Gabriel Orozco
The Poetry of Everyday Objects and Unwanted Things
Gabriel Orozco is regarded as one of
the most important artists of contemporary times. His installations,
sculptures, photographs, and paintings are largely dedicated to the
ephemeral in everyday objects, situation, and experiences. With Orozco,
anything can transform into art: yoghurt containers, cars, even an
entire whale skeleton. On the occasion of his commissioned work
"Asterisms" for the Deutsche Guggenheim, Ulrich Clewing introduces the
work of the artist nomad, who divides his time between Mexico, France and the USA.
Gabriel Orozco, Mobile Matrix, 2006. Graphite on gray whale skeleton. Installation view at Biblioteca Vasconcelos, Mexico City, 2006. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York
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Gabriel Orozco, Mobile Matrix, 2006. Graphite on gray whale skeleton. Installation view at Biblioteca Vasconcelos, Mexico City, 2006. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York
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Gabriel Orozco, La DS, 1993. Modified Citroën DS. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York
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Gabriel Orozco, My Hands Are My Heart, 1991. Two silver dye bleach prints. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York
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Gabriel Orozco, My Hands Are My Heart, 1991. Two silver dye bleach prints. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York
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Gabriel Orozco, Black Kites, 1997. Graphite on skull. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York
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Gabriel Orozco, Black Kites, 1997. Graphite on skull. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York
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Gabriel Orozco, Lintels, 2001. Dryer lint. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York
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Something is not quite right about this car. From the side everything
seems fine, but from the front it appears oddly shrunken. Indeed, the
1960 Citroën DS is missing two feet from its width. Gabriel Orozco and one of his assistants meddled around with it in a mechanic’s shop before shipping it off to Galerie Chantal Crousel
in Paris. At first, they removed the two seats and the motor. Then they
made two cuts along the length of the chassis, removed the middle
section, and joined the two remaining outer halves together. In the
end, the seats were reinstalled—one in the front and one in back.
The implications of La DS
(1993) are clear, partly because the word for car in French is feminine
and the model name DS, pronounced “déesse,” sounds like “goddess.”
After Orozco’s modification, this futuristic national icon, celebrated
at its presentation in 1955 as the quintessence of French avant-garde
technology, was still streamlined but even sleeker than before. On the
other hand, it was nothing more than a heap of metal. “Vanished wishes
of a ravenous technical era … footnotes of a visionary mind at the end
of a blurring millennium,” wrote art critic Francesco Bonami in the
magazine Flash Art at the time.
When Orozco showed La DS in
Paris, he was 31 years old and considered a promising young artist.
Nearly 20 years later, he is an international star with exhibitions in
renowned museums and work in collections worldwide. He has taken part
in the Venice Biennale three times and twice in Documenta in Kassel. Most recently, a survey of his works was on view at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2009); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2010); Kunstmuseum Basel (2010); and Tate Modern, London (2011).
The car sculpture, which has since been purchased by the French
government, is not only one of his most famous works, but also highly
typical of the artist’s working method, which has exerted an enormous
influence on sculpture in recent decades. For Orozco, who was born in
Mexico in 1962 to a painter and a pianist, the whole world is
material—he uses almost anything in his highly versatile work. In most
cases, everyday objects become the point of departure for his
sculptural interventions; he often employs items that have been thrown
away and are no longer needed, what others would call garbage. For
Orozco, there are no boundaries when defining artistic material; he
resists being identified with one discipline. He makes videos, creates
performances, and then photographs the remains; he built a huge wheel
for the Expo 2000 in Hannover, half of which was sunk into the ground (Half-Submerged Ferris Wheel, 1997), and he transported an elevator car into a museum, as he did in 1994 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (Elevator, 1994). Long before Damien Hirst, Orozco took a human skull and drew a diamond pattern on it in pencil (Black Kites,
1997); he pressed together a lump of clay before his chest, and when he
let go, the imprint of his hands resembled a heart muscle (My Hands Are My Heart,
1991). Photos, actions, readymades—all are a part of his work. And
sometimes he does almost nothing. A year after La DS, in an exhibition
at Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, he challenged the viewer with a completely empty room in which he hung four small yogurt lids, one for each wall (Yogurt Caps,
1994). Not everyone was pleased about the extremely minimalist
presentation, but there had not been a gallery exhibition in a long
time that incited as much discussion over the relationship between
presence and imagination as this one did.
