Bankside, London, SE1 9TG
Gabriel Orozco, My Hands Are My Heart 1991
Tate Modern:
Opening Hours: Sunday to Thursday, 10am – 6pm; Friday and Saturday, 10am – 10pm
19 January – 25 April 2011
Tate Modern’s latest exhibition reminded me of a personal truth. When I think back, Gabriel Orozco was the artist that sparked my interest in contemporary art. The first time I encountered that black and white chequered skull, White Kites 1997 was whilst researching for my final essay on an Art Foundation. The next thing I knew, I was enrolling on a History of Art degree. The painstakingly applied graphite on bone still captures every last piece of my attention. Perfectly summing up the dualisms of life; work and recreation, pain and pleasure, science and art, as well as, the inevitability of death. And years before Damien Hirst’s obnoxious diamond encrusted bling.
Orozco has a way that makes the otherwise municipal objects of everyday life always seem personal. Although often the titles of his works may read like a list from a construction site (Elevator, Ventilator, Four Bicycles, Yielding Stone); every time, Orozco brings a human-touched element to the works. There is a car made for one in LA DS 1993; an abandoned lift that has been shrunk to fit the artist’s own dimensions in Elevator 1994. We also find his visible finger marks in My Hands Are My Heart 1991 created by tenderly kneading clay within the form of his palms.
Inanimate objects even take on human characteristics. We witness the story of a yellow Schwalbe through photographs across the walls of the central gallery. The iconic East German vehicle has become a character as we are taken on a journey through Berlin and it encounters alike models. Somehow we recognise body language, physical conversation and sentient traits in the way the scooters have been captured together.
More often then not this playful tone is evident in the works. From re-appropriating the chess board on a skull to reinventing the rules of the game itself in Horses Running Endlessly 1995, Orozco takes the familiar and shakes it up into something fresh and fun. With Ventilator 1994, bringing a wry smile to your face as you become mesmerised by swirling toilet paper attached to a ceiling fan. The modified electronic device suddenly appears like a metaphor for our daily rituals.
The Tate presents a faithful retrospective that demonstrates the entirety of the artist’s scope from photography, installations, drawings and sculpture. There is a lot to be said about an artist that can effortlessly skip between medium and continent. Permanently in a state of movement he lives and works across the world from Mexico City, Paris and New York. He takes the traces of urban culture from all these places and translates them into something we can all recognise but in a new light. Orozco’s blurring of art and objects speak of an era of transit, immigration and multiculturalism.
Yet, at the end of this tale between man and machine we are reminded of the ultimate price that must be paid. In the final room, you walk through the leftover particles of fabric and hair that have been collected from tumble driers. Stretched over washing lines, the fuzzy remnants hover like ghosts opposite the dark clay works Pelvis, Torso, Head and Arms that lie like rotting fossils. The artist is confronting us with a head-on collision of the consequences of society’s pollution.
Orozco has made a lifetimes body of work transforming the banal and discarded traces of modern life. He turns spat out toothpaste into delicate drawings and makes a soggy old deflated ball look like a water feature. In Chicotes 2010, he personally arranges years of gathered burst tires and scrap vehicle parts from Mexican highways into something that emanates Beuys’s socio-political sculptural installations. The result is a show that feels full on energy. He is an artist that almost miraculously recreates from the seemingly futile and in doing so constantly challenges the viewer’s perspective.
But with his junk poetry comes the tragedy of the modern world. At the end of the day, what do we have to show for ourselves? A collection of bones, a couple of lines in an obituary and the devastating remains from our consumerism. Orozco sums this up most eloquently with Breath on Piano 1993, a vestige of the simplest and most beautiful moments of life. Gone before you know it, nothing lasts forever.
