Gabriel Orozco

WHEN MARCEL DUCHAMP mounted a challenge to Constantin Brancusi during a joint visit to an exhibition of new airplane technologies in Paris in 1912—asking Brancusi whether he could ever sculpt anything as perfect as an airplane propeller—he figured a contradiction that haunted sculptural production for the remaining part of the twentieth century and into the first two decades of the twenty-first: the dialectics between traditional artisanal and artistic modes of sculptural production and the ever more compelling paradigm of the technologically produced readymade. Obviously, this dialectic has been constitutive of Gabriel Orozco’s work from the very beginning and determines it to this very day. 

But the challenge addresses an even more pertinent question: Which, if any, of the traditional modes of sculptural production—e.g., modeling, cutting, and casting—is still viable and credible in the present at all? And how do we relate to a sculptural oeuvre like Orozco’s in which the artist continues to deploy all these supposedly outdated modes simultaneously (occupying in fact an almost unique position among sculptors since the second half of the twentieth century)? His project becomes even more complex when the artist—as early as 1991—introduces two additional strategies into the arsenal of his traditional production procedures that programmatically contest their exclusive viability: the readymade and the photograph. 

The decisive—certainly not the conclusive—moment of Orozco’s retrospective exhibition “Politécnico Nacional” at Mexico City’s Museo Jumex, organized by Briony Fer, allows us to contemplate the astonishing multitudes of his singular sculptural practice. In fact, no other project of the past half century comes to mind that is comparable to Orozco’s work of the past three decades, with its the complex and contradictory morphologies, operations, materials, and sites. But this retrospective also gives us the opportunity to think once again about the medium, genre, practices, materials, and sites of sculpture in its recent past, its present, and possibly even its future. 

Confronting Orozco’s sculptural work could inspire us to rewrite Richard Serra’s famous Verb List of ca. 1967–68, which named about one hundred infinitive verbs describing processes of sculptural production. In contradistinction to Serra, we could formulate two lists of terms constituting Orozco’s work. The first would give an account of the extreme diversity of materials and object types the artist deploys: rubber tires and terra-cotta, papier-mâché and marble, cars and bicycles, toilet paper and lint, construction debris and boomerangs, cacti and agave leaves, oranges and chewing gum, river stones and rubber balls, motor scooters and yogurt caps—to name but a few. The second would comprise the sites where his work has been conceived and installed: an abandoned market in Brazil and an open cemetery in Mali, the windows of luxury apartments in New York and a gallery transformed into a garage in Antwerp, a social club in London and the streets of Berlin, a franchise of the Mexican OXXO convenience store chain and the public space of a garden. And, eventually, an entire urban district of Mexico City: Chapultepec Park (and of course, the spaces of galleries and museums).

No other project of the past half century comes to mind that is comparable to Orozco’s work of the past three decades, with its complex and contradictory morphologies, operations, materials, and sites.

My Hands Are My Heart seems a direct response to some of these questions, literally performing unresolvable contradictions. It seems to direct us literally to the heart of the matter of making sculpture: opposing techne, it insists on soma, the bodily immediacy, the corporeal continuity between subject and object. And it provides material evidence of a possible identity that redeems us from the state of alienation and reification. Going even further, its materiality, terra-cotta, and its iconography, the corazón, seduce us to discover an even more seductive identity, a cultural and historical foundation, mexicanidad. Paradoxically, these seductions endow the sculpture with all the false functions of a substitute, which is the quintessential definition of the fetish—compensation for loss and lack, ranging from corporeal presence to the gratifying promise of national cultural identity and continuity, a loss that a work of art cannot and will not repair, in fact has to resist at all costs to do the work of the work of art. 

