33 Artists in 3 Acts (43 page)

Gabriel Orozco

River Stones
in progress at the artist’s home in Mexico City

2013

SCENE 11

Gabriel Orozco

“Y
ou can take refuge here. It is like a country inside a country,” says Gabriel Orozco as we enter a cloistered courtyard, which dates from the 1600s when his Mexican home was a convent. The house lies behind a stone wall crowned with bougainvillea in San Ángel, the “barrio” of Mexico City where he grew up. Although the artist has owned the house for only eight months, he feels like he has lived in it forever. “I guess I’m going to die here,” he says, his hoarse voice counterpointed by birdsong. The artist, who is wearing a kaftan and flip-flops, drank more than a few shots of mescal last night, celebrating the victory of his football team, Cruz Azul. He will give me a tour while his housekeeper makes his favorite hangover cure,
huevos con salsa,
while Mónica Manzutto, the co-owner of the city’s kurimanzutto gallery, who has escorted me here, catches up on phone calls in the morning sun.

Orozco points out a door crowned by a 1930s’ mural depicting a man holding a rifle sitting on a white horse, painted by Juan O’Gorman, an important architect and painter. O’Gorman designed the studios of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, which are two minutes away, as well as the landmark façade of the library of the National Autonomous University of Mexico. This fresco was not a commission: O’Gorman grew up in this house and painted it while he lived here.

We walk to the other side of the courtyard, past a few of the artist’s
new, beautiful, green and gold “piña nona” paintings, then enter a wood-paneled library with a majestic fireplace and a compendium of curiosities. The largest artwork in the room is a 1970s’ portrait of Orozco’s father, confidently drafted in black acrylic on plywood by David Alfaro Siqueiros, one of Mexico’s three great muralists. On a wooden pedestal backlit by a window is a human skull, which I wish was adorned with a graphite grid like Orozco’s celebrated
Black Kites
(1997). I assume Orozco’s memento mori influenced Hirst’s diamond skull. It was singled out for critical acclaim when it was shown in London in 2004, and Hirst collects Orozco’s work. For his part, Orozco sees Hirst as “an impresario who gets in trouble because it is hard to believe in his numbers.” He thinks that artists lose credibility when they “bluff.”

Off the library is a chapel that was converted into a studio by O’Gorman’s father, then into a sixteen-seat cinema by Manuel Barbachano Ponce, the Mexican film producer who owned the house after him. Ponce’s wife was a fervent Catholic who commissioned paintings of morose saints. Orozco came to parties here as a teenager, when the house was full of virgins and crucifixes. Raised as a Communist, the artist still considers himself a “community-ist” and, as such, is intolerant of religion. He is particularly hostile to artists who he feels act like “Catholic missionaries in third world countries.”

Beyond the holy doors is a capacious living room with a wall decked out with graceful anatomical sketches of muscular arms drawn by Orozco’s father—a poignant reminder of his time spent honing the vanishing craft of drawing from life. At the other end of this vast room, a Steinway grand piano sits next to a big white canvas. “In case I have a great idea,” says Orozco with a throwaway gesture that implies they are a dime a dozen. “You have a hypothesis. You feel the energy. Your nerves are working. It’s a bit like sport.”

By luck as well as design, Orozco’s prolific output has met with hearty demand. He has been able to sell his art since graduating from university. “I don’t care so much about being rich, so I don’t feel the pressure of the market. On the contrary, I feel support.” The artist puts an unlit cigarette in his mouth, leaves it there for the temporal equivalent of a puff, then removes it with two straight forefingers. “The artist is not in
his bubble of a studio, rejecting all the forces of the market in a capitalist society. That is a romantic view. It’s just not realistic,” he explains. Indeed, handling one’s market—making decisions about how much art to make and where to show it—is part of the craft of being an artist.

