Published in Fillip 11 (April 2010): 36-39
36

Jamie Hilder

In his two slide installations Whatever Doesn't
Kill YouMakes You Stronger (2007) and Je ne
sais si e'en la cause (2009), Mario Garda Tor-

the island saw the beginning ofthe Greek State and,
with it, the birth ofseveral modern institutions. /
Among them was the Archaeology Museum which
displays some ofthe archaeologicalfindings ofSyros.
/ 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.
As writing, separate from the slides, which

res documents works that had previously been
inadequately documented: Martin Kippenberger's
Museum ofModern 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

are primarily snapshots of the town of Syros and
its surroundings, the passage moves too quickly
between the development of a nation-state, its
modern institutions (one institution in particular),
and a convenient discovery of a modern art museum (the museum Torres went to Syros in order
to visit, which seems hardly as serendipitous as
"bumping into" implies). The contingencies of the
repeated "coulds" serve to weaken the passage,
as if there were ample opportunity to not see the
modern art museum as an archaeological discovery, or that the discovery could potentially add
nothing to an interrogation of how culture is discussed. If this is Torres's position on history-that
in order to subvert the putative authority of art
historical discourse one might instead concentrate
on vicissitudes or an individual's poetic experience
of space-I think he might be both overestimating the immovability of institutionalized historical
discourse and naively valourizing the subject who
attempts to escape that discourse. Challenges to
history are not as rare as his project assumes, nor
are they automatically beneficial.
The narrative in Je ne sais si e'en la cause comes
primarily via a song that accompanies two slide
projections. A single black-and-white slide of a
resort swimming pool on a tropical coastline, with
two sunbathers conversing by the pool, fills one
wall, while a series of colour images of Daniel Buren's dilapidated murals and mosaics on small bungalows and hotel walls that appear half destroyed,
half neglected, is projected adjacently. The scene
depicted in both projections, though separated by
almost fifty years, is the Grapetree Bay Hotel on
the US Virgin Island of St. Croix. Buren received
the commission to decorate the resort shortly after
he graduated from the Ecole Nationale Superieure
des Metiers d'Art, Paris, in 1960. Buren's family

Reading
Mario Garcia Torres
at the Berkeley Art Museum

37

had a business relationship with the resort owner's
lawyer, Thibault de Saint Phalle, who was responsible for much of the legal and financial manoeuvring required for the resort to open.
The song begins with a man's voice, speaking
English in a somewhat dubious French accent,
giving a nostalgic account of The Grapetree Bay
Hotel and its difficult past. The writing is again
in the lyrical tourist brochure idiom, with some
subtle translation difficulties: On the southeastern coast ofSt. Croix is what once was called The
Grapetree Bay Hotel. Its remains have decayed over
the years, the decades. ... The Grapetree Bay was
part ofthe new continental enthusiasm [pronounced
''en-TOO-zee-azm"}; one could say that the story of
the hotel is surrounded by deceptions and disappointments. Even before it opened its doors in the early 60S,
the enterprise was already the motive oflegal and
economic disputes.
The voice goes on to describe the current
state of the resort, again combining superficial
socioeconomic facts about St. Croix, such as the
devastation wrought by Hurricane Hugo in 1989,
with an account of how a visitor, who we can only
assume is Torres, feels in the space of the abandoned resort. It ends with an allusion to Buren's
murals and mosaics, standing witness, like the
building that now occupies the space of Kippenberger's MOMAS, to a march of history bent on
ignoring them.
When the voice finishes, a drum beat comes
full into the front of the mix, and the organ, which
had been in the background, intensifies. A woman's
voice begins singing in French about feeling unsettled while working in an odd place; the lyrics are
based on a letter Buren wrote upon returning to St.
Croix in 1965 to complete the works, where he was
confronted by works of his with which he could no
longer identify. This is part of the popular history
of the murals and mosaics, that the first works represent a younger, more naive Buren who was trying
to combine his Western influences, like Picasso or
Matisse, with the Mexican muralists he had discovered in school. The later pieces departed from these
concerns and are less figurative; some critics argue
that the iconic stripes Buren is known most for are
identifiable in embryo in this second batch.
Torres decided to produce a song and an
album cover for the piece upon discovering an

