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8/10/2019 Gabriel Orozco5
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ir lin
ck
Gabriel Orozco— painter sculptor
provocateur
changes direction.
Essay by Julia ooke
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G
ABRIEL O R O Z C O IS A MERCURIAL ARTIST
enough so that, not three m inutes
after I arrived at his West Village
home with plans to head out into
the city, he suggested th at pe rhaps I migh t like
to help him draw circles inste ad. Specifically, he
wa nted m e to use multicolored tempera
to
paint
inside rings he'd been tracing o nto hefty paper
squares. He was prepa ring n ew work for a large
show,
Gabriel Orozco:
thinking
in
circles at New
York's Marian Goodman Gallery. Most of the
wo rk was being shipped b ack from a gallery in
Edinburgh and would be complem ented by the
tempera-on-paper pieces
as
well
as a
conceptual
project involving free Spanish classes. Orozco
is famously experim ental, so wh en h e asked me
to paint, I thought. Sure
let s give
it a shot. But
w hen he asked, Do you have steady hand s? I
felt compelled to warn him that drawing was
never my strongest suit. The task seemed easy
enough, but Orozco sometimes projects the
studied geniality of someone who decides in
each m om ent w hom he will be to you, a genial-
ity that feels as if it could flip, quietly and sud-
denly, into stony boredom or disapproval.
Try it anyway, he said, and grabbed
a
brush
and gestured toward the kitchen island, where
a young wo ma n was already
working.
The key
is to be sure that the brush has enough paint
tha t it stays put. He reached into the thicke t
of pain t jars on th e island, be hin d a dozen six-
inch squares of paper on wh ich he had traced
thin pencil lines in strict circles atop a sepia-
toned mo ttle of encrusted paint. He pulled out
a jar from amo ng the reds, greens, purples. A
silver lid was flipped over, the tem pe ra mixed,
and Orozco presented me wi th a mustard-
t ipped brush.
Orozco is neither short nor tall, soft at fifty-
one bu t still fit, with a strong c hin that's often
covered in white stubble and nearly shoulder-
length gray hair that, pulled back into a pony-
tail, gives the imp ression of w antin g to escape
its rubber band. Orozco has often said that
he has no studio and he has no assistant; he
works in his homes—in New York, Mexico
City, and Paris. But he has areas th at resem ble
In the West Vil lage brownstone, he works
on the garden level, a cozy space with broad,
oak-plank floors, French doors to the outside
garden, and boomerangs and pointillistic test
sketches hanging on the walls; to help him
prepare for the show at Marian Goodman,
he'd hired the woman sitting at the kitchen is-
land, a graphic designer from Mexico who as-
sured me that painting inside the lines wasn't
difficult. Orozco often discusses how he leans
into a viewer's disapp ointm ent as an aesthetic
strategy. I w ant to disap poin t the expecta-
tions of the one who waits to be amazed, he
has said. Now he was almost barreling toward
it. The tem per a circles riffed on the on e series
of Orozco's work that received near-universal
rejection by critics, a series that played heavily
in his upcom ing show.
I grabbed a stool and got to work. Orozco lit
a cigarette and walked around us with long, de-
liberate steps, then p ulled up a chair, sat dow n
and crossed his legs, tossed an arm across the
chair's back, and leaned to the side. I had fin-
ished drawing my mustard-colored circle and
held it up for his approval. Good, he nod ded ,
and stood up to trace another circle with a
steely protractor. He sat back down and again
settled into the chair crookedly, slanting almost
out of it.
So,
he said after a m om ent . Is this going to
be th e so rt of article w here you're going to say,
'He opened the door, his house was like this,
his couch was green'—like that, you know?
HE PRO TECTED SAND O F ISLA ARE NA IN A B A J A
California b iosphe re whe re gray and blue
whales are born in coastal lagoons and winter
off the coast, is rarely visited by humans. Un-
dulating du nes hide an especially rich selection
of the detritus th at sw irls out of the oc ean, bo th
manmade and natural: gnarled pieces of drift-
wood, a rainbow of soft-edged, sand-tumbled
glass,
shells as small as thumbnails or as big
as fists, a styrofoam packing c rate, a barnac le-
crusted buoy, hardhats, rolls of toilet paper
com pressed like fossils, a kerose ne tan k. Th ese
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culled over the course of a decade. O nce, he
found lightbulbs in so many hues it w as as if
entire discotheques had emptied their weekly
trash hauls straight into the sea; another time,
he found the decomposing carcass of fifty-foot
gray w hale th at had died after crack ing its skull
against
a
passing freighter.
