Gabriel Orozco, Pt. II

II.


Yielding Stone (1992), Plasticine, 35.6 x 43.2 x 43.2 cm. Courtesy Gabriel Orozco and Marian Goodman Gallery.

ART iT: We were just talking about your photographs and how the imprint of the body in life can have multiple connotations. In that regard your works also show how signs can betray us. In My Hands are My Heart (1991), the piece of clay fluctuates between being an objective imprint of an action and an interpretive representation. Depending on how you look at it, it suggests not only the form of a heart, but also that of a clenched fist, or an ancient fossil, so the work offers a trap door that might lead viewers away from recognizing the original action. Is this something you consciously play with, not only in My Hands are My Heart but also in your later ceramic works creating biomorphic forms through pressing actions?

GO: The body has always been important for me as the central point of action that starts processes of connection and interaction with different objects, in both reality and in the landscape. The body is always there in one way or another – through the imprint, memory, vision, the physicality of the hands and other body parts, but also through intellectual games in time-space. The connection between the possibility of the game and action, or gesture, transforms the landscape. It transforms the city, transforms the universe, transforms you yourself. So this constant transformation happens on the human or bodily scale in connection with the big picture of institutions and the city and the urban grid or historical memory, and also in connection with mythology and abstract thinking. This evolving organicity constantly appears in our actions, but we just need to see it and be aware of it. That’s why there is a body there, even though I don’t like performance art in general, and I don’t like myself appearing as an actor or subject in my own work. But that working, thinking body can belong to anybody. It’s not about me, and it’s not anecdotal. It’s not about being Mexican, male, young, whatever. It’s about anybody who can do it.

ART iT: I believe he’s changed his approach several times over the many years he’s written about your work, but in some of his more recent texts Benjamin Buchloch presents the idea of Mexicanismo in opposition to modernism, locating you between the two. Although it’s important to deal with national essentialism in a critical way, this construct strikes me as subtly reinforcing a monolithic modernism that can only be fully expressed in a “pure” Western context. How do feel about this reading of Mexicanismo?

GO: I don’t feel anything about it any more, because I think it’s completely erased from my history as an artist. I try to avoid the stereotypical aspects of Mexican art and culture, whether it’s the way Mexico is perceived by Europeans and Americans, or the self-exotification of Mexico as a folkloric, particular place. I try to work by engaging with different cultures through the places I visit and through something about their way of thinking that interests me, like Zen Buddhism with Japan, or miniature painting and sculpture in India, ceramics in Mali, French and German culture. Otherwise it just leads to a Manichean view of the world, a Cold War way of thinking between national and international, left and right wing. I don’t think in those terms, so I don’t have any conflict regarding them.
Certainly there are particular things that interest me about my own culture. I think you can see them in the work as much as a Japanese person could see something that connects with Japan, or an Indian person could see something that connects with India.


Left: My Hands are My Heart (Mis manos son mi corazon) (1991), Cibachrome print, two parts, 66.7 x 54.5 cm. Right: My Hands are My Heart (Mis manos son mi corazon) (1991), terracotta, 15.2 x 10.2 x 15.2 cm, installation view in “Gabriel Orozco-Inner Cycles” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, 2015. Photo Eiji Ina, courtesy the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo.

ART iT: On the other hand, to what extent do you try to dismantle the structure of Modernism?

GO: I don’t think I try to dismantle Modernism. In fact, I try to bring it back to the moment of its childhood. I like to believe that I play in the world as a child does. Perhaps this is because I had a happy childhood and have good memories of my school, my friends, and the Mexico in which I grew up. In any case, I feel it’s important to always be at the beginning of things, and in a way that means being in a state of childhood, being open to something new and being amused by things. I think early Modernism had that kind of infantile spirit. It was utopian, but based on fundamental necessities. There was something almost naïve about it, but also honest and sincere. Obviously there were many aspects of life that modernism couldn’t understand or acknowledge, and there were many accidents that came along with these utopian ideas.
Modernity is fascinating to me. It’s not something I try to break, it’s something I try to understand and rework as a geometrical way of thinking, as a political way of looking at the whole planet as a unity, as a way of organizing cities and language that is also full of accidents. It’s a combination of the two – even nationality, for example. I’m not saying I am against nationality. I do not claim that I am not Mexican. I am a Mexican citizen. But I am also a citizen of the world. I travel and work in different cultures. I simply have a life that is different from the generations before me.

