fascinated me; I think Kippenberger's casual take on what a museum and its program are and could be is still very viable, as more massive and over-defined museums are being built. That's why when I was invited to do a project based in Athens I became curious about trying to get first hand information on Kippenberger's initiative. My desire to actually try to at least experience the site started to seem a possibility. In the case of Buren's project, it was a text he wrote a few years ago, where he acknowledged the influence of the Mexican modern muralists on his in-situ ideas, that made me reconsider the context of those early works.

 

CF: Was Buren's text also the impetus for the record you produced with Mario López Landa? One of the documents on display in the vitrine is a 12" record titled "Sundown at Grapetree Bay with Pedrito Altieri and His Steel Band" from 1962. How does your record relate to Altieri's? Did you intend for the new recording to function as a sort of soundtrack to the exhibition as a whole?

MGT: The song in the vinyl is an essential part of Je ne sais... and it definitely came about in reaction to Pedrito Altieri's record. It's a strategy I've used before-and in a certain way I explain this through my work-where I use a tactic from the past and try to overturn it with a different purpose. Altieri actually played at the Grapetree Bay, and they recorded him and his band to promote the hotel when it was properly functioning. The initial idea of our record-the music is actually by Mario López Landa-was to ‘promote' a different stage of the same context. The song tells my take on the story of the hotel in spoken word and uses a letter that Buren wrote while working in the Virgin Islands as its lyrics. It was for us a way to try and create a certain atmosphere celebrating both the rhetoric of failure surrounding the story of the hotel and the career defining moment that Buren was in at the time.