Last fall, about
1 200 of
these objects we re
packed
and
shipped
to the
Guggenheim Mu-
seum
in
New York
for a
solo show entitled
Asterisms. By the t im e O rozco arrayed wood
w ith woo d on the gallery floor, set the ossified
toilet-paper rolls in their own small neighbor-
hood, and balanced upright bottles like many-
Un titled , 2013. Gouache on paper, 5% x 5% . ( IMAGES
COURTESY
OF GABRIEL OROZCO AND MAR IAN GOOD MAN
GALLERY,
NEW YO RK, UNLESS CREDITED OT HERW ISE.
museum -goers to walk around the rectangular
carpet of trash. O rozco titled it Sandstars.
The second half of Asterisms, a piece entitle d
Astroturf Constellation was composed of another
1,200 small items prese nted on
waist-high vi-
trine: pennies, bottle caps, glittery barrettes,
pistachio and sunflower shells, plastic bracelets,
bits of red foam, lave nder foam, lim e foam, two
Ferrero Rocher foils, a jar of Blistex, and so on .
This garbage was plucked bit by bit from the
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Orozco throws boom erangs a few mornings a
week around six, or at the quiet lunch hour
betwe en th e pier's scheduled soccer practices.
The museum presentation was twofold,
the objects arranged in front of their meticu-
lous docum entation. On the wall behind both
groupings were a series of photographs, the
2,400 or so exhibited bits of detritu s shot in a
studio against a monotonous gray background.
In the 4' x 5' grids of images, th e p hotos were
organized by shape, and the uniform size of
the 4 6 ph otos created odd visual trans -
formations. Buoys became pastilles or beads;
oars became matchsticks; bottles and light-
bulbs seemed interchangeable despite their
true scale. Amid the pier's litter, there was a
compression of time (a zipper that could have
come from a pair of pants made in 1920 was
set alongside one th at was indelibly co ntem po-
rary),
im portance (the purple, glittery barrette
of a young girl and the bit of lavender foam
near it) , and intimacy (a metal screw versus
a pink, glistening wad of discarded gum). In
this democracy of the discarded, every piece
of trash invited contemplation.
sterisms 2012 . Solomon R. Guggenheim Mus eum ,
N ew
York
O A V I D H E A L D / S R G F , N Y )
people, studied and shipped and then prettily
displayed on a storied m useum 's floor, seemed
like both a celebration and an in dictm ent. Like
all good art, sterisms pulled viewers in to t he
obsessions and preoccupations of its creator,
but what those preoccupations revealed was
unclear: a celebration of what, or an indict-
m ent of who m? Was the work finished? W hat
did he m ean by it? This inconclusiveness is an
Orozco hallmark, the casual adjusted by the
slightest weight of an intention. His art often
generates a push-pull, equal parts me ditation
and play, a sense that th e artist m ay be poking
fun at you, and that you might actually like it.
Some of the ideas behind sterisms can be
traced back to Orozco's first small exhib it at th e
Museum of Modern Art in
1993,
when he was
thirty-one years old.
Yielding tone
(1992) c on-
sisted of a ball of greasy, black plasticine that
weighed as much as he did, which he rolled
around the streets of New York City, impress-
ing it upon gutter grates and grabbing dirt as
it moved along. Orozco also arrayed oranges
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in the windows of buildings opposite the mu-
seum Home Run, 1993), testing the conven-
tion al limits of art-viewing s pace. At th at year's
Venice Biennial, an empty shoe box occupied
a gallery floor Empty Shoe Box, 1993), and
later, at his first shows at Marian Goodman
and Chantai Crousel, in Paris, Orozco tacked
yogurt lids to the walls of an otherwise empty
white cube (Yogurt Caps, 1994) and presen ted a
compressed Citroën racecar
La
DS 1993), hav-
ing sliced out th e m iddle third of its body, mak-
ing it look bug-like and melancholy, excited
and yet incapacitated from ever racing again.
