Gabriel Orozco5

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ir lin

ck

Gabriel Orozco— painter sculptor

provocateur

changes direction.

Essay by Julia ooke



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



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



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



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.



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 .



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



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



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.



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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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-



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



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 .

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