In fall 2016, I invited artist Mario García Torres to present his work at the Walker Art Center in what would be his first survey exhibition in a US museum. But it wouldn’t be our first curatorial project together; we had worked on a smaller solo show in Italy in 2010. Responding to my invitation, he asked for my thoughts about him. I responded: not only did I think he deserves such a show, as recognition of all his great work over the years, but added I that the Walker belongs to him as much as his work belongs to the Walker.
García Torres’s works often delve into the history of Conceptual art—its gestures, figures, and projects—to uncover obscure facts, live testimonials, and other narratives not listed in official accounts. Appropriation, narrative, repetition, and reenactment are just a few of the strategies he employs to present his findings, which often exhibit a blurred division between truth and fiction. All these characteristics make him extremely good fit with the Walker’s history and collection.
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Installation view of Mario García Torres: Illusion Brought Me Here. Photo: Bobby Rogers, Walker Art Center
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Installation view of Mario García Torres: Illusion Brought Me Here. Photo: Bobby Rogers, Walker Art Center
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Installation view of Mario García Torres: Illusion Brought Me Here. Photo: Bobby Rogers, Walker Art Center
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Installation view of Mario García Torres: Illusion Brought Me Here. Photo: Bobby Rogers, Walker Art Center
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Installation view of Mario García Torres: Illusion Brought Me Here. Photo: Bobby Rogers, Walker Art Center
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Installation view of Mario García Torres: Illusion Brought Me Here. Photo: Bobby Rogers, Walker Art Center
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Installation view of Mario García Torres: Illusion Brought Me Here. Photo: Bobby Rogers, Walker Art Center
In June 2017, Curatorial Fellow Fabián Leyva-Barragán joined the team. The three of us had intense conversations, eventually ending up with a very ambitious project that would ultimately encompass the Walker’s galleries, Cinema, and the Bentson Mediatheque, a self-select space for viewing moving image works. The exhibition presents a selection of 45 works created over the past two decades, as well as site-specific installations conceived for the occasion.
There are no better words than the artist’s own to describe what Illusion Brought Me Here is all about:
Imagine for a moment this is not an exhibition and these are not works of art but rather objects that appear, randomly, out of negotiations between interests and desires.
In Spanish, my first language, the word ilusión has more than one meaning. It suggests a misinterpretation of the senses: “a deceptive appearance or perception.” But the word can also be used to relate to a sentiment of hope, to favorable expectations. Ilusión me trajo aquí (Illusion Brought Me Here) could then be both the possibility of a fortunate occurrence happening here and a misleading view, setup, or mirage that prompted a personal journey.
For the past twenty years, I have been questioning the idea that time and memory, beginnings and endings, arrivals and departures, and the very essence of the artist’s role in society are stable concepts. At the core of Illusion Brought Me Here (or in between works, to be more precise) is a debate between my own impulses—forces that make energy shift from one world to the other. Impulse is what has made me move between places, to act on a matter during my time as an artist.
As much as I would love to describe every single work on view, I realize I can only take up so much of your time. So I will focus only on the new commissions, which in many ways best reflect both the very close nature of the collaboration between the artist and myself and García Torres’s approach to artistic production.
The conceptual centerpiece of the exhibition is a newly commissioned sound piece that functions as a backdrop for the installation as well as a unifying device integral to the notion of the “retrospective.” Silence’s Wearing Thin Here is an audio product composed of sound fragments that the artist selected from a range of multimedia works he’s made over the past two decades. The artwork offers, as the artist puts it, an “atmospheric road trip,” which becomes the context for an abstract discussion between two female characters. During their conversation, ideas about time, memory, and images are intermixed with ambient sounds and music, written by the artist and produced with collaborators. García Torres considers this creation to be at the core of the exhibition as it aims to provide an overarching perspective on concepts discussed throughout his work.