But these seductions or deceptions are canceled when the work confronts us with the photographic records of the performative procedure itself—and not only by making the photograph an integral component, the dialectical complement to the material sculptural production. The photograph also confronts us with the performative rehearsal of our own projections, our aspirations for the compensations that the sculpture should deliver. It is in this photographic rehearsal of the productive process that Orozco’s work reminds us of a crucial piece by Bruce Nauman, Art Make-Up, 1967–68,which likewise traces the origin and the destination of the desire for the aesthetic experience, in this case, the origin of painting. Like Orozco, Nauman had exposed his own naked torso to satisfy our desire for absolute immediacy and authenticity. Ever since Nauman (and corresponding figures in Italian Arte Povera like Giuseppe Penone), sculptural production has comprised, if not even required, the presence of photography as a discursive element. The photograph corresponds, complements, or even dissolves the sculptural object’s manual and artisanal production procedures, functioning not as document but as its dialectical technological counterpart. This sculptural dialectic is activated again and again in Orozco’s subsequent work, especially when engaging with the treacherous matter of terra-cotta: In an utterly central work from 2002, Cazuelas (Beginnings),the seductive performance of an apparent return to the potter’s craft is inverted and countered through a chance operation, a ludic intervention performed by the hand of the artist, who throws freshly formed terra-cotta balls into the surface of the freshly formed artisanal vessels, fracturing them and partially disabling their utilitarian potential. 

In this confrontation between traditional craft procedures and the supposedly timeless archaisms of terra-cotta, Orozco once again foregrounds one of his deepest sculptural convictions: that the most powerful enemies of sculpture, the reification and fetishization of the object and the transformation of sculpture into spectacle, can be subverted, if not undone, by associating sculpture with the structures of the game. The ludic principle does not only transfigure the spectator’s passive contemplative mode of aesthetic experience; it activates spectatorial participation, pointing to alternative roads of object relations and social interaction.

Just as Carl Andre promised somewhat grandiloquently in 1970 that his sculpture should function like a road, a road taken by the activated spectator, and thus fulfil the constructivist promise of a transition from radically reductivist abstraction to utilitarian function and use value, Orozco’s Empty Shoe Box, 1993, counteracted the idealizing deception of utopian promises with the deconstruction of the Duchampian readymade paradigm. The empty shell of the utilitarian object, the device of preservation, becomes the object of presentation, allegorically denying grand sculptural promises and literally returning the sculptural object to the actual basis of corporeal and somatic experience of the body’s movement in time and space. 

In the postwar period, car culture has become a seductive violation of private and public space, manifested in its ever more powerful cult status and continually expanding fetishization of an imaginary self-ruling and self-rolling subject secreted in shiny, protective armor. 

The fascination with the celestial airplane as an ideal standard of perfect modernist sculptural form was soon secularized by artists as they discovered the down-to-earth appeal of the newly emerging car culture of the late 1910s and early ’20s. Numerous are the examples that illustrate the enchantment with this mechanical motorized object that seemed to embody essential features of a truly sculptural structure of the future: from Marinetti’s celebration of the birth of Futurism in his car wreck in the mud of the trenches, to Picabia’s obsession with racing cars as engines of spectacular masculinity and Sonia Delaunay’s adulation of the car as one more object through which to expand and disseminate the new world of abstract chromatic design. This infatuation with the motorized body changes dramatically in the postwar period, when it dawns on brighter minds that car culture has in fact become a seductive violation of private and public space, manifested in its ever more powerful cult status and continually expanding fetishization of an imaginary self-ruling and self-rolling subject secreted in shiny, protective armor. Indeed, we can trace the reversal of the car’s mythical fortune in the postwar era, citing such examples as Richard Hamilton’s subversive mapping of the fetishistic fusion of the body of desire and the body of the car in his 1957 Hommage à Chrysler Corp. and the literal explosion of fetish and cult to which the French sculptor Arman subjected his famous collector’s favorite private automotive property, the MG convertible, in White Orchid, 1963.²

It is certainly not accidental that the car models deconstructed by artists in this period had all acquired cult status. Take Claes Oldenburg’s almost nostalgic invocation in 1969 of the famous Chrysler 1937 Airflow, one of the first cars to have been designed according to the laws of aerodynamics. The extent to which Oldenburg conceived of the fetishized car as sculpture’s rival in providing unalienated bodily presence and its ultimate nemesis is evident in the artist’s request that his mnemonic relief—a model of the car had been one of his favorite toys as a boy—should have the transparency of a swimming pool and its material, cast polyurethane, should have the soft consistency of flesh. 