Each of these works con tains an exploration of
space, chance, and play, the way that humans
impose themselves and are imposed upon by
their surroundings, and how we react to and
intera ct w ith a rt objects. A bit of provocation
and nose-thumbing, too: antiauthoritarianism
bent against elegance.
Two decades on, he has become part of a
canon of avant-garde installation artists, such
that his failure—at least in the fall-on-your-
face, excoriated-by-critics, can't-get-a-show
artistic understanding of the word—is diffi-
cult to imagine. Even after certain works fell
flat, as when his Samurai Tree paintings of
fragmented circles in blue, red, gold, and wh ite
were panned (New York magazine's Jerry Saltz
called the m aesthetically celibate and intel-
lectually chaste ), Orozco never lost his place
in the firmament of contemporary artists for
whom true failure may no longer exist.
I argued as mu ch, sitting in th e living room
of his Mexico City home last summer during
our first interview. He had spent the last twenty
minutes pacing around his study, then leaning
over the table at which I sat, and then taking
a seat as if in measured approval of the task.
After another twenty minutes or so, he asked
if we cou ld move to the living room , whe re we
settled into one of the two long, white sofas
there. Orozco is not a fidgeter. When he is at
rest he is quite still, his hands often lingering
near his chin or mouth in expressions of con-
templation. But he is frequently in motion,
between rooms or groups of people, now get-
ting a bottle of water, later a mezcal, then a
Jorge Luis Borges book to look up a poem abou t
James Joyce.
No w in his living room , he asked m e if it was
okay if he thought for a moment about how to
answer my question about failure. He looked
out the window at the garden, smoked his
Marlboro, twisted one of the silver and black
sapphire rings from Bali on his finger.
I like tha t question, he said. W hen you're
no one, no one knows who you are.
ut
then
they start to know you and to have expecta-
tions.
Like, if you say that I am p art of
canon,
people think I live like this, I am going to do
that, that I do things, I guess, to sustain my
status or m y fame or my skills in whatever I do.
But the n you see m any artists in this—let's say,
in
my
position—that start to fail in the bad way.
Failure can be perceived as success, som etim es,
but it's still failure.
When you do something that is not what
you're supposed to be good at, and it puts you in
a position of looking like beginner, or clumsy,
or not so ma sterful, it looks like failure beca use
you're doing something that you're not known
for, or not famous for, he co nti nu ed .
Orozco doesn't necessarily want to disap-
point, nor does he want to fail, not in a literal
sense. Rather, he wants to protect his right to
be a beginner, even at an established point in
his career, even w hen mu ch of wh at he is doing
today revises wha t he's don e in the pa st. Circles
inform his aesthetic, but they're also what he
cites wh en he talks about the path of an artist:
spirals, circles, cycles, success an d failure as in-
take and exh ale of bre ath . It's just that if you
have developed many layers of work, you have
a bigger range of possibility of failure in both
ways,
good and bad, he said.
ut even
w h e n
failure w as an accepted o utcom e, how did it feel
wh en it actually happene d, as in
Samurai Trees?
It was probably the most shocking state-
m ent in my pursuit of disappointm ent, he
said. I really tried to do some thing that was
not in the expectations of people, even those
wh o loved my work.
Believe me, he added. I get ups et at them
also.
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Four Bicycles There
i s
Always
One
Direction),
1994. Bicycles, 78 x 88 x 88
FACING
PAGE,
A B O V E :
Yielding Stone 1993 . P las t i c ine , approx . 14 x 1 7 x 1 7 .
FACING PAGE, BELO W: La DS 1 9 9 3 . M o d i f i e d C i t ro ë n , 5 9 x 1 9 2 % x 47 V 4 .
