Four years ago the peripatetic Mexican
artist Gabriel Orozco could be seen rolling
a large ball of sticky gray plasticine
through the streets of downtown Manhattan.
The soft surface of Orozco's Yielding Stone
(exhibited at the New Museum's 1992
"In Transit" show) picked up and preserved
traces of whatever it came into contact with--
sewer gratings, fingerprints, dirt and debris
from the street. The sculpture, which
weighed as much as Orozco himself, was an
idiosyncratic although strangely
appropriate self-representation of an
artist who for the last ten years has
invested ephemeral, everyday materials--
usually found on-site--with a gracefully
understated poetic intensity.
In his latest show at Marian Goodman,
Orozco turns his quizzical gaze on the
venerable British institutions of sports
and club games, obliquely addressing the
pendulous poise of bodies in motion. In the
north gallery there's a recent series of large
computer-generated color prints of sports photos
clipped from the British daily press, blown
up and overlaid with abstract figures of
cleanly bisected circles and ovals. Each of
the pictures captures the male body in a
state of suspended animation, frozen by the
camera's eye somewhere between cramped
exertion and animal grace. Orozco's graphic
interventions serve to emphasize what's
already there in the photographs--the
staccato rhythm of a crew race, the poised
intensity of a cricket player winding up
for a throw, the oversaturated colors of
dyed newsprint. The most dramatic shot in
the series shows a soccer player suspended
diagonally in mid-air like a human missile.
The overlaid circles and ovals echo the
photo's elementary colorscheme--the white
of the ball, the green of the playing
field, the red of a Coca-Cola banner in the
background--while the original caption
glosses the image in the cryptic language
of sports journalism: "Blindside run: Les
Ferdinand fails to connect with his head
but Darren Anderton ghosts in to open the
scoring for England."
The games continue in the south gallery,
which houses the centerpiece of the show: a
life-sized, strangely modified billiard
table. The table is elliptical, it has no
pockets, and a single red ball is suspended
from the ceiling over its center, not quite
touching the pristine green baize. The rules
of this made-up game are deliberately
open-ended and visitors are encouraged to
play; a wood rack with cue sticks and chalk is
conveniently placed nearby. While the first
shot is easy enough, once the suspended
ball begins swinging in long graceful arcs
over the table the physics of the game
become increasingly bewildering. There's
something vaguely Newtonian about the
piece, like an astronomical model launched
into orbit.
The surrounding walls are covered with
small-scale drawings and collages
incorporating subtly manipulated found
objects that recall the salvaged and
recycled materials of 1970s Arte Povera.
Orozco traces circles like floating soap
bubbles on the pages of a bathroom-supply
catalogue, he meticulously pencils a grid
on a crumpled paper napkin, he spits out a
foamy blob of toothpaste on a cardboard
toothpaste box, he fills in all the zeros
on a cash-register receipt with a blue
ball-point pen. Without proclaiming any
explicit agenda, these quietly beautiful
works offer themselves as ephemeral
documents of a profoundly personal
encounter with the everyday.
The large Cibachromes on display in the
print room are conceived in a similar vein;
Orozco has said that he uses photography as
"a way to document facts, an index of
private works which have vanished." These
transitory private works include a flock of
sheep grazing in a lush green meadow strewn
with car tires, a cluster of inverted blue
rubber thongs arranged in the sand, several
small yellow balls nestled in a dangling
bunch of green bananas. What carries these
photographs above and beyond the anecdotal
register of personal documents, however, is
Orozco's unfailing eye for the exquisite
interplay of color and form.
Gabriel Orozco at Marian Goodman, 24 West
57th Street, NYC, NY 10019, Sept. 10-Oct.
12, 1996.
MIA FINEMAN is a New York writer.
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