Flaminio Bertoni’s Italian design of the French Citroën DS—as the name signals—aspired to mythical stardom from the start when it was released in 1955.³ And indeed it took only two years for it to enter into Mythologies, the epochal essay collection of the philosopher of modern myths, Roland Barthes. Orozco’s choice of the DS for La DS in 1993—and for the work’s second iteration, in 2013—was certainly informed by the car’s mythical powers. But what were his motivations for the sculptural cut that reduced the body by a third, literally disabling all of the fetish’s functions except for those of its primary feature, the design, thereby intensifying it, endowing it even with an imaginary, almost futuristic acceleration? We will not prematurely assume that Orozco’s apparent aggression aimed to destroy the cult car in the manner of Arman’s explosion. Nor do we assume that Orozco aimed for his project to literally embody Barthes’s deconstruction of the myth. Clearly, the artist was already aware that the aggressive public destruction of a mythical object—as Arman had performed it—in fact associated itself involuntarily or knowingly with the seemingly inescapable parameters of spectacle itself, thus canceling the critique it might have set out to induce. Yet at the same time, Orozco’s public reduction of a mythical object by a third of its volume clearly conceives of sculpture as a process of critical reduction, of a paradoxical withdrawal of mass, matter, and volume—presumably the antidote of what we expect from a sculptural production process. It even appears that Orozco declares cutting—one of the most essential traditional sculptural processes—to be the phenomenological embodiment of a fundamentally different type of critical intervention. Certainly, one precedent staged by an artist Orozco befriended and admired might have served as a model: Lawrence Weiner’s A 2″ WIDE 1″ DEEP TRENCH CUT ACROSS A STANDARD ONE-CAR DRIVEWAY,1968. Here the cult of the car and the strategy of its deconstruction by a sculptural cut are literally fused in a dual subversion: The grounding of the sculptural cut in the space of private property and, in particular, in the perverse variety of private automotive space implements sculpture’s innate dialectics—it asserts the primacy and privilege of sculpture’s deep disregard for private space and private property, and it asserts its essential telos of being public and operating in public space. This might help us to also comprehend the almost hermetic compression of Orozco’s gesture of cutting the very object of myth. At the same time that it preserves its morphology and form, it asserts the primacy of the sculptural procedure and structure over the power of myth. As was essential to the procedure of the cut in Weiner’s work, Orozco’s removal neither spectacularizes itself as gesture (as it had done in Lucio Fontana’s work) nor spectacularizes the site or the object of its sculptural deconstruction. The shell of the fetish and the ruins of spectacle remain visible and intact as negative monuments. No victory is claimed other than sculpture’s public affirmation of its difference from fetish and spectacle and its persistence to operate in opposition, in public space. 

To what extent Orozco’s work is in fact engaged with the current conditions of public space, and more specifically with the conditions of cultural production in social space at large, was programmatically performed and formulated in OROXXO, a major project produced by José Kuri and Mónica Manzutto in Mexico City in 2017. Mimetically inscribing the socioeconomics of the financialization of cultural production within the conception and concretization of the work, the artist installed a completely stocked and fully functional branch of OXXO—the largest chain of Mexican convenience stores—in Mexico City’s most prominent gallery of contemporary art, kurimanzutto.

OROXXO literally presented itself in a grotesque act of authorial self-effacement, with the climactic erasure of the artist’s name performed in the mock phonetic assimilation of Orozco into OROXXO, the symbiotic fusion of the artist’s name with that of a monolithic corporation of global consumption. That phonetic play alone already signals one of the project’s theoretical subterfuges: that of exploring the most advanced conditions of the subject’s annihilation as a foundational precondition for artistic authority. To rephrase the Duchampian and Warholian question: Can one manifestly force the work of art and the work of the commodity into a final congruence by abolishing authorial identity and interference altogether? 

