As a child I was fascinated with the fact the earth is continuously moving all the time even when I feel static physically. We belong to an era when shifting geographical locations has become a norm in a rather fast paced life. Gabriel Orozco works in Mexico, New York and Paris and exhibits the world over, creating art of an age with floating extended roots, combining diversity sprouting out of these particular times and spaces.
'I'm not inventing, just reinterpreting', Orozco has said. He alters, reconfigures and transforms the familiar objects by placing them in new contexts, preserving the wider associations they might contain. An awareness of transience and the ephemeral is a persistent quality in his work, making his strongest works exist only as photographs of casually arranged materials in locations such as streets and supermarkets.
Orozco was born in Xalapa, Veracruz, Mexico, in 1962. He emerged as an artist during the 1990s. An ear for spectacle persisted since the previous decade. Orozco responded to it with subtle interactive strategies with the viewer developing an intimate relationship with the human scale. His works make one ride the waves of drama, wit and poetry, reflecting upon the symbolic within everyday life.
In this retrospective show at the Tate Modern, the first work one encounters is a photograph of a performance which is a gesture of him pressing a chunk of humble brick factory clay (rather than fine sculptors clay) between his hands, thus creating a piece of sculpture . This work stands on the crossroads of photography, performance and sculpture, and it is all preserving the impromptu moment of creation, what he has described as 'a gesture of spontaneity'. The work is titled “My Hands Are My Heart “.
Orozco created more works like Pelvis, Torso, Head and Arms (2005-7), where he used similar technique as “My Hands Are My Heart “. He created these forms with intimate physical interactions by using his knees and elbows, incising these fine tactile marks of encounters between body and clay creating a dairy of reminders of our own mortality.
In Black Kites (1997) one sees one of the best examples of his appropriation . In this another confrontation with mortality, he worked with a genuine human skull : 'I was intrigued by something real, that is not a fake, something natural, real death (if that is possible)', he later said . With great patience, he meticulously created a chequerboard pattern on this skull with a graphite pencil in a time consuming seven months period . Making this grid pattern displays a sense of order on this emblem of death. This process of time was crucial in this work for Orozco, who had just spent months in hospital following a collapsed lung.
Orozco collected lint formed of skin, hair and fabric fibers that accumulates in the filter of a drying machine from a Launderette and hung those carefully like clothes on a washing line, forcing the viewer to meditate on the fragility of the human body and precariousness of life. Its first exhibition in New York after September 11, 2001 added more significance.
A famous example of his re-configuration and intervention can be seen in the La DS(1993) when he cut into three pieces, an old Citroen D car from a scrap yard in Paris, removing the central part. 'It is not enough to cut a car in half. You have to build it up again', he has said. The removal of the central part created a single-seater car without an engine - making it dysfunctional creates a paradox of a static object excellently shaped for high velocity.
In another work Elevator (1994) he again cut and removed the central part of an elevator levelling it to his own height, conceiving volume with human scale. He has explained, 'The interior of an elevator is its exterior… the illuminated part, the clean part, is inside, and everything outside is dust and grease. Taking it outside a building is like turning the peel of a half orange inside out.'
One could see several other works at the exhibition which reflect upon the itinerant nature of world we live in, like Four Bicycles (There is Always One Direction -1994), Until You Find Another Schwalbe (1995).
“I was interested in how to transform this object into something else, while also coming back to the reason for this material object to be...So in every work, the first concern for me is a connection with what the material is…” This quote reveals his characteristic approach to the materials he uses. In Recaptured Nature(1990) he made a rubber sphere:splitting, reconfiguring and resealing inner tubes of car tyres and then inflating it to its new form. In the whole process he remains true to the original object, commenting, “I'm using the material in the way it was made for: that is, to be inflated.” but now giving it freedom to roll in any direction.
Ventilator 1997,is another creation which was the result of his travels this time to India: everywhere he and and his wife stayed in hotels, he would be handed a roll of toilet paper as he was shown to his room. This combination of staring at revolving ceiling fans and rolls of toilet paper makes this kinetic sculpture circulating silently like a whirlpool.
“A board is a very bi-dimensional field, black and white. And all the other pieces, they move diagonally, up and down, etcetera. But when you conceive of that knight that is jumping between squares – it's a very beautiful notion.” In the work Horses Running Endlessly 1995 Orozco altered the chess game populating it just with knights running infinitely as the conventional aim of protecting the King is removed.
Orozco said, “I like the idea of the photograph as a shoe box in which you keep and transport objects or memorable events in your life.” In Breath on Piano 1993, one is again confronted with the mortal & ephemeral when one closely inspects the photographic record of the momentary trace of Orozco’s breath on piano. Yet another mark like a spontaneous scribbling as a record of an unsubstantial fleeting thought flips on the pages of personal dairy
Orozco raises the mundane everyday materials to art in Chicotes 2010. He used remnants of torn vehicle tyre from aMexican highway. The pieces look dead discarded remains, blasted, abandoned and tired of their long struggle to survive constantly upon the endless harsh roads. The surface retains the stories of their movement memory scars. One can almost hear the screeching sound echoing in the white space with blowing dry sand. He again succeeds in dealing with the horror of mortality with beauty.
Similiarly in another work, Orozco made a plasticine ball of his own body weight and rolled it on the streets absorbing and receiving the debris and imprints of the places it travelled, as a symbol of Orozco’s constant move and incorporating new places and experiences. The work is called The Yielding Stone.
During the exhibition one moment one deciphers the wit and then the next moment one is alerted with ringing reminders to one’s own mortality before in the next breath becoming submerged in the awe of beauty of the mundane. The rollercoster takes one to places of play, humor, wonder, ponderouness, order and choas . One has to squeeze, expand and twist one’s perceptions to fathom the depths of symbolism. He creates a world that fluctuates between the wonders of the living and dying and could even make one plan the words for one’s own obituary as a precaution, in a rather funny way, incase your whole life’s achievements get stamped with one nonsensical sentence like in the work Obituaries, which consists of a collection of headlines from the obituaries page of the New York Times in which the unnamed dead person’s achievement or notoriety is described in a few words. So: “Nicknamed Dr Strangelove”; “Dumbo’s Creator”; “An Advocate of Mammograms”; or “Wrote Patriotic Chinese Music”.
This retrospective of his works is a treat for those who had not had the luck of seeing his works before, though most of the works exhibited have been shown in London before in various exhibitions.
Gabriel Orozco was curated by Jessica Morgan, The Daskalopoulos Curator, International Art, Tate Modern, and Iria Candela, Assistant Curator, Tate Modern.
The retrospective on from 19th January till 25th April 2011 at Tate Modern , London .
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