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O
ROZCO WAS BORN IN X A L A P A IN THE GUL F-SIDE
State of Veracruz, in 1962. When he was
six years old, his family moved to Mexico City
so tha t his father could mo re easily work w ith
David Alfaro Siqueiros, the political mural-
ist he assisted for much of his career. Mario
Orozco Rivera was, like many of the mural-
ists of his generation, a staunch member of
Mexico's Communist Party. In a Siqueiros por-
trait tha t hangs on the wall of Orozco's M exico
City hom e, his father's c hin is cocked upw ard,
thrust stubbornly out. Orozco describes his
father as a very prou d m an, very leftist, very
com mitte d to politics. He grew up helpin g his
father paint murals. Murals, Mario once said
in an interview, had a more illustrious future
than paintings that sold at market like mere
merchandise.
Today, camera -toting tourists go to Mexico
City's public buildings to view the art that
Orozco's father and his cohorts painted—on
the walls of the government palace, the cus-
toms house, the secretariat of education. The
list takes up a page of the
Lonely Planet
guide
to the city. Mexico City's dow ntow n has some
of the best public art in the world: enormous
stretches of riotous n arrative that spells out the
struggles of the Aztecs versus the Spaniards,
peasants versus landowners, agriculture ver-
sus industrialization. Mexico's history is told
through various stages of labor and protest,
in shades of yellow, red, purple, orange: vis-
ceral colors of struggle. Then come the gray
mac hines a nd the black top hats that follow.
The Vasconcelos Library, which opened in
2 0 0 6 ,
was to add to this canon, albeit in an
oblique, minim alist, twenty-first-century m an-
ner: public building that represented Mexico's
new levels of commitment—by way of a $100
million investment—to education and the arts.
At 500,000 square feet, the library has the ca-
pacity for 1.5 million books, plus classrooms,
offices, and cultural space. The monumental
building, which evokes both a pyramid and a
science lab, was designed in concrete, stone,
and glass by Mexican architect Alberto Ka-
lach, and features the only publicly funded art
Matrix
(2 00 6). The lightly sketched-on whale
skeleton, which shudders with interlocking el-
lipses drawn with
6 000
pencils on its bones,
hangs in the central nave.
For president Vicente Fox, the library was a
symbol of how far M exico had com e as a legiti-
mate democracy. Since 1929, the country had
been ruled by the Institutional Revolutionary
Party (PRI), whose corruption was both insid-
ious and blunt—in a word, complete. Under
the PRI, Mexico was a country in which pro-
democracy student protests were squelched
by gunfire, in which cultural and educational
investments were minimal. In 2000, Fox and
his opposition party, the con servative N ational
Action Party (PAN), defeated the mighty PRI.
The timing of the library's opening in 2006—
near the end of Fox's term and just a month
before the general election— was seen by many
as political posturing. More to the point, the
building was considered extravagant. Orozco
was criticized for accepting th e flashy commis-
sion and its money, for imp licitly suppo rting its
political implications, for providing, as Mexi-
can art critic Cu auhtem oc M edina told the New
or Times a centerpiece for the national cul-
tural white elephant.
The PAN candidate won th e presidency by
half of a perce ntage poin t. But w ithin a year of
its unveiling, th e library closed. Au ditors found
tha t the entir e complex suffered from barrage
of structural problems: marble slabs that had
been put in the wrong places, an unfinished
drainage system, a total of thirty-six faults that
caused leaks, flooding, and instability. The
ma in problem, the library's director, Ignacio
Padilla, told Architectural Record is that the
building is not finished.
Repairs took another year and a
half.
Orozco's whale was never moved. It gathered
dust during the renovations and, when th e time
came to reopen, was cleaned in anticipation
of the crowds. After removing the dust, the
cleaning staff began to apply a protective coat
of varnish, which wo uld have ruined t he subtle
Mobile M atrix
20 06 . Graphite on gray whale
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Orozco doesn t necessarily want to disappoint, nor does he want
to fail, not in a literal sense. Rather, he wants to protect h is right
to he a beginner, even at an established point in his career.
coating that allowed the matte of the bone to
contrast with the gleam of the graphite, an in-
termittent shimmer that added to the visual
movement of the stationary skeleton. Luckily,
the error was caught early, and museographer
M arco Barrera Bassols, wh o had helped Orozco
orchestrate the whale's creation, oversaw its
removal. In the future, the skeleton would be
kept clean by blowing air inch by inch across
the bones.