On another occasion, Orozco received an invitation to show work at the Douglas Hyde Gallery of Trinity College in Dublin.
Here he arrived almost without luggage; or more specifically, he did
not bring any artworks with him. He restricted himself to what he found
on-site: an old broom, a cup of coffee, a used paint roller, a
wineglass, and an empty box of lightbulbs. Such an impromptu process
certainly risked the quality of the final work, but then something
unpredictable happened: using a simple but highly effective trick, he
lent The Weight of the Sun
(2003) a poetry that only existed in his imagination at first, but
became all the more visible later. Using thread, he tied the broom,
cup, glass, paint roll, and box to the ceiling; then he tied them to
one another. After he finished, the objects seemed to hover in the
space, as though held in place by ghosts. When one object was moved,
they all moved in a ballet of banal, utilitarian objects that had
traded in their ordinariness for a magical new life.
The language of Orozco’s installations is that of a globetrotter. It
seeks the universal, finding a strange, intrinsic poetry in all things.
He has worked in Berlin, the Costa Rican rain forest, and New Delhi. He
lives with his wife Maria Gutierrez and their son Simón in Mexico City,
New York, and Paris or, as he puts it, in “three different cultures,
languages, mentalities, and ways of thinking.” While his lifestyle
reflects that of today’s international contemporary artists, his
aesthetic does not forsake the intimate, domestic realm. For Lintels
(2001), he hung objects in his New York gallery that look like fabric;
they flutter at the slightest breeze. The installation consists of lint
the artist found in clothes dryers, draped over clotheslines that
stretch across the gallery. New Yorker
art critic Peter Schjeldahl remarked that once one manages to stop
seeing mere debris in the lint, “its fragility stirs surprisingly
tender feelings”—a rather succinct summation of Orozco’s art and
process.
While Orozco can be extremely exact in his work, improvisation is a method he often uses. For Black Kites, his black-and-white patterned skull, he drew the delicate lines with precision. But for Penske Work Project
(1998), it was the other way around. For four weeks, he drove a Penske
rental truck around Manhattan, collecting garbage from dumpsters and
making art right in the bed of the truck. The working principle was
total chance. “It’s a kind of game,” Orozco recalled in the catalogue
for his 2009–11 survey exhibition. “I drove the truck around the city,
and I was only allowed to use what I found, and I had to think
something up right then and there. And so I worked, sometimes for 30
minutes, and sometimes for two hours, until I found a solution that I
liked. And then I made a Polaroid photo to help my memory, carted the
thing inside the truck, and drove to the next place.”
In both Black Kites and Penske Work Project,
the artist moved found objects from a simple to a more complex context
but through two different processes. Orozco’s tendency toward expanded
meaning explains in part why a library is an appropriate place to
present his art. One of his most spectacular works hangs in the Biblioteca Vasconcelos
in Mexico City, which opened in 2006: the artist covered a gray whale
skeleton, similar to what he did to the human skull, in a rhythmic
pattern. Twenty assistants used 6,000 mechanical pencils to apply the
fine graphite lines to the huge bone structure, now titled Mobile Matrix (2006). Orozco had found the skeleton on the shore of Isla Arena
in Baja California, a nature preserve in which, unfortunately, the
protection of nature is not all that happens. In addition to the dead
whales that occasionally wash up with the ocean’s waves, garbage of
every kind comes ashore. As he demonstrated with Penske Work Project, for Orozco it provided a perfect reservoir of material to work with.
In preparation for the exhibition Asterisms
at the Deutsche Guggenheim, Orozco returned to Isla Arena to collect
objects from the beach once again. This journey repeated a process
carried out at the Pier 40 recreational park in Manhattan, where he
searched the artificial lawn for small bits of detritus—for instance,
bottle caps, cigarette butts, and chewing gum in all colors—which he
will present in the exhibition hall on Unter den Linden along with
photographic works and a video. But first he will slightly transform
them through his unique sensibility, allowing them to speak to the
fragile state of nature and civilization in the early 21st century.
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