Gabriel Orozco at Tate Modern

Gabriel Orozco at Tate Modern

18 January, 2011
by: Tom Jeffreys

Patchy but interesting: Tate Modern's retrospective of Gabriel Orozco. Tom Jeffreys has a look.

“Empty shoebox goes on show at Tate Modern” is the headline we were considering going with. Nothing like a sensationalist headline to whip up a spot of righteous anti-art ire huh? But the suggestion that Tate Modern's retrospective of Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco is somehow bombastic or even particularly controversial would be a misleading one.

Yes, the show does feature some strange works – a lift cut down to the height of the artist, pages from a Japanese phone book, a room full of exploded tyres, a surprisingly whimsical piece featuring toilet paper attached to an overhead fan, and the empty shoebox – but Orozco isn't really about shock; rather, as the Tate Modern spiel has it, his work is more about “subtle strategies of interaction”.

Sometimes these strategies produce genuinely intriguing results; and sometimes, naturally, they don't. The most successful works combine visual impact with both humour and conceptual integrity: after all, it's no good having a fascinating back-story if nobody is inspired to read it. To this end, famous works like the reconfigured Carambole table, the lint hung garment-like from washing lines, and the restructuring of a Citroën DS are all fun and entertaining, but they don't say or do that much to sustain interest. The Citroën DS piece is cool, primarily because the car itself (mythologised by Roland Barthes) is the coolest car ever made. The artist adds (or rather, takes away) very little.

Orozco is clearly fascinated with the everyday and the ephemeral: there's small-scale works featuring paintings on boarding passes, banknotes, old tickets and newspaper images of sportspeople, but this interest really reaches its peak in the series of photographs shown in the same room as the Carambole table. There's something of Andy Goldsworthy in the painstaking approach of an artist who produces something, knowing full well that it won't last the rest of the day, or – in the case of 'Breath on Piano' – more than a few seconds.

Yet where Goldsworthy's interest is in the intervention of the artist in nature, Orozco's is in the subversive role that the artist can play in an environment or system of rules/meaning that is already dominated by the human. In that sense his work has more wit than Goldsworthy but perhaps less power. 

Whilst both artists explore process, Orozco seems more like he's playing with ideas. Whether this is a good or a bad thing it's hard to say, but much of the work seems unfinished or incomplete conceptually. Orozco sometimes doesn't seem particularly attuned to the specificity of his chosen medium – many of the sculptures could work as photographs and vice-versa; whilst something like 'First Was The Spitting' just seems facile.

One of my favourite works is 'Obituaries', a text-based piece featuring phrases used to describe the great and the good. The combination of epithets like “Had style in and out of the ring”, “Barber wedded to tradition”, “Cerebral croquet champion”, “A Dreamer” and the laughable “Co-heir to a fortune” provides a brilliantly witty overview of the (often fairly silly) things that society holds dear. But why this particular medium? Why this scale, font, material etc? It's, as far as I can tell, arbitrary. And in an artist who's all about process and concept that's a problem.

Having said that though, something like 'Horses Running Endlessly' celebrates an appreciation of the arbitrary. Consisting of a  chessboard – four times larger, with four colours, but only knights – the work suggests a new kind of game, the potential for new rules therein, and the possibility of new ways of seeing, classifying, judging. That this isn't then simply closed off (with, say, a new set of rules) is what keeps the work open and, importantly, alive.

Gabriel Orozco is at Tate Britain from 19th January to 25th April 2011. 

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Tom Jeffreys