33 Artists in 3 Acts (5 page)
We are on the ground floor of Orozco’s Greenwich Village home, a red brick townhouse built in 1845. His desk is stacked with an odd assortment of books. One pile starts with several volumes of Jorge Luis Borges, then rises up through
Marcel Duchamp
by Bernard Marcade to
Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream
. Nearby, a bulging notebook of drawings, photos, and thoughts in three languages—Spanish, French, and English—has the pregnant character of a fetish. Orozco has filled eighteen such notebooks since 1992. At a time when so many artists have gone digital, Orozco prefers analogue tools. “The thinking is in the notebook and
the communication is in the computer,” he says with a brawny Hispanic accent. The artist has the puffy look of one who has just woken up, even though it is midafternoon.
In the middle of the desk, next to the sunflower seeds, are the floor plans of the west side of level four of Tate Modern. Scrawled arrows and circles testify to a conversation between artist and curator about the placement of specific works. The artist’s solo show started in New York, then went to Basel and Paris, and it will open in London shortly. It will feature “assisted readymades”—in other words, found objects that have been altered by the artist.
Black Kites
(1997), for example, is a human skull that Orozco has covered with a graphite checkerboard grid in order to create an object that fuses the long art history of memento mori with the buzzy visuals of Op art. Another Orozco classic is
Four Bicycles (There is Always One Direction)
(1994), in which four bikes are upended and arranged in an interlocking, acrobatic cluster. (As it happens, Ai Weiwei has made many sculptures using bicycles, although more recently and on a much larger scale, such as
Forever Bicycles
[2012], 1,200 bikes stacked in a spectacular 100-meter-high constellation.) In addition to sculpture, Orozco has made many photographs that find engaging geometric patterns in everyday life and paintings that display winsome abstractions from the imagination. His “Samurai Trees” (2004–06) is a series of egg tempera paintings on oak panels in lustrous shades of gold, red, white, and blue. The artist designed 677 of them on a computer, then delegated the execution of the works to a couple of friends—one in Paris, the other in Mexico City. “I love making things when they require decision-making,” explains Orozco. “When it is simply a reproduction process, there is no need for me to do it.”
The artist’s father, Mario Orozco Rivera, was a muralist in the grand social realist tradition of Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco (no relation), and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Gabriel Orozco grew up surrounded by artists and always thought of being one. However, his father didn’t care for the idea. “He tried to push me out in a friendly way. For that generation, it was much more difficult to make a living out of art,” he explains. Orozco eventually trained in academic painting at the Escuela
Nacional de Artes Plásticas in Mexico City, where he learned, as he puts it, “fresco, tempera, oil, pastel, etching, everything.” After a stint helping his father paint murals in order to raise money to buy a car, Orozco decided against the life of a painter—at least initially—and has never embraced the illustrative, message-driven mode of social realism.
Another way in which Orozco differs from his father is that he is not keen on being an “opinionator.” Mexico, like France, has a habit of embracing artists as public figures. His father was “an outspoken left-wing artist,” whereas Orozco would rather not be a “political professional who opinionates about everything.” He has encountered this pigeonhole when traveling to certain countries on the biennial exhibition circuit, where “people expect the artist to be a kind of missionary or doctor that comes to the country armed with good ideas, recipes, solutions, social goodness. You become a kind of
artiste sans frontières
.” Orozco leans back, recoiling from the thought. In America, Britain, and other market-driven art worlds, artists are not expected to be politically engaged, and if they are, they are likely to be ignored. “The role of the outspoken activist is occupied by celebrities like Angelina Jolie,” says Orozco with a chuckle. “She does the job that in France would be filled by Jacques Derrida or in Mexico by Frida Kahlo.”
Orozco’s politics are implicit in his art. For example,
Horses Running Endlessly
(1995), a chessboard in which all the pieces are knights, depicts an egalitarian social world where there are no almighty queens or expendable pawns. Although the wooden knights come in four shades of varnish, suggesting teams or tribes, they intermingle on the board as if color doesn’t matter. Overall, his chessboard looks less like a battle scene than a dance floor.