album featuring the steel band musician Pedrito
Altieri that the hotel produced as part of its
promotional campaign. He enlisted his friend,
the musician Mario L6pez Landa, to compose it,
while he wrote the voice passage and the lyrics.
Torres describes the record as an attempt to promote the hotel in its current, run-down condition:
a reaction to the Altieri record but also an updating of it, replacing the good-time tone of Calypso
with the rhetoric of failure and discomfiture.'
While the lyrics certainly fulfill that function,
the music seems to quote more from Chicago in
the 90S and a lounge music-like contemporary
R&B-a Latin bistro-rock-funk hybrid-than any
current Caribbean music. Although in the sense
of failure and invasion, Torres and Lopez's tourist
rock might be a better fit for addressing the resortification of the Caribbean-a process that accelerated around the time of the development of the
Grapetree Bay Hotel-by positioning it firmly in
the global cultural banal. The album's back cover
has a picture of Lopez and the singer, wearing
clothes with subtle vertical stripes, after Buren's
trademark style, in the compositional equivalent
of a wink.
Critics and curators repeatedly describe Torres's practice as research-based, which is a problem. When curator Elizabeth Thomas writes in
her description of Je ne sais . .. that "Mario Garcia
Torres has spent years researching these murals,
piecing together the facts from the biography of
de Saint Phalle and from Buren monographs, and
traveling to the abandoned site to experience and
document the murals firsthand and trace anecdotal information about the hotel's troubled history,"2
perhaps what she should have said is that Torres
"performed research over a period of years." The
difference is slight, but significant. Spending years
researching implies a rigour that I'm sure not even
Torres would argue is present in his work, while
researching over a period of years fits more with
his type of quiet and persistent interest. Of course,
the suggestion of an intensive research practice
provides the work with a greater weight and is
therefore appealing to a market looking for an
intellectual return alongside the monetary, especially within a project that foregrounds its anxiety
over academic art-historical discourse. But maybe
"investigative" or "explorational" should replace

38

"research-based" in reference to Torres's work.
Torres likely did a lot of reading and writing
and contacted anyone he could who might have
information about the histories that interest him.
The Some ReferenceMaterial referred to in the title
of the Matrix exhibition is a small vitrine containing the Pedrito Altieri album and a cocktail stir
stick, plate, and room service slip from the hotel.
As evidence of research, however, they contribute
very little to the project beyond a confirmation
of proximity, if not to the hotel itself-the photographs do that-then to somebody who had a
relationship close enough to the resort to hold on
to its physical remnants.
The pieces risk becoming accounts of Torres's
working vacations, performed against the backdrop of Kippenberger and Buren's working vacations. If Torres means to critique the artist-hero's
disengagement from the more temperate climes
they found themselves in by replicating it, I think
the tactic fails. His description of the interactions with the people of Syros, who were kind but
generally uninterested in MOMAS, make it seem
like the island is a space made for the ephemeral and geared toward the itinerant subject. His
descriptions of the beaches as "blissfully underdeveloped," or of the original MOMAS, which was a
building which had stood unfinished for approximately twenty-five years, as "located picturesquelyon an empty lot," or even his account of how
Kippenberger became intrigued by the site while
fiying into Syros's small airport-that infamous
view from above--are presented without irony or
concern. If Torres is unconcerned with the artists'
negotiation of the local, and potentially vice versa,
I think he has missed an opportunity. The work
becomes a fetishized object for its excavation of
past objects to fetishize-non-canonical projects
by canonical artists. Galleries and audiences
have been and will continue to be receptive, but
the work is not necessarily successful as an idea.
Torres has previously addressed the anxieties of
the colonizing forces of art in Carta Abierta a Dr.
At/ (Open Letter to Dr. AtI) (200S), a short film he
showed at the 2007 Venice Biennale. In this piece,
in which a fictional letter Torres wrote to the
deceased Mexican landscape painter Gerardo Murillo, or Dr. Atl, appears subtitled over footage of a
Mexican valley near Guadalajara, he again uses a

