Impossible Objects
Gabriel Orozco’s Empty Shoe Box and Yielding Stone 1
What is admirable about the fantastic is that there is no longer anything fantastic:
there is only the real.
André Breton, ‘First Manifesto of Surrealism’ (1924)
I come from a country where a lot of art is labelled Surrealist.
I grew up with it and I hate that kind of dream-like, evasive, easy, poetic, sexual, cheesy Surrealist practice.
I try to be a Realist.
Gabriel Orozco (2011)
In a conversation with Benjamin Buchloh, Gabriel Orozco noted ‘most of my actions are done with found objects – it is kind of a rule or a system to bring nothing with me’ (2009 et al., 194).2 In view of this practice, this chapter looks at two early works by Orozco, Empty Shoe Box (1993) (see Figure 33) and Yielding Stone (1992) (see Figure 34), which were shown at the Venice Biennale in 1993. Both these works were intentionally set up to resist spectacle in the historical and institutional context in which they were exhibited: a global biennial at a time when the art world was dominated by large-scale installations and paintings. Empty Shoe Box and Yielding Stone display an aspect of sabotage as a disruptive strategy that seeks to break with established narratives in art museums and exhibitions, and which often involves the works’ intentional or accidental obliteration.
Art historian Guy Brett argues that there are two historical threads in Orozco’s work: the reconsideration of the category of sculpture, and the dissolution of the barrier between art and the everyday, although the two threads do not, paradoxically, exclude each other (2009, 51). This chapter, then, examines Orozco’s implementation of readymade and found objects in rethinking the category of sculpture, on the one hand, and in renegotiating the tension between art and everyday life, on the other. It does so in relation to the historical horizon established by Marcel Duchamp’s readymade and André Breton’s found object, which implement the idea of breaking with a definition of art as an autonomous institution (disassociated from the praxis of life) that has been a long-standing imperative among the European historical avant-gardes (Bürger 1974, 255). In order to address the contradictions that arise from the objects’ status as both everyday items and artworks, David Joselit reads Orozco’s works through the Duchampian rendez-vous, as an encounter between the artist and the object (2000, 173). I suggest, however, taking my cue from an analysis by Margaret Iversen (2004), that this encounter is best encapsulated in André Breton’s notion of the chance encounter with the found object, which posits the latter’s intrinsic connection to the unruly and traumatic Lacanian Real. Iversen noting that the two terms, readymade and found object, are ‘often run together and used interchangeably’ in critical literature, seeks to ‘drive a wedge between them’ (2004, 45). For Iversen, calling attention to aspects of the found object in contemporary art breaks the self-critical cycle perpetuated by the readymade and its legacies, which are more concerned ‘with reflecting on and undermining the conventions and institutions of art’ (57). By being situated in the space of the unconscious (48), as the author claims, Breton’s found object opens up the art work to wider issues of life, death and sociality, and reveals the traumatic core of the modern subject (57).
Because of their subject matter, the links with the readymade and the found object are entrenched in Orozco’s works. Rather than maintaining, however, the sharp distinction between readymade and found object that Iversen puts forth, this chapter is responsive to the intersections, overlaps and encounters between them in the work of Orozco, a dialogue that is still active and potent in much object-based contemporary art. It is my view, moreover, that examining Orozco’s pieces in relation to the historical precedents set by the early twentieth-century avant-gardes does not reduce the works to mere repetitions of earlier art, as Bürger held in his criticism of the neo-avant-gardes of the 1950s which, he argues, institutionalized the early avant-gardes by reproducing their gestures and in effect defeating their purpose of eliminating the distance between art and life (1974, 256). On the contrary, situating Orozco’s works in relation to Duchamp’s readymade and Breton’s found object brings into relief some of the perplexing qualities of these objects and the claims they make to being ‘in reality’ (Buchloh et al. 2009, 190). Finally, I address the complexities that arise from reading Orozco’s work in the light of aspects of Surrealist practice given the artist’s own vocal resistance to Surrealism. In particular, I situate Orozco’s position in relation to the historical reception of Surrealism in Mexico.