We pass through some heavy wooden doors made by an “important carpenter,” as he puts it, “a man with a name.” Then we admire some “serious” pre-modernist chairs, made in Mexico from tropical wood. In an octagonal room with a hidden spiral staircase is a pastel portrait of a youthful beauty, Orozco’s mother circa 1960, by Ramón Alva de la Canal. Orozco’s parents were divorced in 1974 whereupon the family dispersed, leaving San Ángel. “I have come back to the place where my family was together and reunited my parents with the portraits,” he says. “But not in the same room. I could never do that to my mother!”

The artist’s breakfast is ready, so we settle into some vintage Shoemaker “sling” chairs in the shade of the arcade surrounding the courtyard. Dizzy from the visual stimulation of this almighty house, it takes me a moment to notice that we are surrounded by dozens of stones. They are partially carved and marked up with black geometric lines and indications like “←3mm→.” They sit on old wooden stools, in makeshift sandboxes, and between potted plants on the floor. Stencils, protractors, wax pencils, and black Sharpies lie nearby. “You are in the studio!” says Orozco in response to my gaze, as he bends over the coffee table to eat his eggs and black beans.

Orozco has been celebrated for his “post-studio practice,” particularly in New York, where he first made a name for himself with
Yogurt Caps
(1994), an installation of nothing but four blue-rimmed transparent plastic lids from Dannon yogurt containers. For many years, it was important to him “not to have a studio, not to have a permanent assistant, not to have secretaries.” But now that he makes more artworks from scratch (as many artists of his generation who started out in readymades do), he has spawned de facto studios in all six of his homes. (When I visited him at his New York townhouse a couple of years ago he avoided the loaded term “studio,” preferring to call his workspace an “operational center.”)

For the past six months, Orozco has been collecting stones, made
smooth by centuries of erosion in Mexican rivers, and drawing patterns on them, then handing them over to a stonemason who carves and polishes them according to his instructions. “They are tumbling stones,” he says. “They have traveled so much they are soft. They are not monumental. They are about circulation, rotation, change.” Once Orozco has chosen his stone, he spends a lot of time looking at it, touching it, deciding how to engage with it. “It’s a kind of spiritual process. You get into a mineral mood. It is about imagining the stone’s past rather than tattooing or stamping it,” he explains. “The type of craft and the mentality of the making are very Mexican.”

A few of the rocks are engraved with designs that hark back to pre-Hispanic and Aztec art, but most have an extraterrestrial quality, as if an alien civilization had taken up the art of Zen stone gardening with a laser cutter. At the same time, they are almost all recognizable as Orozcos. The circle has been a formal fetish since the artist learned to spell his name, while checkerboard patterns and wonky all-over grids are persistent inclinations. Indeed, a half-finished oval stone, which is the size of a bread loaf, bears a scalloped fish-scale pattern that reiterates an art-school drawing from 1982 that hangs in the library. “If I thought in a straight line, I’d get to a dead end,” explains the artist. “I need to think in circles and keep coming back around.”

Manzutto, slim in a little black dress and running shoes, leaves her fountain-side “office” to inform us that it is time to head over to the gallery. Among other things, Orozco needs to meet the stonemason and fine-tune the locations of the forty-four works in the show. While the artist goes upstairs to change, Manzutto explains that the artist has, until now, had only one show at kurimanzutto, despite having spurred the gallery’s foundation.

Orozco is highly influential—the leader, even, of an informal school of art. Between 1987 and 1991, a group of artists came over to his house once a week for a workshop that started at 10
A.M.
and ended at around 10
P.M.
after several rounds of beer. The participants included José Kuri (Manzutto’s husband and business partner) as well as the artists Damián Ortega, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Dr Lakra, and Gabriel Kuri (José’s brother), all of whom are now represented by kurimanzutto.
Gabriel Kuri recently told me that he had learned a lot from Orozco’s “precision and lightness of touch” and his ability to combine good ideas with strong formal structures. Kuri admitted that he had to strive to find his own voice because Orozco was such a powerful character. “He can own circles,” he joked, “as long as I get to own crushed cans.”

