GABRIEL OROZCO AT THE TATE MODERN
GABRIEL OROZCO AT THE TATE MODERN, February 2011
The artist Gabriel Orozco was born in Mexico in 1962, began to rise to prominence in the 1990s and now lives internationally, strung out, you might say, somewhere between New York, London and Mexico City. That sounds depressingly rootless, many of the works offer testimony to his constant shifts and possible escape acts.
Some of Orozco’s works imply possible new horizons but many are rooted in art college banality. An enormous chess set with hundreds of squares, fifty or so knight pieces. The knight, uniquely, is the only chess piece that has two simultaneous moves within its single board move. In psychology a knight’s move is an attempt to connect two disparate concepts or implies the disconnected or fragmented thought process of the psychotic. Modern art, Orozco is saying, is very like psychosis in its attempt to describe chaos or fragmentariness and the connections in between without collapsing into total chaos itself.
Orozco’s sports car for a very fat man or two very thin ones, for instance (LA DS 1993), is another sideways portrayal of the urge towards everything shiny and new, fast, modern gadgets that do more than move you between A and B. His game of carambole, a French form of billiards with a pocketless rectangular table is transformed into a pocketless oval table and (Carambole with pendulum, 1996) is played out interactively as visitors are also allowed to play the canon off the white ball into the red ball swinging from a pendulum, a feat that this reviewer accomplished once anyway. It is as if the table itself bent perspectively in a distorting invisible mirror. Orozco’s work has undoubted connections to surrealism obviously, where the everyday is imagined new, yet Orozco casts his decaying laundry hung out on invisible lines or empty cardboard box in a way that allows you to smash into it or even ask: is this laundry or a cardboard box? Indeed they are, is the answer. However Orozco’s work seems connected more intrinsically to the games of perspective and infinite regression configured by the Dutch artist M C Escher. Escher was hardly original as Rembrandt, Turner or Picasso were, but he was more than a gimmick or one hit wonder, managing to re-interrogate ways of seeing in a perplexingly original sense.
Sometimes Orozco depicts the repetitive symbol of two yellow mopeds in some presumably Latin American city, images like atoms or atomic symbols, machine code computing binaries like the infinite regression of perspective found in the work of Escher, for instance, that turns out instead to be pages from a telephone directory, jaw-droppingly repetitive yet intrinsically comfortingly so. There are symmetries as well as asymmetries, decaying truck tyres salvaged from an elephant’s graveyard of trucks it seems, the kind of pure waste that we are accustomed to in the west being transformed into art but which might indeed seem gob smackingly original in contemporary Mexico. Orozco salvages waste, yet it remains detritus until re-forged or re-imagined. In short, it is not clear if Orozco is this artist but his work is tending in the right direction. Perhaps Black Kites (1997) is his most quintessentially Aztec work with its intimation of human sacrifice and tribal decoration yolking together the violence of contemporary Mexico with its Aztec antecedents.
There was very little text accompanying this exhibition, possibly because little has been written about Orozco in Europe generally and in Britain particularly.
Paul Murphy, Tate Modern, London
The artist Gabriel Orozco was born in Mexico in 1962, began to rise to prominence in the 1990s and now lives internationally, strung out, you might say, somewhere between New York, London and Mexico City. That sounds depressingly rootless, many of the works offer testimony to his constant shifts and possible escape acts.
Some of Orozco’s works imply possible new horizons but many are rooted in art college banality. An enormous chess set with hundreds of squares, fifty or so knight pieces. The knight, uniquely, is the only chess piece that has two simultaneous moves within its single board move. In psychology a knight’s move is an attempt to connect two disparate concepts or implies the disconnected or fragmented thought process of the psychotic. Modern art, Orozco is saying, is very like psychosis in its attempt to describe chaos or fragmentariness and the connections in between without collapsing into total chaos itself.
Orozco’s sports car for a very fat man or two very thin ones, for instance (LA DS 1993), is another sideways portrayal of the urge towards everything shiny and new, fast, modern gadgets that do more than move you between A and B. His game of carambole, a French form of billiards with a pocketless rectangular table is transformed into a pocketless oval table and (Carambole with pendulum, 1996) is played out interactively as visitors are also allowed to play the canon off the white ball into the red ball swinging from a pendulum, a feat that this reviewer accomplished once anyway. It is as if the table itself bent perspectively in a distorting invisible mirror. Orozco’s work has undoubted connections to surrealism obviously, where the everyday is imagined new, yet Orozco casts his decaying laundry hung out on invisible lines or empty cardboard box in a way that allows you to smash into it or even ask: is this laundry or a cardboard box? Indeed they are, is the answer. However Orozco’s work seems connected more intrinsically to the games of perspective and infinite regression configured by the Dutch artist M C Escher. Escher was hardly original as Rembrandt, Turner or Picasso were, but he was more than a gimmick or one hit wonder, managing to re-interrogate ways of seeing in a perplexingly original sense.
Sometimes Orozco depicts the repetitive symbol of two yellow mopeds in some presumably Latin American city, images like atoms or atomic symbols, machine code computing binaries like the infinite regression of perspective found in the work of Escher, for instance, that turns out instead to be pages from a telephone directory, jaw-droppingly repetitive yet intrinsically comfortingly so. There are symmetries as well as asymmetries, decaying truck tyres salvaged from an elephant’s graveyard of trucks it seems, the kind of pure waste that we are accustomed to in the west being transformed into art but which might indeed seem gob smackingly original in contemporary Mexico. Orozco salvages waste, yet it remains detritus until re-forged or re-imagined. In short, it is not clear if Orozco is this artist but his work is tending in the right direction. Perhaps Black Kites (1997) is his most quintessentially Aztec work with its intimation of human sacrifice and tribal decoration yolking together the violence of contemporary Mexico with its Aztec antecedents.
There was very little text accompanying this exhibition, possibly because little has been written about Orozco in Europe generally and in Britain particularly.
Paul Murphy, Tate Modern, London
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