Totems and Relics

Fiona Banner, Harrier and Jaguar 2010



Gabriel Orozco, Modified Citroën DS






Gabriel Orozco, Mobile Matrix and Dark Wave





An aside: I guess it isn't all that surprising to hear a common misgiving about the recent MoMA mid-career retrospective for Gabriel Orozco is that many of the pieces lose their appeal or "aura" in the sterile, hallowed halls of a grand institutional setting. Unsurprising because Orozco's work so often draws from small private epiphanies and casual phenomena, incidental bricolages and whimsical asides, -- not to mention a number of things that sometimes seem like jests. (And jests often don't come of so well in such somber & contemplative contexts). The whale skeleton that makes up Mobile Matrix is undoubtedly pretty magical and astounding when encountered looming overhead like a dreadnought in its cluttered in situ architectural cove at the Biblioteca Nacional de México, but -- one would intuit -- much less when suspended in a sparse, hangar-like hall. Taking the cliché that the aim of certain strands of 20th-century art (surrealism, Dada, Fluxus, etc.) was to elude the ossifying embrace of institutionalization and to merge art, common culture, and everyday experience into an autonomous realm of activity; then maybe all this means that Orozco managed to achieve just that on some level? Just musing (and perobably not too coherently).