Warhol’s first presentation of his Campbell’s Soup Can paintings had equally (and a year after Oldenburg’s Store) appeared in the guise of objects in a store, mocking the art gallery’s eternally disavowed commercial latency. And what appeared in 1962 as the most radical attempts to desublimate painting and sculpture by mimetically mapping their iconography, morphologies, and production procedures onto the actual commodity object is now fully accomplished when Orozco—in an orthodox return to Duchamp’s readymade—collapses all objects, as well as their institution of production and distribution, into one congruent synthesis of monotonous and homogeneous objects, frame and fiction. The failed reception of Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Can paintings in 1962 only proves that the consequential mapping of an economic configuration (the commodity object) on its opposite (the aesthetic object) was utterly illegible and unthinkable at that time. Similarly, at least for the time being, Orozco’s congruence of store and gallery, of universal commodity and of global sculpture, emptied even of the most residual forms of tactility, has remained relatively illegible. 

Not accidentally sharing the extreme delay of reception with Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise, OROXXO concludes the innately totalizing radicality of the readymade with utter consequence. If Duchamp had finally collapsed the modus of technical production of the readymade with the readymade’s technical reproduction, in OROXXO Orozco claims the totality of the actual institution of the production and dissemination of the objects of consumer culture as the credible matrix for his conception of the sculptural object. 

Following Duchamp’s prognosis that one day in the future the entire galaxy of objects would qualify for the status of readymade, Orozco came quite logically to a conclusion: Not only the objects but the institutions actually producing and disseminating the plethora of readymade objects under totalitarian consumer culture needed to be critically incorporated and theorized. OROXXO thus exceeds even the spatial chiasmus and discursive exchanges that artists in the context of institutional critique had initiated.

After grotesquely assimilating the artist’s name into the corporate brand, and imposing the space of the supermarket onto the space of the gallery, Orozco no less grotesquely transferred artificial rarefication, the most crucial economic principle of the marketing of artistic objects, onto precisely the one economic institution where rarefication is utterly impossible: the supermarket. After all, the supermarket—unlike the art market—is precisely the sphere where the principle of artificial rarefication has neither value nor function, since the inexhaustible production of consumer-culture objects defines itself by the perpetual repetition and complete abolition of the singular, the specific, the concrete, and the presence of the tactile. By contrast, the principle of artificial rarefication, the essential secret of rapid value increases in artistic production under the conditions of global financialization, had brought about heretofore unimaginable numbers of speculators/investors in contemporary art, and a no less extreme increase in artistic practices that are all too willing to deliver products to this global project of investment and speculation.

In OROXXO Orozco claims the totality of the actual institution of the production and dissemination of the objects of consumer culture as the credible matrix for his conception of the sculptural object.

Orozco’s OROXXO installation—other than its conception and logistical planning—literally lacked any other intervention by the artist, except for one seemingly minimal addition: a single sticker, adorned with Orzoco’s idiom of painterly abstraction, affixed to every item in the store’s universe of readymade objects, an addition that designated each item as a work of the artist and the mere commodity as a work of art. Analogous to the erasure of the artist’s name, now even his innermost idiom, which had culminated in his ongoing series of “Samurai Tree” paintings, begun in 2005, appears reduced to the extreme banality of a mere marker of authorial identification, confronting each collector with the question of whether every banal object in OROXXO had actually been transfigured and redeemed by the sign of abstraction. After all, abstraction had been in the service of spiritual liberation and social emancipation since its inception, and had always appeared in opposition to the totally reified world of Duchamp’s readymade. Orozco’s stickers of abstraction posed the question of whether abstraction—denigrated to its lowest possible level—could now serve as a last sign of resistance and redemption from the totalitarian conditions of reification. Too, they asked whether abstraction’s last promise, offering an autotelic cognitive and perceptual instant of perception itself, had now been literally incorporated, by its mere presence, into the totalizing distribution system of commodified contemporaneity.

Thus the global permutation of the aesthetic experience itself is staged in full view in Orozco’s OROXXO: In a dialectical operetta, the artist subjects the most common banality to the rigorous procedures of value accumulation in the same manner that he subjects the elevated principles of a painter’s spiritual aspirations to the most banal procedures of speculation and investment. The very principle of financialization rules even the most mundane exchange of objects in the same manner that the most banal exchange of economic investment and speculation regulates the sign of spiritual autonomy and utopian aspirations that abstraction had initially promised. Thus the collision between the two spheres allows us to clarify the distinct dilemma within which Orozco’s project had constituted itself, and as such has acquired the conditions of an exemplary stage for a central question: whether presumably pure aesthetic spaces and sign spaces can now actually be subjected to the very same social and economic pressures to which the objects of plasticity have long since been fully adapted, if they have not even become their very essence. 

