Total Recall

Mexicos Mario Garca Torres explores the strange sideroads and deadends of art history

In September 1969, the American magazine ArtNews published a cryptic feature about a young, overlooked artist named Oscar Neuestern. It described the rare amnesic condition he suffered, which prevented him from remembering his work from any previous day, and so opening his practice to perpetual reinvention.

‘Why was I telling you this story?’ asks Mario García Torres, frowning, as if his own memory was suddenly failing him. The Mexican artist is gearing up for his first US survey at Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center. It features some 35 works – old and new – spanning video, photography, installation and performance. ‘I’m happy not remembering things,’ he concludes. ‘Without memory, you can experience things in a different way,’ he says, a nod to Marcel Duchamp’s claim that he desired to live without memory.

As it turned out, Oscar Neuestern was a product of fiction – a satirical swipe at early conceptualism. García Torres stumbled across the article by chance at CalArts’ Library in Los Angeles, where he studied in the early 2000s. And it had a profound effect. ‘I started to realise what the power of fiction was,’ says the artist, now 43. Soon, he would turn the anecdote into art: The Transparencies of the Non-act (2007), a silent visual work made of black and white slides, questioning the role of artists in the building of history.