Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco is hot property. ADRIAN SEARLE test drives his new show at the ICA in London
THERE is a lift stalled in the middle of the Institute of Contemporary Art in London’s upper gallery. The light is on inside and the doors are open: Going Up?
But wait, there’s something wrong here. Not only is this marooned elevator sans pulleys, gears, counterweights, motor and, most importantly, lift shaft, but a peek inside induces the same queasy feeling you get during a lift’s descent, as the car slows and the floor feels like it’s rising to meet you.
The cabin, a closer inspection reveals, isn’t quite tall enough for a comfortable vertical journey: it is as though the lift has been squeezed by those same G-forces that the body experiences, that painless yet disconcerting sensation first of weightlessness, then of compression, in the silent rush from the 18th floor to the ground. The lift — – which has been cut crosswise, a section removed, then welded back together again — just sits there as an open invitation: Going Down?
Elevator is a work by Gabriel Orozco, a Mexican artist whose mini- retrospective opens at the ICA just as a multiple-part installation housed in a defunct gentleman’s club in St James’s closes its doors. Orozco, now 34, held a solo show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York last year, and has appeared in several prestigious international theme shows. He is hot property. And, in keeping with the times, he is hard to pin down — a sculptor, a photographer, an old-fashioned Duchampian, an installationist, a prankster.
A crossover artist, then, in every sense, at home equally in Mexico City, Berlin, London and New York. Or at home nowhere at all, a nomad of the international art circuit. Modes of transport, objects in transit between their use-value and their meanings and metaphors, the slipperiness of language and the shiftiness of signs, provide his major theme.
His is an art of transience — never served better than in his photographs: of breath fogging the black lacquer of a grand piano; of bicycle tyre-tracks circling between a manhole-cover and puddles reflecting the sky; rain on a flat roof; a sleeping dog, dreaming its dreams of leaping and running.
And in his little collections of objects: casts of socks, over-stuffed with papier m%che to look like gourds and balls; a slither of onion skin propped up on a blob of Plasticene, waving at you across a tabletop; a lump of clay bearing the impression of the hands that clasped it and which now looks like a human heart (My Hands, the title goes, Are My Heart), an endless series of photographs of yellow East German mopeds, just like the one Orozco himself owned in Berlin, seen on his peregrinations about town and snapped alongside his own vehicle. Orozco is good at playing with the unregarded, the small and often absurd gesture, the visual bon mot.
Probably his best work is a big, grey lump of Plasticene, which weighs the same as the artist, which he has rolled around the streets, picking up dust and scraps of litter as it was rolled around. Called Yielding Stone (1992), it is a beautiful lump, a mute, key work, a rejoinder to Richard Long’s interminable hikes and stone circles (and appropriated by our own Kendell Geers). If this one work was all that Orozco did, it would still be a great visual poem — on nothingness, on our banal transports, a Sisyphus Stone commemorating the ridiculousness of the peripatetic artistic journey.
There’s a car parked in the ICA’s lower gallery, a white-roofed, grey Citro`n DS. Designed in the 1950s, it is a model of stylish elegance, French, sexy and a bit mad. When the original Deesse, or “Goddess” was unveiled, the French writer Roland Barthes called it a modern-day Nautilus (and recalled both Jules Verne and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis), and remarked on its smoothness, its almost spiritual perfection.
Like the elevator, however, there’s something a bit wrong with this particular model. The Citro`n appears elongated, extruded into a real-life cartoon, a penman’s shorthand for velocity. Like the elevator, too, it has had a central section cut out of it, this time along its length, narrowing the vehicle by about a third. It too has been welded — – or “sutured”, as Benjamin Buchloh’s catalogue essay has it — back together: the steering wheel is now in the centre, and there’s only room in the front for the driver’s seat. The sensation that the car is too long is an illusion.
JG Ballard once did a show of crashed cars at the ICA, and the recent film of his novel, Crash — a hymn to sex, death, shattered windscreens and the multiple uses of the gearstick — created a furore at Cannes earlier this year.
Orozco is not the first artist to delve into the commodity-fetishism of the car, and Richard Artschwager once made a static, oversized lift which had a similar vertiginous effect as Elevator on its audience. Nor, certainly, is Orozco the first artist to cut things up. The Cubists cut up space, Gordon Matt-Clarke cut up buildings and Lucio Fontana cut and bored his way through his canvases. There are, perhaps, no new techniques: it is all a matter of timing and context, of the mutability and flux of meanings.
>From computer screen-saver programmes to bicycles, shoe boxes and even the dirt of the street, Orozco’s materials and devices range from the hi-tech to the most abject waste. While he employs traditional sculptor’s methods — cutting, casting, fabricating, remaking — to photography, it is in his apparently slightest works that he becomes the most telling.
Horses Running Endlessly is a chessboard laid out with a profusion of white, brown and black knights, each unable to take one another. If not a homage to Duchamp — a chess master — it is certainly something of a self-portrait, a diagram of the way Orozco’s brain is wired, producing works that are the product not of linear logic or even lateral thinking, but of two moves in one direction and one to the side; an endless travel, arriving nowhere, achieving nothing. But fun to watch, all the same.