Gabriel Orozco, Yogurt Caps (1994) (detail), courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York. |
Necessity, as the old adage has it, is the mother of invention. It can also be the engine of dubious theorizing. Take, for example, the work of the Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco, currently the subject of a mid-career retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. Or, rather, read the accompanying wall texts and catalogue, without which the casual viewer will be baffled by the sundry objects on display. With the absence of a unifying visual rationale, words provide the only link between a dis- placed elevator, an elongated automobile, a preponderance of photographs, pseudo– High Modernist abstractions, and Mobile Matrix (2006), the skeleton of a whale overlaid with graphite markings.
Writing in the catalogue, the exhibition’s curator Ann Temkin details the artist’s “post-studio” art-making. Arriving in Manhattan in 1991, Orozco “developed a practice accepting of limitations.” Aghast that an artist should have to work for a living to afford workspace—rent restricted his “freedom,” don’t you know—Orozco made due with a cramped Twelfth Street apartment. An obedient heir of Dadaism as filtered through the puritanical tenets of Conceptualism, he proceeded to challenge “the problematic legacy of a modernism whose ideals no longer seemed wholly compelling.” This led him to tack a Dannon yogurt lid on the wall. After months of contemplation, Orozco decided the gesture was, well, not boring. Out of such rigorous standards art