Speaking as someone who once spent several minutes circling a slightly out of the ordinary light switch, trying to decide whether or not it was part of an art exhibition (it wasn’t) , it doesn’t pain me too much to admit that I failed the same dilemma yet again at Tate Modern’s Gabriel Orozco exhibition. I swept past what seemed to be an empty shoe box abandoned on the floor, muttering something about not being fooled by that old trick, only to note later on from a video accompanying the exhibition that the spurned box is apparently part of Orozco’s work. Still as Orozco is fascinated by transience and the ephemeral he may find the idea of viewers ‘deleting’ certain elements of his work, whether by accident or design, intriguing.
Living and working in Mexico, New York and Paris Orozco epitomizes the global artist, picking up and reinterpreting influences from around the world. He seems to mix up time just as much as place and space, combining what has been deeply familiar and known to him for years with new ideas and perspectives that have hit him out of the blue.
Along with transience Orozco is fascinated by pattern and symmetry, whether they are visible patterns seen in objects or paintings or the more abstract patterns created by movement and energy. Horses Running Endlessly topples the hierarchy of chess by removing the king and quadrupling the size of the board. The knights are left to shadow each other around the board, infinite choreography in a tightly defined and controlled space.
In a piece of what appears to be a piece of anti-symmetry or perhaps the logic of the slightly drunk Orozco has shifted the rules of carambole, a French version of billiards, by building an oval rather than rectangular table and suspending one of the balls just above the table’s surface (see above). This swinging, trapeze artist ball skims back and forth, missing the other balls on most occasions then suddenly making contact, disrupting the flow and changing the rules yet again. Hovering on the periphery then dropping in to change the game plan the flying ball struck me as a perfect illustration of Donald Rumsfeld’s ‘known unknowns’ – it was a moment of political enlightenment through balls and some would say a perfect matching of message and medium.
Place and the process of elements finding and taking up positions in a particular setting are important to Orozco. In this exhibition this is most obvious in Chicotes, a collection of burst tyre fragments gathered from Mexican roads which still give off a faint tang of burnt rubber. Arranged in a wide swathe on the gallery floor with the Thames glinting in the background they look like river debris brought here on the tide.
The loose, faux natural arrangement of Chicotes is faced off by the precise, painstaking artifice of an adjacent work. Dial Tones is a reconfiguration of the New York phone directory, the pages sliced into strips each about as wide as a piece of tagliatelle and then pasted on to a ten metre long paper scroll. Deprived of their accompanying names the numbers still look familiar and make a kind of sense to us because of their recognisable phone book format. It’s a succinct summing up of our reliance on codes and patterns to order our lives, sometimes clinging on to them when they cease to have any obvious use but also using them to interpret our surroundings and create and preserve memories.
The perpetuation of memories and the way in which memory infuses our understanding of the here and now is symbolised in one of the earliest works in this exhibition, Extension of Reflection (1992). A picture of a puddle is superimposed on another photo of a grey asphalt road. Tree branches reflected in the puddle merge with wet bike tyre tracks on the road – the long vanished puddle and the reflection it captured transmute into other forms, blurring lines between what is liquid and solid, what endures and disappears. This image seems to echo the tradition practiced in some parts of the world of throwing water in the wake of people as they leave a particular place, the idea being that the spilling of the water will guarantee their return because…well just because. Perhaps it’s the idea of a return to water, the source of life.
Although Orozco has created some bravura pieces like La DS, a streamlined Citroen with the central segment cut out his artistic approach seems to be anti-showmanship. Speaking on the accompanying video he says he is interested in “concentration and awareness” not “entertaining or mesmerising”. Whether it’s a shoe box, a puddle or shreds of an old tyre he invites us to look closely at usually disregarded elements of everyday life. The invitation may be spurned – witness my reaction to the shoebox – but the message is that out of the necessary, unglamorous skill of concentration comes pleasure and even liberation from the restrictions that we believe are imposed by the normal and the everyday.
Gabriel Orozco is on at Tate Modern until 25th April 2011.
Image: Carambole with Pendulum 1996
Tate © Courtesy of the artist; Marian Goodman Gallery, New York; Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris; and Kurimanzutto, Mexico City Photo: Carol Schadford