The final dialectics between contemporary sculpture as devalorized commodity and the utopian sculptural and architectural telos of remembering or revealing the possibility of conditions of simultaneous collective reception can find a viable model in the pragmatist conception of actually accessible utilitarian functions. Such a model was accomplished in Orozco’s recent design for the bridges of Chapultepec Park in Mexico City. Once again it is productive to look back at some of the most important predecessors of sculptural production with whom Orozco found himself in an inevitable and continuing dialogue, if not outright conflict and dialectical historical opposition. One of the central works of post-Minimal sculpture is Serra’s To Encircle Base Plate Hexagram, Right Angles Inverted,1970, constructed almost anonymously in a neglected stretch of road in the Bronx in New York, a site that Serra himself described as one where thieves stripped and dismantled the cars they had stolen. The radical anti-monumentality of the circular steel structure, half embedded in the ground, only showing its linear metal edge, the other half of the circle revealing its minimal planarity, almost explicitly if not programmatically denied the credibility of the claim that sculpture could still achieve the promise of monumentality, if not even functionality, mythically associated by Andre with the sculpture’s equivalence to the road. Serra’s epochal sculpture incomparably performed the necessary condition of the anti-monument: The work’s location literally prohibited any form of communicative action. The sculpture’s location itself is one of total urban deletion and communicative displacement as much as the sculptural structure is one of perceptual withdrawal and refusal of even a minimum of gratifying tactility. Indeed, it initiated the most radical negation of sculpture’s everlasting promises—the monument’s simultaneous collective reception—an ancient aspiration first dismantled by the readymade, then extensively abused by propaganda in the ’30s for authoritarian regimes, and finally totally absorbed by ever-intensifying regimes of control and spectacle. In Serra’s work, nothing claims to be site-specific, and nothing claims to be seen, shown, or commemorated—these are the actual conditions of object experience in a social and economic order ruled by the dual tyranny of compulsive consumption and spectacle.

But Orozco seems to always find a road not taken or to resuscitate forgotten and repressed models of cultural production. In an almost exact reversal of every single term just listed to describe the historically crucial features of Serra’s anti-monument, Orozco’s extraordinary design for the vast urban renewal project of Chapultepec Park leads the way out of the epistemic and sculptural cul-de-sac within which Serra’s post-Minimalist radicality placed us. 

The road not taken—and now rediscovered by Orozco—is the reintroduction of the ancient Marxist concept of use value,the dialectical opposite of exchange value, and, more recently, also the sole form of resisting exhibition value, which has totally effaced the concepts of material use and function. But use value had of course also been the archenemy of modernist sculpture. For one, its simplistically radical withdrawal from functional objects like a urinal had been one of the great mysteries of Duchamp’s readymade since 1917. Now Orozco resurrects one of the archaic and at the same time transhistorical models and actually functioning structures that had always fused function, use value, and immaterial spirituality: the architectural typology of the bridge. Always anonymous, totally devoted to the service and the functions of the most elemental needs of the collective, never appealing to the glamour of architectural vanities or the pomposity of the monument, never serving the propagandistic demands of ideology and authoritarian grandeur, the bridge—along with the road—is possibly the only structure among architectural types that integrates pure function and pure use value with the sphere of collective social needs and lives.⁴

That is the amazing volte-face performed by Gabriel Orozco in his most recent rewriting and remaking of the history of sculpture in the twenty-first century. In the construction of Chapultepec Park, the artist orchestrates a triumphant synthesis of public space, sculpture, architecture, and collective conditions of simultaneous reception, along with—most threatening to all sculpture, at least until the transition from Constructivism to Productivism in the Soviet Union—the celebration of use value as a condition of collective defiance of spectacle. The political propaganda voiced by Orozco’s public architecture advocates for allowing people to cross the road, take a walk in the park, and help trees survive and grow. It is a very complex public sculpture, requiring a chapter all to itself—a chapter that I still hope to write.