sentimental, lyrical tone to imagine the effect of a
rumoured construction of a Guggenheim franchise museum at the crest of the valley. A similar
self-reflection and concern for the ramifications of
art tourism, or artists' tourism, does not appear in
the works he made in other geographies. While an
acknowledgment of the local impact of economies
of visiting or invasion need not be a requirement
for any work produced within a foreign space, the
absence of any attempt to understand the space
beyond its role as a curious backdrop for overlooked artwork seems to border on the cynical.
Positioning it against the contested terrain of art
historical research does a disservice to the tradition of social art history. The idea of collapsed
or circular time-present in the form of the slide
carousels, vinyl record, and the revisitation and,
in a sense, remounting of previous work-is not
enough to acquit the work from its responsibility to the historical, however tired a concept that
might be in contemporary art discourse over the
past decade.
I submit that Torres's work in Whatever
Doesn't Kill You ... and Je ne sais ... is not so much
research as a challenge to research; the projects
of Kippenberger and Buren are likely to reach a
wider audience and make a different impression
through their display in a narrativized gallery
installation than in a critical art journal. But the
works are still in need of analysis and development, and future art historical projects will owe a
debt to Torres. In that way, both pieces function
poetically, as I think Torres assumes they do, but
as a heuristic. In that way, their deficiencies-the
laissez-faire approach to language and images, and
the neglect of all social characteristics embedded
within the history of the pieces-are even more
productive than their achievements.
About the Author
Jamie Hilder is a Vancouver-based artist and critic whose
work addresses issues surrounding performance, urbanism,
and economics.

Cf. Mario Garda 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.
Notes begin on page 115.

