Gabriel Orozco

In his dialogue with Buchloh, Orozco mentioned that he purposely made no new work for the LA show but rather sought to recombine objects from the past decade in new configurations. And indeed the bulk of the ninety-six piece exhibition at MOCA consists of a very large open gallery in which many threads of Orozco's practice are intertwined. At the center of the space are four large tables--or plateaus--including fascinating arrays of found objects, small artworks, and studies. On either end of the room are long plinths with peaked tops like library tables, where photos and videos are displayed. Overhead are the Toilet Ventilators, 1997/2000, a series of ceiling fans with partially unfurled rolls of toilet paper attached to each blade. These add a festive air of spiraling streamers that never fall to the ground. Also present are some of Orozco's best-known works like La DS, 1993, an automobile (the famous Citroen DS) whose midsection Orozco removed only to reattach the remaining pieces in a tour de force of th ree-dimensional foreshortening. And on one side of the gallery, in one of many self-referential gestures in the exhibition, Orozco recycled his own works as ready-mades by representing several of them in Photogravity, 1999, an installation of twenty-eight large black-and-white photographic cutouts held up from behind by spidery black legs. If the first two galleries at MOCA invited museum-goers to play games--the Ping Pond Table in the first gallery and Oval with Pendulum in the second--the beautifully installed third gallery proposed another kind of game: hide and seek. Where exactly do we find the art of Gabriel Orozco? In this gallery "reproduction" slid in next to original, study sidled up to art object, and ephemera joined with monumental sculpture. In other words, Orozco took the material conditions of the museum, including its strategies of canonization, and submitted them to the same acts of unraveling and serendipity that inform all of his work "in reality."

"Gabriel Orozco" is on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, through Sept. 3. The exhibition travels to the Museo International Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City, Sept. 28, 2000-Feb. 4, 2001, and the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Monterrey, Mexico, Feb. 22-May 27, 2001.

David Joselit, associate professor in the Department of Art History, University of California, Irvine, is the author of Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp 1910-1941 (MIT Press).

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