Anyone familiar with the temporality of trauma and the theory of repression knows that, in psychoanalysis, the second time is in fact the first. Anyone familiar with the temporality of trauma and the theory of repression knows that, in psychoanalysis, the second time is in fact the first. Jorge Jinkis, “An Intellectual Passion,” text written for the book Segunda Vez: How Masotta Was Repeated, Torpedo Books, Oslo, 2018 Second Time Around which is in fact the first Dora García Dora García Second Time Around 6 Prologue Íñigo Méndez de Vigo y Montojo Minister of Education, Culture and Sport and Government Spokesman 7 Prologue Íñigo Méndez de Vigo y Montojo The oeuvre of Dora García folds up into writing, film, installation, and performance like the pleats in a map, one that ultimately reveals the tangle of routes leading along a path of talent and innovation to her artistic discoveries. The result of this multidisciplinary atlas is a highly conceptual and metaphorical discourse that addresses issues like the artistic dimension of fiction, marginality as a form of resistance, or the symbolic logics that condition our relationship with cultural spaces and products. Along the lines of Bertolt Brecht, one of those heterodox and transgressive authors she has always admired, Dora García considers that only a critical image, with its process of representation, has any potential for transformation. In her works, the artistic device lies within the viewer’s gaze as a means of establishing an open and direct dialogue with spectators, urging them to take decisions, no matter how simple or ambiguous, which end up marking the development of this interaction. Or to put it another way, she manages to implicate them until they form part of the artwork itself. Dora García starts from the conviction that the function of art is not to give answers but to raise questions, not to please and satisfy but to move and mobilize. Her projects, which tend to have a strong metalinguistic component, can therefore often be disconcerting, even disturbing, since they confront us with complex problematics without any indication from the artist of the position we should adopt. This puts us in a “state of perplexity,” which, in the artist’s own words, helps to “make perception more intense” and forces us to resituate our gaze. Pervaded by an unrestrainable narrative urge that largely derives from her insatiable reading, her oeuvre revolves around the impossibility of apprehending reality, exploring and showing up the potentials and limitations of the fictional strategies we devise to palliate that lack. It is a lack that constitutes us as subjects, as the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan suggests. This author, like the aforementioned Brecht or the Irish writer James Joyce, has played a key role in her career. Dora García Second Time Around 8 The exhibition dedicated to her work at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía takes its title from one of her most recent projects, Segunda Vez (Second Time Around), a series of short films in which the figure of the Argentine intellectual Oscar Masotta serves as a starting point for an exploration of the relationship between art, psychoanalysis, and politics. Opting for a dynamic and transversal expository discourse, the show presents a selection of Dora García’s work over recent years, including pieces as important for her career as Respiración artificial (Artificial Respiration),The Deviant Majority. From Basaglia to Brazil, The Inadequate, and The Joycean Society. Dora García has also produced an installation specifically for the show, Odradek, based on one of Franz Kafka’s most unnerving short stories, “The Cares of a Family Man.” Overall, the exhibition is an exceptional opportunity to rediscover and plunge into the polyhedral, complex, and always fascinating work of this artist, one of the most singular and internationally prestigious figures in the panorama of Spanish art in recent decades. 9 xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Dora García Second Time Around 10 Second Time Around Manuel Borja-Villel Director of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía 11 Second Time Around Manuel Borja-Villel With a career stretching back to the early 1990s, Dora García has achieved widespread international recognition for her rigorous and incisive work based on artistic research into the blurred boundaries between the real and its representation. Interested in the political and poetic potentialities of certain forms of radical imagination associated with the experience of marginality, García lays bare the mechanisms that govern cultural communication processes, exploring and questioning the nature of the relationship between artist, artwork, and audience. Through very diverse media and means of expression—from drawing, video, and staged readings to installation, performance, expanded books, and hypertext narrative—she seeks to actively and critically engage spectators, whose actions, decisions, and omissions condition the processes and the formal and material configuration of the