A
s WITH HIS SHIVERING WHA LE A SORT OF
I attenu ated gorgeousness hangs aroun d
m uch of Orozco's work. No matte r how hu mb le
the materials, the result is often disconcert-
ingly beautiful: the greasy shine of Yielding
Stone, the color-coded tidiness oiAsterisms, the
quasi-star-shaped pu ddle of w ater reflecting
gray-blue sky in a photo of a grimy, collapsed
soccer ball Pinched Ball 1993).
The ex-convent in Mexico City where
Orozco, his wife, and their nine-year-old son
spend three months of the year exhibits this
self-conscious stylishness. The house h ides be-
hind eno rmo us studded doors on a cobblestone
street, just two blocks away from wh ere Orozco
lived as a boy. Other d etails of the h ouse are out-
sized: two eager black Labrador retrievers that
greet every visitor, windows that offer broad
views of the garden, gray stone arches, puffy
white sofas—a kind of gothic Wonderland.
Alongside the sofas, white-painted maguey
flowers stretc h stiffly tow ard fourteen-foot ceil-
ings.
On the walls han g his father's sketches for
a mural, pencil studies of a woman's torso and
a man's arm , of an arm w ith its veins in relief
an arm with only its muscles drawn, an arm
disappearing down a hole. In the study, where
wood-clad bookshelves are packed with art
books and novels, a carambole table (pool with-
out the pockets, Orozco explains) stands be-
fore a ma ntel, beside w hich are two of Orozco's
first paintings, which he made as a teenager,
abstract pastels on black paper that channel
Wassily Kandinsky and the C ubists. Geo me tric
lamps dangle above wood an d leather Mexican
modern furniture. Everything is in its correct
place, calculated sh ort of being cold.
At the end of high school, Orozco moved
out of his parents' home in this neighborhood
to live with friends farther south in Tlalpan,
which used to be a colonial country getaway
until the city's sprawl consumed it. Still, its
streets are leafy, its roads uneven. At first
Orozco squatted at his friends' house; after he
began to make some money from his art, he
bought it.
Every Friday for four or five years, from
around eleven in the mor ning until nighttim e,
a group of artists would descend on Orozco's
Tlalpan home. He had graduated from Mex-
ico's national art school in 1984, studied for
a year in Spain, and returned to Mexico City
with an overwhelming sense of al ienation
from the local art scene. From 1987 to 1991
or 1992—no one seems to remember exactly
wh en— he hosted a cadre of a half-dozen art-
ists and students for a salon-like day of in-
dep end ent work and group discussion. We
changed the name all the time, but it was al-
ways workshop, because it was my workshop,
Oroz co said. Stupid nam es, like Ahi Viene
Carlitos
— ere
Comes Carlitos—because there
was a critic w ho was always trying to sneak in,
and we w ere tired of him . For me, it was a way
to no t be so alone.
Orozco had begun to travel abroad with
his ar twork, and each t ime he returned to
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were unavailable in Mexico, circulated amo ng
a small group of slightly younger artists. The
Friday W orkshop was th e formalization ofth at
ritual. It usually included independent work,
lunch t ime
tortas
bought from a Salvadorian
man who lived nearby, collective discussions
about art, and beers, usually in that order. At
the end of the week, artists who were still in
school would leave class, pack up their work,
and drive to Orozco's hou se. Even if he didn't
want to be, Gabriel became a teacher figure,
said Gabriel Kuri, one of the regular atten dee s.
It was inevitable tha t we wo uld see him as an
example.
Of the half-dozen CVs of Orozco's that can
be found on the inte rne t, the Friday W orkshop
appears on more than one. What is not on his
CV is his status as one of the three founders
of Kurimanzutto, the Mexico City gallery that
opened in 1999.
The first site of Kurimanzutto was in a
market called Mercado Medellin, near the in-
creasingly trendy neighborhoods of Condesa
and Roma, which the city's wealthy had aban-
doned after a devastating earthquake in 1985.
Artists we re moving in and colonizing the area
with studios, conceptual-art spaces, bars. The
first exhib it, a day-long show, featured puck ish
installations by the founding members of the
Friday Workshop, among others, arranged in
a cavernous, block-consuming stretch of fruit
sellers, amid stacked bottles of cleaning p rod-
ucts,
boxes of biscuits, and candies. The show
was titled
M arket Economy.
