In the stage monologue I Am Not a Flopper, co-written with philosopher Aaron Schuster, Mario García Torres assumes the role of Alan Smithee—a pseudonym that filmmakers use whenever they want to withdraw their directing credit from one of their films. By personifying such a pseudonym, the piece brings to the forefront issues surrounding established notions of authorship, creation, and invention. Through the monologue, the character self-proclaimed to be the elusive Alan Smithee, expounds a series of self-referential speculative rants; switching between different possible iterations of himself; pondering on the reasons for his existence, or into the possibilities for the origin of his name; and also goes through exercises in tautology. Finally, Smithee candidly addresses the construct of the artwork itself. Seen in relation to the exhibition at hand, the work paves the way for another meandering thought trajectory, and like An Arrival Tale a path that is situated between times, truths, fictions and possibilities.
 
I Am Not a Flopper has been realized in two different configurations, first delivered live in London and then recorded in a television studio and presented as part of García Torres solo exhibition at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. In both of these instances an actor was cast to deliver the monologue, but for the version at TBA21–Augarten the piece is delivered by García Torres himself.
 
Mario García Torres Mario García Torres (born 1975 in Monclova, Mexico) is an artist currently living in Mexico City. He earned degrees at Universidad de Monterrey and the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia.
 He has presented solo exhibitions at Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; Pivô, Sao Paolo; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; UC Berkeley Museum of Art and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, the Wattis Institute, San Francisco; Museo Madre, Naples, and the Kunsthalle Zurich. His work has also been exhibited in Paris at the Centre George Pompidou and the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; the Tate Modern in London and the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, the Netherlands, as well as in the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico, and the Guggenheim Museum, New York, among many others. García Torres has participated in numerous group exhibitions like the 29th Sao Paulo Biennial; the 2010 Taipei Biennial; the IX Baltic Triennial, Vilnius; the 8th Panama Biennial; the 2008 Yokohama Triennial; the 52nd Biennale di Venezia; and dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel.