Content provided in partnership with
Gabriel Orozco
ArtForum, Sept, 2000 by David Joselit
MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, LOS ANGELES
On the occasion of his first major survey exhibition, at LA MOCA, Gabriel Orozco told Benjamin Buchloh in a public dialogue that, as an artist, he works "in reality." Identifying reality as his medium--as opposed to conventional practices such as sculpture and photography, both of which Orozco also deploys--is provocative. First, from an art-historical perspective, the equation between art and reality conjures up the tradition of the readymade initiated by Marcel Duchamp and transformed by postwar artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, who in 1959 famously declared: "Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. (I try to act in that gap between the two.)" The danger in Rauschenberg's declaration--one that has ambushed many artists, including at times himself--is that art will simplistically collapse into life, or life into art. Second, at least for those versed in post-Freudian psychoanalytic theory (which includes a significant subset of the art world), Orozco's remark to Buchloh evokes shades o f the Lacanian "real," giving rise to a vexing contradiction: If, as Lacan argues, the "real" is that which exists outside of representation, thereby establishing its limits, how can "reality" be incorporated as an artwork? From both art-historical and poststructuralist perspectives, therefore, working in reality calls forth "impossible objects." Such things must simultaneously emerge as representations and fall back into the unmediated condition that is "reality."
Gabriel Orozco makes such "impossible objects," in which the stain of reality remains pungent. He does so, I think, by cultivating a dimension of the readymade that is often insufficiently recognized: its nature as an encounter between artist and object-"a kind of rendezvous," in Duchamp's words--and not simply as a gesture of aesthetic validation conferred on ordinary commodities. For Orozco, objects are either the provocation or the residue of an event. These two aspects of rendezvous are evocatively juxtaposed in the second gallery of his LA exhibition. In the center of this room stands Oval with Pendulum, 1996, an oblong, pocketless billiard table holding two white balls and a red one, which hangs from a cord like a pendulum. Pool cues are available in a nearby rack, inviting visitors' participation. Arrayed around the perimeter of this temporary pool hall is Until You Find Another Yellow Schwalbe, a series of forty pictures of the artist's yellow Schwalbe scooter (a brand manufactured in the former GDR) , which he photographed alongside identical bikes parked on the streets of Berlin. Like Ping Pond Table, 1998, installed in an adjacent gallery and comprising four "wings," allowing for four players, and a lily pond where the net would be, Oval with Pendulum is a game without rules but not without a specified playing field. The encounter it facilitates is therefore both restricted and open-ended. Conversely, in Until You Find Another Yellow Schwalbe, it is the playing field that is fluid (the entire city of Berlin) and the rules that are dear (find another yellow Schwalbe).
These disequilibriums at the heart of Orozco's post-readymade encounters are fundamental to the meaning of his art. When I played Oval with Pendulum, naturally I wanted to see what would happen if one of the white balls were to collide with the hanging red ball at the center of the table. When at last I succeeded in hitting the pendulum and sending it flying off the table in a motion whose axis was dramatically different from the table-bound white balls, I realized that the kind of encounters Orozco orchestrates are not exclusively between things, places, and people, but also between different vectors of movement. Paul Virilio has famously argued that in modernity, politics and collectivity must be understood as the extension and control not of land or commodities but of routes and vectors of circulation, ranging from freeway systems to advanced networks of communication. It seems to me that Orozco's practice has expanded our notion of the readymade by bringing to it precisely such a consciousness of speed a nd circulation. In a series of 1997 video works, for instance, with titles like From Container to Don't Walk, the artist records his wanderings through urban space by focusing on a sequence of ordinary but arresting things in his path. In these tapes the experience of time is erratic: Sometimes a single object receives sustained attention only to yield to a series of quick cuts from thing to thing or angle to angle. Much of Orozco's work manifests an encounter between dramatically different temporalities: Static geometric patterns are projected onto wildly animated photographs of sports figures in a series of computer-generated prints known as the Atomists, 1996; and in another series of works, Pinched Stars, 1997, the artist made permanent aluminum casts from seemingly ephemeral residual forms by pressing wax between his hands.