Not having fixe venue was the idea behind
Kurimanzutto's founding. It would exist only
in nam e, serving more as financial and logisti-
cal support for artists whose works were less
static than paintings on
walls.
We are starting
a project that stems from a tight collaboration
between a group of artists and gallerists who
listen to us and understa nd us, Orozco, wh o
had been unrepresented by a Mexican gallery
as his fame rose throug hou t th e 1990s, told Re-
forma one of Mexico City's main newspapers.
Together we will try to create collective w ork
of our generation. Subseq uent shows would
Political mura list David Alfaro Siqueiros lef t) and
Ma rio Orozco Rivera rig ht) , Mexico City, 1970.
an apartm ent shared by Monica M anzutto and
José Kuri, with whom Orozco cofounded the
gallery, and later at Cha ntai C rousel.
The gallery came about, Orozco said, be-
cause he'd stopped doing work in Mexico. He
was living in New York and retu rne d h om e pri-
m arily to see friends an d family. I was work-
ing with good galleries in New York and Paris,
and suddenly I realized that I wasn't going to
Mexico anymo re, he said. Everything else was
absorbing me. But the galleries that existed in
Mexico weren't very prepared for the sort of
work I did. I had the idea, gave it a name, put
everyone all together, a nd th at was it.
A sense of having pulled something off, a
giddy swelling of what could be expected, ac-
companied Kurimanzutto 's immediate suc-
cesses . Articles in newspapers and travel
magazines began to compare Mexico City to
London in the 1990s, to proclaim that t he city's
mo me nt had come. Though he was not always
present, Orozco often hovered at the center
of such conversations. It was very dynam ic,
that moment, and not having a space allowed
us to move around the city, and to show out-
side of the country, said M anz utto . It's a com -
mercial gallery, it was obvious even then, but
by not having a space we were going against
something.
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THE ROOF OF HIS HOUSE ON THE MEXIC N
coast, Orozco holds a string in his h and,
a feather dangling from his fingers, to test the
wind. Behind him, the Pacific O cean shim -
me rs. In front of him , a circular pool glim me rs
a brighter, clearer blue. Orozco designed this
house based
on a
seventee nth-century Indian
observatory, with four living spaces that inter-
sect in the shape of a cross, and a circular pool
that hangs in the middle of the house.
After measuring the wind, he stands still,
pulls his arm back over his shoulder , and
throws the boomerang, which bangs forward
and lifts as
it
cuts through the air, then zooms
back around. Orozco turns and catches
it
just
a few steps from where he threw it.
This was the video that played on a fifty-
eight-inch TV in one of the two classrooms
at the Marian Goodman Gallery last Novem-
ber, a back drop for Spanish Lessons the three-
week project that would
run
concurren t ly
with thinking in circles which had taken over
the sprawling, open gallery space upstairs.
The Samurai paintings were back.
And the
tempera-on-pap er pieces were the re, too, or-
ganic and elusive as they hove red above framed
ivory mats alongside stones with clean circles
carved out of them .
Downstairs, the tropical video contra sted
with the cop per roofs of stately townho uses
and the construction lights of midtown Man-
hattan high-rises you could see through the
windows.
It
was nearly four
in
the afternoon
on
the
show 's first d ay;
the
official op en ing
would
be at
six. Orozco wore black jeans,
a
dark-gray, button-down shirt, a pile of silver
and wood bracelets, and gray, plastic glasses
that he wou ld take off w hen guests began to
arrive in force. He was tired, he said. He'd bee n
at the gallery for weeks and faced a long night
and early mo rning . The next day, he'd perform
a class called M irror Crit, du ring w hic h
he
would flip through images
of a
youn g artist's
paintings on one of the televisions and describe
each piece as if it w ere his own, conte m pora ry
art bullshitting mixed with critique. The red,
green, and white on this canvas, he'd say, are
looks like women's panties above
the
tw o
T-
shirts pasted
to
the canvas tell the story
of a
couple that lost their und erw ear in Mexico.
