London
Serpentine Gallery
01/07/04 -
30/08/04
There’s a scene I can’t seem to forget in a movie I only half liked, A Beautiful Mind. It’s the scene where the hero played by Russell Crowe is seen crouched in the Harvard quad, completely absorbed by a group of pigeons as he attempts to follow and awkwardly document their every movement. The resulting diagram looks much like a football play set-up. Circles and arrows with X’s marking the spot where they stopped or collided and then moved on. The point he was trying to make, or really, discover, was that all seemingly random movement is not random at all. That even pigeons and -stretching this- things move according to pattern.
The text on the wall in the Gabriel Orozco solo exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery explains that the works selected show the artist’s interest in geometry and ‘the role it provides as an underlying structure to his practice’. And that indeed is about it in a nutshell, you soon realise after a quick once-over. The whole looks rather hushed, gentle almost. Perhaps even sculptural. The three rooms and entrance hall hold works on white pedestals, paintings and framed drawings and collages, glass vitrines with various objects, some hanging sculpture and the occasional C-print. A natural history presentation at best, a nod to the beauty of natural geometric form at worst. But it’s the second glance, the second delve which offers tentative answers to questions like: how could the same man who carefully arranged and photographed eleven cat food tins neatly balanced on eleven watermelons (Cats and Watermelons, 1992) start making perfect life-like polyurethane foam Spume fins (Spume Fin, 2003)? And how could the same person who created an oval shaped billiard table (Oval Billiard Table, 1996) carefully attempt to sculpt a Styrofoam and plaster cascade (Fleuve, 2003)?
One tentative answer lies within their rooted sameness, simply put: pattern seeking and stressing. Or, better: Conceptual aestheticism via geometric re-arrangements. Meaning that Orozco in most of his works including both the older and these newer seemingly more enigmatic ones, has sought out the banal, the known, chosen it, and has accentuated its remarkable. Things are taken from life, (in the exhibition a lotus leaf, perfectly etched, socks, of papier mâché, lint, real, puddles, drawn, airline tickets, saved, a soccer ball, incised, spit and toothpaste, collaged) and are held, are on hold. The banal -a tin of cat food, a watermelon, a billiard table- are picked out and underlined and are so transformed as to ‘demonstrate’ (though this is a term far too rational -too slow- for the immediacy of their effect) life’s gamefulness. Puddle 49 (1997) is a drawing on graph paper. In black ink some squares have been either filled in, completely or partially, to form triangles. These black triangles and squares touch and float outwards to form a ‘diagram’ you could say of a puddle, Puddle 49. Puddle 33 (1997) is a similar translation of yet another puddle, this time the black inked squares forming a slightly different pattern. To name a puddle, something by nature fluid and untamed, by a number and to then capture these small flukes of consistency as though they were mere examples of a greater whole, as though there were but a few possibilities of Puddle, as though Puddle itself is a designed result of a mathematical equation, is typical, one could say. Typical of Orozco’s play of the world around him, his play on and with these selected objets trouvées. His, like Duchamp’s have been noticed (by him) and have been underlined. But unlike Duchamp’s, Orozco’s found objects -his ‘underlining’- brings with it a juiciness which manages to seep through a rather dry and timid exterior presentation. It’s not merely a matter of a pointing out and a re-setting of context thereby causing useful discord, it’s a matter of a pointing out and a re-contextualisation and -here’s the difference- a letting alone. There is no re-explaining. The cascade is arrested mid cascade, the sharks’ majestic fin highlighted in all its fin glory, both have been chosen and re-submitted but neither have been truly altered nor re-assessed; they command their original natural respect.
This smell of Natural History actually allows for a conceptualism more natural, more at-one-with. A Conceptualism less dry, less black and white, less Western than for example Sol LeWitt’s no less masterful pinnacles of Concept Art, his triangles, circles and squares. And it’s the titles of Orozco’s wonderfully seductive paintings, his abstracted circular units (emblems referring to an image’s pixel content) in shiny acrylic blue, gold, yellow and red, which yield the discerning clue: The Samurai’s Tree, Le Phare des Siecles (Lighthouse of Cycles), Landscape Flag, Spinning and Rotating (all 2004)…Zen-like terminology which weighs down these patterned variations with a symbolic - even spiritual - subtext, making them, through this odd marriage, messily conceptual. Further from Concept Art’s playful Western rationalism, yet still undeniably related, their power to seduce aesthetically is at the root of the confusion and causes this messiness. Formalised life meets cosmic egg, you could say. Tales wrapped up in careful observation; but still more alchemy than science. Could this be chalked up as Latin conceptualism?
Gabriel Orozco
Serpentine Gallery, London
1 July - 30 August
