Meet Iñaki Bonillas edition 2009-2010: maker of circular reading situations and labyrinthine restored albums. Since the late 90s, Bonillas has combined a conceptual photographic practice with a conviction to let site and materials at hand define his artistic projects. He belongs to that strange breed of artists who mingle postproduction and a search for moments of poetic intimacy.

In a recent new commission at Mexico City's Museum of Modern Art (MAM) entitled ‘Pensamiento circular' (Circular Thought), the glass circumference of the museum's pavilion brought him to create an elegant floating circle, which functioned as support for a personal, neatly ordered anthology of about 80 poems. Each text further exemplified circularity either on a formal or metaphorical level. Bonillas's insistence on following to near exhaustion a simple rule deduced from the environment equally surfaces in his work currently on display at Mexico City's OMR gallery.
The exhibition's title, ‘La vuelta al origen', translates as either the return to the origin or the twist to the origin. Counting 16 stations, each of which located in a corner, ‘La vuelta al origen' departs from the artist's personal album of his father's exploits as bullfighter. This torero archive (dated mid 1960s) not only contains photos, but also newspaper clippings, a cassette tape, and some videos with transferred Super 8 material. Bonillas, however, does not show these authentic materials. Instead, he makes a careful selection of pieces that particularly speak to him in a personal way - for instance: a photo of his father playing the guitar, another one of his father observing the bullfight behind the ring's burladero, or a snippet of a newspaper special about Bonillas Senior's feats. The chosen photos, like the filmed footage, are amateurish and journalistic at best.

INVERSION

With this affective material in hand, Iñaki Bonillas operates rationally and brings a clearly established modus operandi full circle. In his translation process, archive fever reaches a freezing point to distill the final work. Despite his evidently personal motivation, he proposes and executes an almost tautological rule. The four media in the paternal album (newsprint, music, photography, and video) each appear four times, culminating in the 16 stations. Every station in this voyage of the son's rediscovery of his father is two-fold. One part stands in for the original document, the other one for the blueprint that created the original. The combination, however, turns the table on our regular understanding of mechanical reproduction processes. Casting himself in the role of the conservator, Bonillas makes a facsimile reproduction of the album piece. He then uses this copy as starting point for the production of a new negative. Once ready for display, the two are hung in a corner and create a mirror effect. The result: father playing guitar reflects in its negative, father's music appears to echo its re-written score, a clipping of a bullfight news-report confronts its printing plate, and a home-made moving image is coupled with the newly reconstructed Super 8 film.
Initially unaware of this process, we see a crisp, yet clearly outdated photo of the artist's youthful father and fall into assuming that the neighboring negative produced the photo. Through inverting the usual trajectory of mechanical production (from negative to positive), Bonillas creates multiple stand-ins for lost originals. He feeds his viewer the illusion of origin in a double way - genealogically and formally speaking -, and only through disbelief does the inversion become apparent. This meeting of distanced rational observation with the Telemachian son-looking-for-father narrative disables common archival nostalgia. More, intimacy now comes to the foreground in the produced material, instead of in the absent found material. Bonillas so cleverly avoids the fetishization of the ‘real' documents that fell in his hands only a few years ago. Even if the artist invokes the figure of the archeologist who creates replicas to protect the original, the true forte of this refusal is an increased attention to the mediated nature of image, text, and music as well as that of personal memory.
Not unlike other artists who came to the fore in the late 90s, Bonillas works with a wide variety of texts he encounters. While he could be responding to an archival impulse because he "assumes fragmentation as a condition not only to represent but to work through" (i.e. he does not wallow in the incoherent lacunae of the archive), the final product does not "propose new orders of affective association" as Hal Foster suggests. (1) In this case, the matière brute is not kitsch, counter-culture or culture's forgotten black sheep, but random collections of texts or images that, mostly via familial connections, have entered his life. Previously, Bonillas focused, for instance, on the detailed diaries and photos of his grandfather J.R. Plaza, some of which was shown last year at the Kunstmuseum Basel and the Malmö Konsthall.

APPROPRIATION

Bonillas's album search also evidences a connection with earlier appropriation practices. In fact, with ‘La vuelta al origen' Bonillas literalizes Sherrie Levine's appropriative strategies. Whereas Levine partook of a movement that undermined questions of (paternal) authorship and originality, Bonillas appropriates someone else's image, text, or music to expose something quite distinct. On the one hand, he showcases a fascination with the legends of the fatherly torero figure, and, on the other, foregrounds our thwarted cultural relation with mechanical reproduction.

I have yet to figure out how Bonillas can circle obsessively around his personal archive without inflating the figure of the artist himself. He so continues to welcome the viewer who is less interested in the personal telos of the story. Bonillas, perhaps unknowingly, is a master in gracefully pulling the carpet from under our perceptual feet. The rest of this year presents several opportunities to experience such a Bonillas moment in Europe - ranging from Art Cologne and Art Basel (as part of the specially selected ‘Statements'), to Barcelona (Projecte SD) and Stuttgart (Hermes und der Pfau).

Sarah DEMEUSE
lives in New York. She has a PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures from UC Berkeley and is currently enrolled at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College.

(1) Hal Foster: ‘An Archival Impulse' October 110, Fall 2004, p 21.