For
now the
show's final deta ils w ere
smooth ing
out.
Chalk
and
erasers, Orozco
pointed out, had
to
be collected and put away
lest the visitors use them too liberally. The
walls of the three rooms in the 1,200-square-
foot space were coated in a broad swath of
blackboard paint and pulsed w ith w hat had
been written, erased, and rewritten: Spanish-
English cognates, a Borges poem transla ted
into English,
a
quote
by
Cuban intel lectual
Jose Marti, strange words
and
phra ses like
Tiempo, Som bra de besos, and Soy un
ar-
tista in block letters, repeated n ine tim es in
a vert ical column. On two folding tables in
the main room, Orozco and his team of artists
and teachers had set up a chessboard as well
as dominos that Cuban artist Wilfredo Prieto
had brought up from Havana. A documentary
about Borges played on the wall. The project's
program promised
not
only twenty-m inute
Spanish classes but worksh ops wit h artists like
Prieto, Damián Ortega, and Abraham Cruzvil-
legas, conversations between poet Monica de
la Torre and novelist Ben Lerner, a karaoke ses-
sion with Mexican artist Pablo Helgue ra, and a
session on Boomerang Throwing In and Out
of Language, led by Oro zco himself.
The project was insp i red by Borges,
Orozco said on our w ay upstairs to the main
gallery, where he would call the nearest gallery
employee over to point out that the poster di-
recting visitors downstairs didn't look right and
needed to be moved. People quote him but
don't know how it sounds in Spanish. I started
to think about Spanish as a serious language,
an intellectual language. It's the second most
popular language in the United States, but here
most people use it to talk to the gardener . I
like
the
contrast betw een the show upstairs,
which is abstract, hermetic, not narrative, and
dow nstairs, which is about comm unication and
idiom. It's
a
space
for
exchange
in
Ne w York
continued o page 48
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rozco s
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City, whic h doesn't happ en mu ch tha t way any-
more, at least not in the art world.
Even the Spanish class Menu, one teach er
later told me, was a collaborative effort. The
convoked team of a half-dozen teachers and
artists had been putting together the program
for the last three weeks. They'd filled every
inch of the blackboard walls with tequila-
fueled brainstorming sessions and translated
poetry, discussing politics and playing domi-
nos together. Among the suggested subjects for
Cho ose Your Ow n Topic, studen ts we re di-
rected toward
News,
Obam acare, Wikileaks,
and Privacy Issues, Imm igration Politics, a nd
Democrats vs. Republicans.
A group of middle-aged wom en in long,
earth-toned coats arrived at 5:40.
"Bienveni-
dos, welcome, Orozco exclaimed, and walked
them through the space, gesturing to the two
microphones for karaoke in the back room,
then pointing toward a shelf of poetry in an-
other classroom.
spectacular they muttered to one another
as they left to go upstairs.
"Buenisimo '
Orozco his
son
and several of their sixty-tw o pets.
OSKAR LA NDI)
stairs, smoking near a window and talking his
way around th e crowd of Mexican cu ltural and
diplomatic figures, other Ma rian Goodm an art-
ists, young artists, high-school acquaintances.
At the Mirror Crit the next morning, a
winnow ed-down selection of
tw
dozen mem-
bers of the same crowd jam me d into one of the
small classrooms with coffee in paper cups.
Orozco leaned out of his folding chair and
stroked his chin as he described each painting ,
large natural-toned canvases with expressive
blotches of bright color and cartoonish forms
with fuzzy outlines. W hen h e invited a udienc e
members to ask him, the faux-painter, ques-
tions, he instructed th em to be harsh : You can
be critical, shoot it, I don't care.
You're much better than that Gabriel
Orozco characte r whose work is upstairs, said
one wo ma n. You could teach him a thing or
two.
Orozco and everyone else laughed, includ-
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opposite end of the room, looking excited and
vaguely nauseated.
Did you make drawings for these paint-
ings?
asked another.
No,
in fact, these are the preparatory can-
vases, Orozco answ ered. They are, and they
are in the process of becoming. giggle swept
across the room again. Soon the experiment
was over; there were Spanish classes to begin.