The second work is deeply rooted in the Walker’s past. During several site visits, García Torres dug into the Walker’s institutional history seeking hidden stories—and finding a real treasure. In the Walker Archives, he came across a photograph of the museum’s 1927 building during its demolition in 1969 and took particular notice of one person in the picture, Louise Walker McCannel (1915–2012), who was there not only observing but also filming the event. The granddaughter of T. B. Walker, founder of the Walker Art Center, McCannel used a Super-8 camera to capture the demolition of the Venetian-style building from the moment the wrecking ball first hit the structure. García Torres wanted to know more about her.
In conversation with Jill Vuchetich, the Walker’s Head of Archives and Library, we learned of McCannel’s critical role the Center’s history: along with her brother, Hudson, they became the caretakers of the vast and varied art collection amassed by T.B. Walker. McCannel was appointed director of the Walker Art Galleries, and while Hudson left for New York in 1938, she stayed to help facilitate the gallery’s 1939 transition to the Walker Art Center. She worked at the new institution in many capacities: as director of the Children’s Gallery, editor of the Magazine of Art, and assistant curator.
Over the course of several months of research we discovered that, among her professional endeavors, she had an artistic talent as a filmmaker. Ruth Hodgins, the Walker’s Bentson Archivist and Assistant Curator of Moving Image, was independently researching McCannel’s films, and she found that all of them, more than 60 titles, were housed at the Chicago Film Archives. While browsing through them we found many family films but also a vast amount of footage taken throughout Minneapolis documenting social and political changes, including protests and other public actions. We immediately realized that she was an avid filmmaker as well as an advocate for cultural and social issues.
Among her films, we found four reels documenting the demolition of the Walker Art Center, and this material looked to be the same footage she was shooting when she was photographed in the picture that so fascinated García Torres. After contacting McCannel’s family, and with the total support of one of her daughters, Teri Motley, we were generously granted the rights that allowed for García Torres to use this footage for his project.
Creating a new artwork, he edited the footage into a video that melded McCannel’s films with his own text and sound score. During our research, García Torres also became intrigued by the mystery of the wrecking ball used in 1969: where is it today? After some deep research, we finally located it—in the courtyard of Bolander, the Minneapolis-based company contracted for the demolition project.
Together, the elements of this Walker story ended up creating an entire installation, titled Goodbye, Goodbye, comprised of the edited video, a granite plinth (made from the same material from the original 1927 building’s facade), and a set of photographs and drawings documenting García Torres’s proposal for returning the wrecking ball to the Walker as its final resting place.
The third new ambitious project included the exhibition was conceived during the six months prior to the opening. In Spring 2018, the artist and I began talking in depth about the meaning of this exhibition at this stage of his life and career. On the phone one day, García Torres said that he couldn’t have made it to this point without the support of many individuals who collaborated with and supported him along the way. Was there a way to have all his collaborators be part of the exhibition? This is how we got to Illusion Brought Me Here, an augmented-reality app which shares its name with the exhibition’s title. As García Torres describes, the app aims to acknowledge the fact that works of art are not the product of one individual’s efforts but rather a combination of personal impulses and the interests and ideas of others. Within the project, he recognizes the participation of writers, curators, photographers, musicians, and gallerists who have contributed to the development of his work over time. Through the free smartphone app, these figures appear—only within the space of the exhibition galleries—as 3D holographic avatars in various locations throughout the show. Each character performs small actions, referencing a specific place or moment in time that reflects the artist’s memories: a curator moves skeptically about the gallery, a musician cleans his eyeglasses, a writer pulls out his hair.
With this project, García Torres makes visible one of the fundamental recurring statements in his career—that artworks, even if signed by one person, by him, are the result of negotiations that are much wider than his own interests. Works for García Torres are born and take shape from ideas and contexts, searches and encounters, always in conversation with someone else. For this reason, recognizing and celebrating the influence that each of the people in the app has had in his practice bear witness that all of them, like the illusion, brought him here and, in the future, will bring him elsewhere.
Afterword: While in Minneapolis for the opening of this exhibition, García Torres learned that his friend, Ernesto Adrian Garcia (aka Netito)—one of the avatars presented in the exhibition app—was tragically killed in a car accident. As with many other amazing friends and professionals we worked to realize this exhibition, without Netito—who will now live on within this work—nothing would have happened. RIP, Netito.
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