ART iT: Early in your career, when you did the “Friday Workshop” sessions in Mexico City with artists like Abraham Cruzvillegas, Gabriel Kuri and Damian Ortega, were you conscious of creating a new approach to art, both within the context of Mexico and in an international context, or was it just responding to a very immediate need for community?

GO: It’s always both. I am not the kind of person who plans things too far in advance. On the other hand, I grew up in the art world and I know about art, I know the history, I know the theory. I was very well prepared in all the academic, philosophical and political aspects of art. The other artists were all five or seven years younger than me. At the time, my work was very different from what was going on in Mexico and what was circulating in the market there. I think that’s why the others came to me – to learn how to think in a different way. I challenged them to think for themselves, rather than just follow me. We did not plan it as an artist group. It was a process of learning, and then community, because we became good friends.
Then when I moved to New York, I started to work with other international artists there, and that changed some of my ideas. So it all came together in a very interesting way, with the Mexican artists and the New York artists, with European artists – it was all a mix of approaches. And from what I understand, my work has helped offer ideas to others about how to act in the global environment and how to do things with everyday tools, which can apply in different ways to Japan, to India, or to Mexico. It is rewarding to see my work used in that way.


Above: Clenched Fist (2005), terracotta with black carbon, 7 x 38.1 x 9cm. Below: Four and two fingers (2002), terracotta, installation view (foreground) at Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris, 2002. Courtesy Gabriel Orozco and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris.

ART iT: Returning to the connotations of the body, Yielding Stone (1992), for example, is a large ball of Plasticine that collected bits of refuse and other material on its surface as you rolled it through the streets. Maybe it’s a cliché to use this phrase, but at the time were you thinking of it as a “return of the repressed” situation, bringing the body back into visceral contact with things that are considered untouchable or taboo?

GO: What do you mean by “return of the repressed”? It sounds like one of these hardcore Lacanian psychoanalysis terms.

ART iT: It is. I guess in this case we could say that if repression is when you go to the toilet and flush everything away so you don’t have to see it anymore, then the “return of the repressed” is what happens when the toilet gets stuck and everything comes back up.

GO: Ha, ha! Well, I’ve never been fond of psychoanalysis for analyzing art. For me it was more philosophical, relating to the constant changing of the world and our bodies and perceptions. For much of its history sculpture was motivated by the idea that it should be permanent and eternal, frozen as a monument for the public. On the other hand, Plasticine is a material that is hard to conceive of as being anything other than a medium. It’s always a medium, and it stays that way. It never becomes the definitive material for a finished object.
I liked that idea, and I decided to assume that vulnerability. The idea of vulnerability is important in my work. It is important to put yourself in a situation of vulnerability and think that the acceptance of that vulnerability allows you to better understand the world around you. In doing so, you become a recipient, or receptacle, of what is happening to you. I wanted to embrace vulnerability in that positive sense.
Yielding Stone is my own body weight in Plasticine, exposed to the street and its debris. But the vulnerability of the material – its flexibility and malleability -makes it indestructible in a way, because it is capable of constant change. At the time I was reading Heraclitus – “No man ever steps in the same river twice” – and thinking about time, the infinite, and the perpetual motion of bodies. I was also thinking of the idea of the “wandering star,” a term I considered using for the title of the work. In archaic astronomy there were fixed stars and then wandering stars, which moved, and it was only afterward that the latter were identified as planets. This idea was important to me, but then the work is also a stone – a fake stone, not a real one, but it looks like a stone. So it connects with the real world and the phenomena of reality in terms of time-space and permanent motion. It’s a piece that is not anecdotal in that sense, except that it has my weight and I roll it. The piece is not about representation. It is about the physicality of this object being exposed to the elements.


Installation view of “Gabriel Orozco-Inner Cycles” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, 2015, with stone carvings in foreground. Photo ART iT.

ART iT: Would it have been the same if you had made it as a cube?

GO: Actually, it would have been the same, ultimately. That’s why for me roundness, or circularity, is more representative of constant motion in time. Everything that starts to collapse and obtain friction against gravity through constant movement tends to be spherical or round. That’s why for the collection of stone carvings on display here, I used the 5000-year-old stones, which have already been worked by nature and become round from rolling so much. Even if it starts out square, anything begins to take on a round shape the moment it starts to have rotation. That’s why all the planets are round – because of constant motion and friction and collision. The cube is just a momentary state of matter.

Part I | III

Gabriel Orozco: Ineluctable Modality

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