O
ROZCO KEEPS A HALF DOZEN BOO MERANGS
tacked to the
Wcdl
of his garden-level N ew
York studio. He owns around 250 more, from
cheap plastic to expensive collector's models
signed by the world's best throwers.
It took him two months to learn to throw
a short-range boomerang, he said, and a year
or more to master the long-range ones, which
can travel up to 260 yards before returning to
the lau nch ing spot. These days, he only throw s
the long boom erangs on the weekends, du ring
visits to his Pennsylvania farmhouse, w here he
and his family go every weekend during the
school year. At last count, they kept sixty-two
pets there, most of which remain on the farm
during the week—llamas, alpacas, chickens,
pigs, a flock of geese that arrived unbidden to
the p ond on the property, a few dogs, and m ore.
When he was his son's age, Orozco wanted
to be a star Formula One driver. But in Mex-
ico, it's a career that's not easy to have, to be a
speed racec ar driver, he said. He used to walk
down the street looking at cars and thinking
about how, if you just cut them the right way,
they could race. When he was a kid, he said,
his notebooks w ere filled with sketches of cars.
La S was a direct re turn to these childhood
plans. This summer, the Kunsthaus Bregenz
museum in Austria featured a reincarnation of
La S called La S
ornaline
(2013), a tighter,
newer, burgundy version of the original.
His more current notebooks are filled with
thoughts, sketches, snippets of ideas inspired
by wh at he's reading. A mobile studio of sorts,
he calls them, which a non-assistant assistant
transcribed this year. Twenty years of note-
text, which Orozco is now editing down to
300 pages that the leftist press Ediciones Era
will publish in Mexico this year. I was not just
scribbling or sketching out,
I
was taking notes ,
and I knew that I was going back to these pages,
and I always did, he said. I was always wr iting
for my own understanding.
Publishing notebooks is not the gesture of
an insecure artist. Though Orozco may often
ruminate on the varieties of failure and disap-
pointment, it is impossible not to see, even in
his most ephemeral work, an ambition that
shines through, even when tempered with
coyness. For all its playful, collaborative bent,
Orozco's oeuvre and presence feel weighted
with an awareness of their own m agnitude. Un-
like London in the 1990s, wh ich birth ed a half-
dozen household art-world names, Orozco's
is the only commonly known Mexican name
from th e early 200 0s.
The first weekend after the Marian Good-
man opening, the family returned to the farm-
house, where Orozco keeps a set of boom erangs
stuffed in file folders in a foot-wide briefcase.
The next week, he'd be back at Marian Good-
man, where he'd perform another Mirror Crit.
Then he'd go to Mexico City for a few days to
host a panel. Then he'd com e back to New York
and Pennsylvania, work toward shows planne d
for th e next year and
a half
at Stockholm's Mod-
erna Museet and Tokyo's National Museum of
Modern Art, among others.
That Sunday afternoon, tufted pink-tipped
clouds rippled over the long, low slope of the
field behind the barn. The day was windy.
Maples and oaks shivered nearby, nearly bald.
Orozco leaned back and pitched the boomer-
ang, a pink-and-yellow model that sliced up
and out on a tilted axis, then shot back in and
burrow ed into th e long, nea t grass a few paces
away. This tim e I'll catc h it, he said. I prom -
ise.
He pulled his arm back and launched it
again. He didn't catch it the fifth time, or the
sixth. But eventually, as it lashed back arou nd,
it got close enou gh, and he steppe d and swung
his arms like a jaw snapping shut, his hands
clapping around the boomerang just before it
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C o p y r i g h t o f V i r g i n i a Q u a r t e r l y R e v i e w i s t h e p r o p e r t y o f V i r g i n i a Q u a r t e r l y R e v i e w a n d i t s
c o n t e n t m a y n o t b e c o p i e d o r e m a i l e d t o m u l t i p l e s i t e s o r p o s t e d t o a l i s t s e r v w i t h o u t t h e
c o p y r i g h t h o l d e r ' s e x p r e s s w r i t t e n p e r m i s s i o n . H o w e v e r , u s e r s m a y p r i n t , d o w n l o a d , o r e m a i l
a r t i c l e s f o r i n d i v i d u a l u s e .