Although Orozco declares that “art doesn’t have to do with good intentions or morals,” he might pass judgment on a fellow artist if he or she takes advantage of others. “There are some ethical aspects in the working that are really important. I’m very sensitive to the idea of cheap labor,” he explains. I catch him looking at his anthill of Ai sunflower seeds. “It’s not easy,” he admits, “for an artist to be in control of all the little problems that the practice generates in terms of politics and exploitation.”
I tell Orozco that Ai is also the son of an artist. Orozco counters that his father was jailed a few times in the late sixties and early seventies. “His paintings were censored or kidnapped out of shows. He was never in jail long-term because they couldn’t find anything against him. But, basically, yeah, my father was an enemy of the state.” Between 1929 and 2000, Mexico was an autocratic state ruled by successive incarnations of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, a rhetorically socialist but generally capitalist organization. Orozco’s father was a member of the Communist Party.
The younger Orozco led a nomadic existence for many years, living in Madrid, Berlin, London, Bonn, and San José, the capital of Costa Rica. Even now that he has settled into working in New York (his six-year-old son goes to school here), he spends several months of the year in Mexico and France. On a shelf behind the artist sit a pair of binoculars and a set of bowls that say “bon voyage.” “Sometimes I work better on holiday. That’s why I take a lot of them,” he quips. “New York is noisy. There is too much consciousness.”
International travel has been essential to Orozco’s experience as an artist. “The outside world is my primary source,” he explains. “Mobility becomes part of the work. It’s like I need to move out of myself to start.” Many Orozco works evoke the joys of free movement. For “Until You Find Another Yellow Schwalbe” (1995), a series of forty color photographs, Orozco drove around East and West Berlin on a moped until he found one just like his, then took a picture of the pair. The resulting images are a witty meditation on reunification and coupledom. By contrast,
La DS
(1993), which consists of a 1960s’ Citroën DS that has been sliced in three lengthwise, suggests the misery of stasis. The middle of the car was removed and the two sides were soldered together, resulting in a gloomy, narrow, engineless vehicle with a central steering wheel for a lone driver. In this work, the streamlined form of the DS, which was once associated with a promising future, becomes a dystopian Frankenstein.
“When I started to do my work, to go out of the studio and out of my country,” says Orozco, “one of my aims was to avoid the exoticism of the Mexican artists.” Every country has folk traditions, some of which become national clichés. However, Orozco laments the tendency for
people’s identities to be “exoticized” or “defined by others, according to prejudiced or preconceived ideas.”
Orozco suddenly stands up. “Do you mind if I smoke?” he asks. As we step through some French doors onto a patio that gives way to a well-tended garden, I tell him that when I told a friend this morning that I was going to visit him, she said, “Oh yeah, Gabriel, he’s the real thing.” Why do people think you are an authentic artist? I ask.
“Well, I think. . . . um . . . very nice question. I do like this question!” says Orozco. A discordant mixture of sounds wafts through the cool, damp air from the music school next door. The artist lights his Camel. “Hmm,” he says as he takes a long drag. “I come from a country where a lot of art is labeled surrealist. I grew up with it and I hate that kind of esoteric, dreamlike, evasive, poetic, sexual, easy, cheesy surrealist practice,” he declares. “For example, sculpture that blows up some little thing into a big spectacle. I try to avoid this exoticizing of common things.” It sounds like you’re describing a Koons, I observe. “Exactly, right!” replies Orozco.
I suggest that Koons is not Mr. Authenticity because he works in the Warholian tradition of Pop artifice. Orozco shakes his head. “Warhol was a transvestite. It’s not the same as being a fake,” he declares with some force. “Warhol was trying to produce cheap work with cheap production systems. Koons is exactly the opposite. It’s expensive and very expensive. I would say one is a Pop artist and the other is a capitalist artist.”
