ART CITIES:Tokyo-Mario García Torres
Mario García Torres describes himself as a conceptual artist who makes work about the history of conceptual art. He uses film, photography, slide projection, sound, text, and video to expose modernist myths, deconstruct art-world icons, and reveal the manufactured nature of supposedly universal truths. As he explains, “My work doesn’t really become a remake of the conceptual story but more like a second rehearsal”.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Taka Ishii Gallery Archive
Mario García Torres’ solo exhibition “The Space We’ve Got (a Proposal for the 10th Tokyo Biennale’s Between Man and Matter)”, comprise sculpture, photography, and a sound installation, is planned as a proposal for the “10th Tokyo Biennale: Between Man and Matter” (10-3-/5/70). The Biennale strove to identify a zeitgeist among what the commissioner, Nakahara Yūsuke, described as “Forty different approaches”. What united these approaches, he posited, was a common understanding of the relationship between man and matter. Rather than using material to form an image, the artists presented their materials as if they were “Cut out from the real world”. Instead of coalescing to form an image, the work revealed the contingent relationships between matter and man, space and time, and addressed broader cultural conditions by allowing many of the artists to produce or alter their works on site in Japan in response to the local environment. The present exhibition serves to echo that notion, devised to live outside our culturally conscious frame of reference. It conceives of the world within a larger spectrum, a perspective that does not depend on the immediacy of our knowledge, but rather, that provides a space of skepticism, and eschews any insistence on explaining the world we live in. Here, artworks are smoke signals reminding us of “The space we’ve got left” to live on.
Info: Taka Ishii Gallery, 3-10-11 B1 Sendagaya Shibuya-ku, Tokyo, Duration: 31/10-28/11/15, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.takaishiigallery.com
