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EXHIBITIONS
his work might supply privileged experience. In other words Orozco’s work is radically democratic. Indeed, as the exhibition’s curator, Ann Temkin, argues in her own catalogue essay, his approach advances on the poststudio practices of the 1960s, replacing such models as the factory, the laboratory and the office with the commonplace notion of the apartment or the home. The result of all these alleged achievements, Buchloh concludes, is a practice that revives the viewer’s sculptural experience of the everyday world, and helps mend our destroyed – or endlessly mediated – relationship to material objects. Catalogue essays (which are the basis of much of the material in the new Files book) are ever the source of indiscriminate praise, but rarely are their assertions as robustly supported as they are in these essays. Unfortunately, we cannot really look to MoMA’s exhibition to verify those assertions, since a monographic survey cannot make the necessary historical comparisons. MoMA, of course, enjoys grand claims, and the installation in the Marron Atrium is in that vein: the very eye-catching Mobile matrix (2006), employs the skeleton of a grey whale divided by geometric lines. But Orozco himself has a quieter personality, and it is characteristic of him that the exhibition opens with Empty shoe box (1993), a sly humbling of the Museum’s claim to serve as a definitive historical archive and not as some private, subjective scrap-album. The exhibition only really takes off with works from the series My hands are my heart (1991; Fig.82): two photographs of the naked torso of a man moulding a piece of clay, alongside the heart-shaped fired clay itself, still impressed with the man’s hand-prints. It delivers – as indeed Buchloh argues – a startling reassertion of the value of tactile, sculptural processes, and one which does not elicit an object demonstrative of sculptural mastery. Neither is Orozco wedded to tradi81. Kytes tree, by Gabriel Orozco. 2005. Synthetic polymer on canvas, 200 by 200 cm. (Museum of Modern Art, New York).
82. My hands are my heart, by Gabriel Orozco. 1991. Two chromogenic colour prints, each 23.2 by 31.8 cm. (Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery; exh. Museum of Modern Art, New York).
tional artisanal materials: Spume fin (2003) is a sleek mobile fabricated from polyurethane foam, yet, in a similar vein to My hands are my heart, its smoother, more sculpted areas often give way to ragged parts which speak of the act of making. The show also confirms critics’ contentions that Orozco is engaged by the Duchampian readymade as a commodity form: La DS (1993) is a Citroën DS, modified so that the centre of the car has been sliced out and the two sides rejoined to create a symmetrical effect: the object becomes a phantasmic image of desire for modernity. Similar in conception, if not intention, is Four bicycles (There is always one direction) (1994), in which the parts have been fused together into an
eccentric three-dimensional form. The show also reveals that other important influence on Orozco, John Cage’s notion of art as a commonplace event. It includes many photographs of performance-based sculptures that Orozco has made in the street, including Extension of reflection (1992), in which the artist rode a bicycle in circles between two puddles to spread a trail of watery tyre marks. Buchloh’s eagerness to comprehend Orozco’s work in terms of the history of sculptural media tends to apprehend it as an endeavour on many fronts. Orozco himself seems to feel more impelled by a single governing idea of form, a single metaphor being more compelling than a scattered history. That governing idea makes its debut in a series of drawings, First was the spitting (1993), in which the artist spat toothpaste onto sheets of graph paper and, from the edges of the white pools, elaborated patterns like rudimentary scientific sketches of cell groups. But that organic metaphor has since morphed into one based on the more rule-bound notion of the game (although Orozco’s use of it still has recourse to the concept of growth). And he is now well known for his networks of disc motifs, complexes which appear to build out from a centre according to a game-like scheme of steps and rotations. The motifs overlay news photographs of sporting events in the Atomist series (1996), suggesting underlying order, and more recently they have also begun to appear alone in paintings such as Kytes tree (2005; Fig.81). Glossing the ideas underlying these works, however, is difficult, just as it is difficult to draw connections between them and Orozco’s sculptural output, and MoMA’s show sheds no new light. Some of Orozco’s supporters have expressed disappointment about his move into painting, seeing it as regressive; had they been curating the show they might have excised it. Critical consensus might also have excised his preoccupation with organicism, since this is the province of his more eccentric ideas about ‘tantric abstraction’. But this is a show that observes the totality of Orozco’s work – as a mid-career retrospective should – and while that makes it difficult to adequately weigh the validity of the claims made for Orozco, it still delivers a marvellously rich show. It will take time, historical survey shows and, probably, the trace of influence on younger artists, for those claims to be tested. 1 After New York, the exhibition travels to the Kunstmuseum, Basel (18th April to 10th August); the Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (15th September to 3rd January 2011); and Tate Modern, London (19th January to 25th April 2011). 2 Gabriel Orozco. Edited by Yve-Alain Bois. 240 pp. incl. 59 b. & w. ills. (October Files, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2009), $38/£28.95 (HB). ISBN 978–0–262–01318–5; $18.95/£14.95 (PB). ISBN 978–0–262–51301–2. 3 Catalogue: Gabriel Orozco. Edited by Ann Temkin, with contributions by Ann Temkin, Briony Fer, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Paulina Pobocha and Anne Byrd. 256 pp. incl. 500 col. ills. (Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2009), $55. ISBN 978–0–87070–762–9.
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