Upon reappearing in an untucked white shirt and baggy trousers, Orozco climbs into the passenger seat of a navy Volvo next to his driver while Manzutto and I take the back. Kurimanzutto officially opened on August 21, 1999, the very day that Leo Castelli, a legendary New York dealer, died. “I did not have any representation in Mexico, so I decided to form a team,” says Orozco about kurimanzutto. The artist has “ended up organizing people” since he was a kid, but he is forever ambivalent about it. “It’s part of my personality but I don’t like the burden. I have to be careful that they don’t make me a dictator or a godfather,” he says with appealing camaraderie.

Orozco coined the name kurimanzutto, which he loved because it sounded Japanese, and set up an internship for Manzutto (until then a grad student) at Marian Goodman Gallery while José Kuri finished a masters degree in international affairs at Columbia University. “Gabriel [Orozco] created all the founding aspects of the gallery,” says Manzutto. “We would help artists realize projects. We would be mobile and versatile, working with a stable of artists that were good and without representation, not the hot international names.” For the first two years, kurimanzutto organized group shows in makeshift spaces that were virtually nonprofit. The gallery was both a business and a prolonged artist’s project—albeit one with a very different ethos to Hirst’s “Beautiful Inside My Head Forever” auction. After several years supporting solo shows and art fair booths, Kuri and Manzutto realized that they needed a permanent space. “The art industry had become a monster. We had to adapt to the new circumstances,” explains Orozco.

The car pulls into a predominantly residential street in San Miguel Chapultepec. Kurimanzutto is three stories high, with the ground floor demarcated by vertical wood panels. We enter through a wide tunnel of a room into an open-air patio featuring a perilous staircase without railings, which would never pass inspection in the USA or Europe. Once
through this courtyard, we go back inside, past a reception area and into a grand exhibition space that was once a timber yard with a high A-frame wood ceiling. Four large plinths of different heights in different shades of muddy gray display a range of Orozco rocks.

José Kuri, the other half of kurimanzutto, comes down from his office to greet us. “
Hola, chavo,
” says Orozco to him affectionately. They converse in Spanish, then the artist wanders off to inspect the installation. He takes up a number of static positions with his arms crossed, looking hypercritical. For a number of years, sales of Orozco’s work paid kurimanzutto’s bills, but Ortega, Cruzvillegas, and José’s brother Gabriel now bring in substantial sums too. When I ask Kuri how he would describe his relationship with their artists, he says, “Complicity is the best word. We have a complicity in everything they do—in relation to their work, ideas, travel, and politics.”

“The space is not easy,” says Orozco upon his return. “There is a weird wall, we call it
el muro del diablo
, the diabolic wall, because it is so hard to resolve
.
” The artist points to the right side of the room, where a built-in bench offers seating and displays a few stones. “My solution was to kill the wall with the bench—to make it disappear.” Orozco tells me that the other problem for his show was the base. The stones looked great resting casually on the stools in his patio, but that would be “too romantic, too country, too charming” for the display here. “And individual pedestals would look horrible, conventional.” So Orozco decided on four platforms with a bench on one wall and a chest-high shelf on the other. “The base of a tri-dimensional object is like a frame on a painting,” he explains. “You don’t want it to interfere or feel mechanical. It needs to be functional and neutral in a way that allows you to concentrate on the object.”

Juan Fraga, a stonemason who usually works with a generation of artists now in their seventies, arrives with two assistants. The three muscular men in T-shirts set up a table covered in gray carpet, then carry in ten stones one by one. Orozco picks up a stone, studies its underside, and rubs it with his thumb. “
Muy bien,
” he says, followed by some quick-fire Spanish in which he refers to Fraga as “
maestro.
” The artist points to a black mark on one stone. One of Fraga’s assistants, apparently his
son, pulls some white gauze and liquid industrial cleaner out of a duffel bag. Orozco marks up a couple of the stones, which will have to go back to the shop for further carving and polishing. Otherwise, these late arrivals are ready to be added to the show.