A global practice of art making

Associated media

Gabriel Orozco

Jessica Morgan

For Jessica Morgan, Gabriel Orozco (b. Veracruz, Mexico, 1962) is an exemplary figure in contemporary artistic practice. The travels he has undertaken for educational, personal and professional reasons, combined with his resistance to identification with any single country or artistic environment, make him part of a new generation of artists who have established ‘a global practice of art making’. Morgan is quick to distinguish this claim from images of romantic wandering or internationalism. Instead, she links this theme to explorations of personal identity, dislocation, and ‘otherness’ that recur throughout Orozco’s work and practice.

Morgan is curator of an exhibition of works by Orozco at London’s Tate Modern (19 January – 25 April 2011). She skilfully imparts biographical information about the artist throughout her discussion of his works and exhibition history. She covers his artistic influences, educational experiences, and dialogues with his contemporaries, providing a sense of the different environments and encounters that have most marked his development as an artist. These range from his early art training in Mexico City, to student days in Madrid, and time spent living and working in New York.

Morgan is alert to ways in which Orozco’s works interact with the gallery’s architecture around them. She provides insight into certain of Orozco’s works that could erroneously be interpreted as familiar critiques of the spaces for exhibiting and viewing art, including the Empty Shoe Box, which was part of the artist’s contribution to the 1993 Venice Biennale. Morgan provides a new explanation for this piece, which some people have seen as a provocative gesture. Instead, Morgan relates it to Orozco’s personal practice of storing objects and drawings in shoeboxes in his apartment, his visual experiments with found and discarded materials, and his probing of the physical and imaginative contexts in which we view art. Orozco blurs boundaries between art gallery, domestic space, and public street. Morgan highlights the unique, and often surprising, nature of each new installation of the artist’s works. 

The theme of game playing recurs persistently in Orozco’s output, and it is a subject that is amply treated in this book. From the beautifully conceived Horses Running Endlessly of 1995 (an enlarged chess board occupied only by knights), to the oval billiard table comprising Carambole with Pendulum (1996), and modified ping-pong tables that unfold around a central lily pond in Ping-Pond Table (1998), viewers are invited to think afresh about familiar games as they attempt to devise ways of winning when governed by a new set of rules. Morgan also highlights the broader significance of game playing in Orozco’s work, drawing attention to the way he explores the relationship between sport and community. In the haunting Empty Club (an installation on the site of now disbanded Devonshire Club on St James’s Street in central London) Orozco’s fascination with architecture and gaming combine to produce a meditation on the fragile choreography that supports social, economic, and cultural infrastructure.

Morgan concludes her book with short essay in which she argues that Orozco’s works are marked by the artist’s ‘absent presence’. She develops the artist’s own stated quest for self-erasure and argues that the gestural qualities of Orozco’s works, in particular his sculptures, leave enigmatic traces of the artist’s body and actions. Following the traces of this ‘invisible actor’, to use Morgan’s term, through museums, natural environments, and urban spaces around the world is a journey worth taking.

This handsomely illustrated book was published to coincide with the exhibition at Tate Modern. Engagingly written, the book is aimed at the general reader and will provide an introduction to the imaginative breadth of Orozco’s sculptures, installations, photographs, collages, and drawings. Chapters are interspersed with interviews carried out by the author, Jessica Morgan, with the artist. Each interview focuses on a single work and provides fresh insight into key pieces of Orozco’s output, including, amongst others, La DS (1993), Black Kites (1997), and the artist’s more recent experiments in terracotta entitled Cazuelas (2002).

This book is published by Tate Publishing, 2011.  128 pp. 100 colour illus. ISBN 978-1-85437-912-2