works. Dora García, who often describes her practice as “situation art,” creates complex relational dynamics that place spectators in a space of indeterminacy in which remaining passive is not an option (for even withdrawal or disengagement are evinced as decisions, as a becoming aware of the space they occupy). At the same time, these dynamics take on a life of their own, beyond her control. As such, to paraphrase one of the statements which she literally inscribes with gold leaf in her Golden Sentences series, her work raises a question that avoids an answer at all costs. In fact, instead of answers, her questions lead to other questions, in open, derivative, defiant processes. Starting from the premise that the real is always inapprehensible—and thus the dichotomous distinction between reality and fiction is meaningless—Dora García works with bewilderment, exploring and exceeding the visible and invisible rules that shape and determine our behavior, such as the way we interact with art and institutional contexts. Her work thus generates what Donald W. Winnicott described as a “transitional space” (a concept we link to Michel Foucault’s “heterotopia”), which not only pushes spectators out of their comfort zone and forces them to (re)position themselves but also allows García to enter unpredictable terrains. Dora García Second Time Around 12 Broadly speaking, much of Dora García’s work is a reformulation of Brechtian Verfremdung, or estrangement, one of the most radical and transformative strategies in twentieth-century critical thought. Based on critical and emotional distancing, the defamiliarization effect that Bertolt Brecht sought in his theater reactivates the audience’s cognitive apparatus, making them see reality in a new light. One of the techniques that Dora García uses to achieve this effect is “delegated performance,” which eliminates the possibility of her own subjectivity determining the course of action. Although as Francesco Matarrese reminds us, this delegation is not metalinguistic, or about “improvement,” but rather reflects a conception of the author. In an interview with Beatriz Escudero and Zaida Trallero, Dora García described Joyce as “someone who watches the others busying themselves and is, by nature, outside of them. He stays outside the normal state of things.” All of which suggests that García does performances but is not, strictly speaking, a performer. As she herself has said, her role in her projects could most accurately be compared to that of a film or theater director who seeks to turn the audience into characters in her works. García’s strategic use of estrangement—a term that etymologically suggests otherness, the experience of inadequacy—cannot be uncoupled from her long-term defense of marginality as an artistic stance and a radical (though often not visible) expression of political dissidence. This is evident if we examine the long, eclectic list of writers who form part of her affective genealogy; cult writers, heterodox intellectuals, and figures of all kinds who transgress the norm in their respective contexts: from Robert Walser to James Joyce, J. G. Ballard and Ricardo Piglia, from Antonin Artaud and Samuel Beckett to the psychiatrist Franco Basaglia and the comedians Lenny Bruce and Dean Martin. She believes that displaced experience—the choice of real or metaphorical exile as a field of operations and personal outlook—is a vital step that artists need to take in order to fully carry out their task. This decision to remain outside and resist any attempt at domestication and standardization has a profoundly poetic and political meaning for her, because it exposes and challenges some of the basic principles—productivity, security, meaning—underpinning our social and symbolic order. It leads her to ask, as Doreen Mende does, what kinds of practices and vocabularies are necessary in order to maintain agency in conditions and situations of political impotence. 13 Second Time Around Manuel Borja-Villel A passionate and indefatigable reader, Dora García’s work is above all driven by the desire for narrative. Drawing on heterogeneous materials, she creates complex theatrical-discursive devices that activate polyphonic stories made up of very different voices. She herself, as we have seen, is, and wishes to be, only partly in control. Like a cadavre exquis, the fictional progression of her works assembles fragments, instant stories, interferences, continuous lists, quotes, and spin-offs that are generated spontaneously and mobilize the pieces without her intervening. In this regard, Peio Aguirre points out that García manages to bring storytelling back to the realm of speech. Although, strangely enough, she often does so using books—that is, the space to which storytelling was confined by modernity—as a starting point and pivotal center. On many occasions her use of books has exceeded the concept or reference: over the years she has perforated them, stained them with fingers dipped in gold, overprinted them with notes covering their contents, and even exhibited them with an appeal to spectators to steal them.