Orozco’s ability to think on his feet is heartening. We move on to a discussion about artists’ personas. “Joseph Beuys was the shaman professor,” he says. “Richard Serra was the romantic worker, and Jackson Pollock, the pure existential expressive one,” he says. “If you generate a genealogy from these models, you can probably find many artists that fit into these types. But I didn’t want—and I don’t need—to follow these models.”
“The real thing?” he says, returning to my original question. “I try—it is not easy and I fail constantly—but I try to be a realist in my work. There is humor, but I’m not flirting with the art world or engaging with the frivolity of the market.” Next door, sweeping cinematic strings
emerge victoriously out of the cacophony. “Perhaps I’m real because I am not playing games in terms of manipulation or cynicism,” he continues. “Perhaps I’m real because I grow from my work.” He pauses, then speaks slowly. “My work is in between the entertainment industry, big market powers, the spectacularization of politics, and everyday life. But it is not a media thing or a rock concert or a political demonstration. It offers, I hope, some moments of intimacy with reality.” He laughs, then adds, “Oh man. I hope you like that answer!”
Orozco turns around to go back inside and we walk the perimeter of the room. Despite the fact that he is inclined to call himself a sculptor, Orozco’s current preoccupation appears to be painting. Taped to a wall over the fireplace are some red, orange, and pink experiments on paper that evoke boomerangs spinning in the air. Nailed into a wall nearby are many real boomerangs. On two other walls are works on Japanese rice paper that the artist calls “folded drawings that are a little bit like maps.” They are covered in hand-drawn shapes, lines, and Spanish words made in acrylic paint, ink, charcoal, and pencil. Orozco knew that he would be very busy with his retrospective tour, so he found a way to make new work on the road, folding the paper so it would fit in his luggage. He fingers through three piles of drawings stacked on a filing cabinet. “This one has been with me for eighteen months,” he says with affection. “This one, maybe a year.” The concept of folded traveling works reminds me of the “airmail paintings” of Eugenio Dittborn, a Chilean artist. When I mention it, Orozco says, “Ah yes, absolutely!” with genuine surprise.
Eugenio Dittborn
To Hang (Airmail Painting No. 05)
1984
E
ugenio Dittborn has a cult following among South American cognoscenti. After countless hours on two planes, I arrive in the dry, sunny city of Santiago, which sits in a valley beneath the snowcapped Andes. The economy of Chile is on the rise due to a wealth of natural resources and a positive trading relationship with China; the country has seen a concomitant surge of interest in contemporary art.
More than a decade older than Ai Weiwei, Jeff Koons, and Gabriel Orozco, Dittborn is small and wiry with a beaky nose and crow’s feet that attest to a good sense of humor. Partial to tweed jackets and corduroys, he looks like a Freudian psychoanalyst. In the 1980s, when the dictator Augusto Pinochet was in power, Dittborn started making collages on long strips of lightweight linen. Each panel was folded up and placed in a specially made envelope emblazoned with the label “AIRMAIL PAINTINGS BY DITTBORN,” then posted out of the country to museums for exhibition. The experimental works addressed a range of political and anthropological themes at a time of censorship and cultural conservatism enforced by a police state. “I invented these folded paintings to get out from this place, to be in the world,” says the artist unhurriedly, with an amused professorial tone. “They are like messages in a bottle.”
Since 1990, through Chile’s subsequent democratic governments, Dittborn
has continued to make airmail paintings—over 180 so far—some of which have crisscrossed the hemispheres several times.
La Cuisine et la Guerre
(1994) is a vast work made up of twenty-four panels that display black-on-white images of anonymous faces, open fires, dismembered body parts, and instruments of torture. The panels flew in twenty-four envelopes first to the Reina Sofia in Madrid, then to art institutions in New York, Houston, and Glasgow, and will soon travel to Brazil, where they will enjoy pride of place at the center of the prestigious Mercosul Biennial. “The superstructural meaning is the travel,” explains Dittborn. “You can see it in the folds.” The work has a double identity; it is a letter when it “sleeps” in its envelope, but it becomes a painting when it is “awake” and pinned on the wall.