“THINGS tend to get lost – disappearing between movements and changes.” Thus states a short strip of fading telefax paper exhibited behind glass in the gloomy first room of TBA21’s current show in Vienna’s Augarten, and thus commences one of the most intricate, playful and rewarding art experiences you can have this year in Europe: An Arrival Tale by Mario García Torres. Europe’s the word here, as this show is one of the very few unpatronising reactions to the continent’s self-proclaimed migration crisis the art world has had to offer so far. And the presentation succeeds quite effortlessly on every level, aesthetically and intellectually, but also socially and politically, where everybody else tends to drown in high drama and hysteria.
Mario García Torres
I arrive on a crisp autumn morning and cross the city on foot in order to take in the surrounding. Vienna is a place where 20th century history, migration and geopolitical interests at times loom larger than in Berlin, Paris and London together. Today, with each breath of cold air one takes in a chilly dose of anxiety, preoccupation and uncertainty in equal measure.
Watching the famous ferris wheel doing its rounds as it has done now for the better part of half a century since the end of the war, one can be sure that Harry Lime’s latest real-life incarnation is either having a ride right now, or isn’t far off at least. Only that the profiting and bargaining with displacement, migration and misery these days is much more an overtly political strategy of those in power than the black market penicillin cutting of a private rogue back then.
Mario García Torres. Still from The Way They Looked at Each Other.
Commisisoned by Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection, Vienna
Each story comes with a frame, a narrative situation, and in this case it is the intimacy of the Augarten location that lends Torres the perfect setting. The windows’ brightness is toned down to atmospheric leafy warm twilight by tinted foil, resulting in something that resembles the classic stage design of La Boheme at the Royal Opera House. This similarity, coincidence or not, becomes uncanny when half-way through Torres’s major new commission, The Way They Looked at Each Other, the narrator reflects on the operatic, or filmic effect the sight of rivers have on him. And just then, ushered in by a distant chord from the off, the rather perfect curation of this exhibition makes a subtle entrance. It may only be a split second the sound hovers in the first room, but what it creates is nothing short of audio-visual magic.
When the narration of the video works grinds to a halt and the visual speed is reduced to zero, creating a lingering still image, these few shy notes of music draw up a bridge to the next room, from where the resounding of Conlon Nancarrow’s machine music already answers back with a foreshadowing of things to come. At this point it becomes clear that An Arrival Tale is not one, but many, interwoven stories, fragments, memories and reflections, circling the same topic and crossing the seemingly known territory repeatedly from new angles and perspectives until it becomes foreign land again, ready for yet new discoveries.
Mario García Torres. Shar-e Nawa Wanderings (A Film Treatment) 2006. 19 sheets of thermal paper.
Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection Vienna
An Arrival Tale, the artist declares for the visitor’s handout, uses his own works from the TBA21 collection to argue that the space of arrival, the space where one can reinvent oneself, could be an interesting one and one that has historically been a space to thrive. This is a far cry from the hotbed of political propaganda that recently has claimed its ground across the continent and further afield. It’s a sign of the artist’s, but equally the art foundation’s vision and sense of direction that they have managed to pull off an installation that utterly and completely cuts out the useless jargon of politics and media and to refocus on the individual.
Mario García Torres. Tea 1391. Single-channel 35 mm film transferred to HD Video, color, sound.
Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection Vienna
Only by giving room to the smallest detail, by following down the path laid out by a personal story, the viewer can ignore the noise, the disturbances of the overblown generalisations, and get back to where art has its essence: the interest in the human condition. If this wasn’t so rare these days, it wouldn’t come as a surprise. Since Francesca von Habsburg took over the country’s, and one of the continents foremost art collections in 2002, it has been transformed into a driving force of contemporary culture. Challenging the idea of what a museum, as well as an art collection can, or should be, is high up on the agenda. And challenge they do.
The previous project at Augarten, Olafur Eliasson’s Green Light, has been a daring move of positioning an art project straight against the passivity and lethargy of the political mainstream. Functioning at the border of what’s been legally possible, explains curator Daniela Zyman, they restlessly worked with migrants and local communities to create both a metaphorical and a tangible object of resistance. Compared to such single-minded and political proposition, Mario García Torres is a jack of all trades of story telling, and his exhibition is best thought of as one of the weird and wonderful Bolano novels in three parts.
Mario García Torres. The Way They Looked at Each Other.
Commisisoned by Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection, Vienna
The Way they Looked at Each Other makes for an opener as strong as you could wish for. It is hypnotic, witty, and so well paced and meticulously constructed, one can see the long way this has come from the much earlier video Tea, which is shown in the last room. The homage to maverick composer Nancarrow in the mid-section is unexpected, and you need to invest time to make it work. Once it does, it’s rather fantastic. What starts with a small doubt, ends in the realisation that hardly anything in this documentation is real, yet all of it could be. It’s a game of possibilities and imagination.
The snippets of telefax paper in the front room are tying it all together. Torres’s faxes are a long series of messages he addressed to Alighiero Boetti during his search for the Italian artist’s former hotel in Kabul. The One, as the hotel used to be called, did actually exist, and at some point must have played host to the creation of some of Boetti’s most famous works. Yet where documentation ends and where the tale begins is notoriously hard to tell in Torres rather unique approach to artistic narration. The late Boetti never was to receive the snippets of writing that Torres sent from a copy shop in Afghanistan while documenting his artistic gesture.
Mario García Torres, An Arrival Tal. Tigris Baghdad by Nik Wheeler 1970s
The lure of the trope of the lost hotel reminds of Murakami’s Dance Dance Dance. There is a shared method here, as it is a novelist’s fascination of fabricating traces of evidence that underscores the artistic gesture throughout the exhibition and makes it the addictive visual road trip that it is. By the end of it, viewers will leave with a range of good stories, and questions worth pondering.
One of them is Torres’s own introduction, “What are the actual conditions and what are the dreams, what are the politics housed in the bodies of the people moving, what is left behind and what is met anew?” Coming back to Harry Lime, who said, up on the wheel: “Nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don’t. Why should we?” Because, one might say, the story of each and everyone is a tale of an arrival, somewhere.
by Oliver Krug
An Arrival Tale by Mario García Torres is on view at TBA21, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Foundation, Atelier Augarten, Scherzergasse 1A, 1020 Vienna, Austria, until November 21
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