39

in Europe in the beginning 01 the twentieth century and spread throughout the
world, reaching Latin America in the
late 19405. In Brazil, this international
trend was represented by Max Bill's
1. Chris Fitzpatrick, "Some ReferConcrelism, which was Characterized
ence Material: Mario Garda Torres in
by an e~treme concern about the forma l
Conversation," Art in America, hllp:J1
elements of the artwork. On Brazilartinamericamagazine.comlfeaturesl
ian constructivism, see Aracy Amaral,
mario-Garcia-torres - bampfa.
2. Elizabeth Thomas, "Je ne sllis si c'en
Projeto Construtivo Brasi/eiro na Arte,
t~t962, exh. cat. (Rio de Janeirol
est la cause, WIlat Doesn't Kill You Makes
You Stronger, and Some Reference MateSio Paulo: Museu de Arte Moderna of
Rio de Janei ro/Pinacoteca do Estado
rial," e.hibition pamphlet essay, Berkede Sio Paulo, 1971).
ley Art Museum I Pacific Film Arch ive,
4. Then, the crilic wrote the essay ~On
Berkeley, 2009, n. pag,
the Affective Nature 01 the Work 01 Art,"
which became extremely important
for Brazilian abstractionism. On this
Negative Space
article, see Mlirio Pedrosa, Artel Formll
e Personlliidade (Sio Paulo; Editora
Kair6s, 1979).
,. Susan Hiller, The Provisional Texture of
5. Lygia Clark, lygia Clark, exh cat (BarRe.tlity, ed. Alexandra M. Kokoli (Zurich:
celona/ Marseille/ Porto/ Brosselsl Rio
JRP Ringer and Oijoo: Less Presses du
de Janeiro: Antoni llpies Foundation/
rll!el, 2008), St.
1. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Crelltion of tile
World, trans. Frant;ois Ralloul (Albany:
MAC Contemporary Galleriesl Serralves
2. Ibid., 33.
3. Thanks to Kristina Lee Podesva lor
State University 01 New York Press,
Foundationl Pallais de Beaux Arts Socisuggesting this term.
2007), SO. See also Ralloul's introducetyl Pat;o Imperial: 1997}, 72.
4. Both journals are print-based, bUI see tion to Nancy's texl.
6. Ibid., 140.
hUp:J/themock.co.uk and http://materi 2. Gregg Perkins, "Josiah McEl heny,"
1. Ibid., 121.
8. Lygia Clark, "Nostalgia 01 the Body,"
alpress.org for further information.
Art Forum (2006), http://artforum.com/
October, no. 69 (Summer 199<1), 99. The
5. Hiller, The Provisional Texture of
archive/id"12036.
full instructions are as lollow$: Make
Rel/lity,46.
3. Here,l am thinking of theosophist
yourself a Trailing: you take the mnd of
6. Ibid., 55.
thought as il was mined by key modernist l igures such as Wassity Kandinpaper wrapp~ IIrround II book, you cut
7. Ibid., 2"6.
8. Thinking About Art: Conversations
sky, Piet Mondrian, Kazimir Malevkh,
it open, you twist it, lind you glue it back
together so liS to produce a MObius strip.
with Susan Hiller, ed. Barbara Einzig
and Joseph Beuys, as well as the
(Manchester: Manchester University
Take a pair of SC;55ors, stick one point into
importance 01 Zen Buddhism for John
Press, 1996). Ei nzig's volume is a useCage, Marina Abramovic, and others.
the surface and cut continuously along
tile length of tile strip. Take care not to
fu l resource lor thinking through new
taKonomies 01 Hiller's artistic producconverge with the preexisting cut-which
tion In which her writings figure. This is Rena ta Rodrigues da Silva
will cause the band to separate into two
evident Ihrough the book's tra nscripInterdisciplinarity and Participation
pieces. WIlen you have gone the circuit of
in Contemporary Brazilian Art
tions of sl ide presentalions, such as
tile strip, irs up to roo whether to cut to
the left or to the right of tile cut you've /11"The Dream and the Word" and "The
Word and the Dream" (both 1993),
ready made. The idea of choice is capital.
I. See Ferreira Guliar, "Neaconcrete
The unique meaning of this experience is
whiCh can be usefully compared to
Manifesto," Jorna/ do Brllsil, March
in the act of doing it. The work is YOUflt("t
other artists' use 01 slide, overhead pro- 22,1959. An English translation 01 this
jector, and PowerPoi nl sequences in art document was published under the
IIlone. To the extent that you cut tile strip,
it refines lind redoubles itself into interlacworks (Robert Smithson through Janet
title "1959: Neo-concrel ist Manifesto,~
ings. At the end tile path is ${j narrow that
Cardiff/George Bures Miller to leckey,
October 69 (Summer 1994), 91-95.
you can't open it further. It's tile end of
Wilt Holder, and Alexandre Singh would 2. The contri bution of Neoconcretism
be a usefullhough hugely partial sl artto contemporary art shows that critical
the trail."
ing point on this lopic). Possibilities lor
discourses based on traditional divi9. Ibid., 99.
these new ta.onomi es also emerge in
sions between centre and periphery,
10. Ibid., 99.
metropolis and hinterland, first and
Thinking About Art Ihrough the ample
11. Ibid., lOa.
illUSlration of Hiller's lalks and essays
third worlds are no longer valid. Thus,
12. Waldemar Cordeiro, "Teoria e Prlilica
wilh writing-including art works.
Ihis contribution should be addressed
do Concretismo Carioca," Amaral,
9. Hiller's The Last Silent Mov/e {20071
by a new theoretical approach to the
Projeto Cons/rutiva Brllsileiro na Arte,
1950-1962,134.
resulted from research in archives of
problem of culture, one that is pro13. Ferreira Gullar, "Lygia Clark: A
e.tinCi and endangered languages. The posed in postcolonial studies.
3. In this article, the term "construcRadical Experience (1954-1958)," The
soundtrack of the "film" comprised a
Neoconcrete Experiment-A Watershed
sequence of archival recordings, whilst tivism" means the general trend 01
while subtitles at the foot 01 the always
geometric abSlractionism .that was born in Art (Sio Paulo: Cosac Naify Edit;6es,
Jamie Hilder
Reading Mario Garcia Torres
at the Berkeley Art Museum

black screen offered English \fanslations or noted when no translation
was available. A further text in the top
lelt corner identilied the language in
block capita ls and noted its status, for
example, "(severely endangered)." For
il s exhibition at London's Mall's Gallery
in July 2008, the gallery was turned
into a miniature cinema, with rows of
seats and visitors allowed in only at the
commencement of each twenty-minute
screening. The work was shown alongside twenty-lour etchings, each derived
from oscilloscope traces of a voice on
the soundtrack.
10. Ibid., 115.
11. Ibid., m.
12. l bid., 2"9.

115