The fifty-third Venice Biennale in 1993 was the first major international exhibition where Orozco presented his work. The artistic director of the Biennale, entitled Cardinal Points of the Arts, was Achille Bonito Oliva. The event addressed issues of globalization and included art works from ‘peripheral regions’. Empty Shoe Box (see Figure 35) was presented in the Aperto section of the Biennale, a much-anticipated event established in 1980 to showcase emerging artists.3 The work, as the title reveals, comprised an empty open shoebox placed directly on the floor of the exhibition space at Le Corderie dell’ Arsenale, the former rope factory where Aperto was taking place (Bonami 1996, 41). Orozco describes the long corridor and the way the booths were lined up one after another in a space that he found ‘too big and strange’, divided as it was into fragments (Orozco and Morgan 2011). During the installation, Bonami recalls that Orozco casually opened his knapsack, took out the empty shoebox and placed it on the stone floor of the space allocated to him (1996, 41). Because competition for space is not unusual in an exhibition like the Venice Biennale, ‘the idea that such an uneventful object was taking up so much real estate caused quite a commotion among many artists’ – Charles Ray, for example, who was installing his 7 1⁄2 Ton Cube 1990 in the same section of the Biennale (Bonami 2011, 92). As a result, Bonami explained how he had to stand his ground to defend the legitimacy of this occupation of space, for, proportionally speaking, the shoebox ‘looked like a caravan in Monument Valley’ (92).
In his account of the work on site, Orozco recalls: ‘it disappeared minutes before the exhibition began, carried off because people thought it was trash’ (2009a, 88). Because the work kept disappearing, Bonami suggested that the box could be glued onto the floor but Orozco objected to the idea as he thought it would cause the object to be more easily ‘destroyed by its own resistance’ (88). Instead the artist suggested, ‘it would be better to let it be kicked and for the container to take the blows and ricochet all over the place […] this way it would be more likely to survive’ (88). Taking into consideration that visitors to this vast exhibition would probably see the work for a few seconds at best, Orozco explains that this almost imperceptible gesture was aimed at testing the potential for impact on visitors’ memories and perception. He further claimed that such a subtle gesture ‘can have a stronger impact on our memory than a skyscraper ever could’ (quoted in Orozco 2007, 98). Moreover, the decision to present the shoebox came as a challenge to the grand gestures of the large-scale paintings and installations of the Eighties:
It was the climax of market speculation, and the objects were made to behave in a market of commodities. They were trying to impress with shininess, as products. Obviously Jeff Koons is one of the main characters of this type of art. I was skeptical of art like this, and still am. I also found it really tedious – stiff, dead, not intriguing. So my work started to do something different. (Orozco cited in Sook 2010)
Indeed, Empty Shoe Box stood in stark contrast to the glossy, monumental works by Koons and others at the Aperto, such as Damien Hirst’s Mother and Child (Divided) (1993) (the dissected halves of a cow and a calf in formaldehyde solution, displayed in glass vitrines) or Charles Ray’s heavy solid steel cube painted with white automobile paint to make it appear lighter than it really was (Ray cited in Kontova 1993, 380). In contrast to Ray’s steel cube, Orozco’s modest shoebox turned into an ironic comment on minimal art while also effectively undermining the condition of art as spectacle (Bonami, 1996, 42).
Orozco’s ‘slight’ objects attracted substantial criticism because they appeared to undermine an internationally prestigious event. ‘There has sometimes been the complaint (not least at the Venice Biennale in 1993) that Orozco has lowered the tone of a would-be important mixed show by submitting a slight piece of work’, writes Guy Brett (2009, 57). Others, as Gabriel Kuri remarks, criticized the works for being opportunistic, demonstrating ‘nothing more than a counterpoint to the magnitude of the exhibition by means of their own circumspection and failing to resonate outside the event’s structure of publicity and promotion’ (2000, 48). In addition to the commotion at the Biennale, Brett notes the annoyance Empty Shoe Box has often caused among museum directors who have despaired of insuring as an artwork a nondescript empty box that could easily get destroyed or discarded (2009, 57). For Brett, however, ‘paradoxically, the modest empty box can become in one’s mind the opposite: an expansive figure of receptivity, openness, possibility, especially by contrast with some of the more laboured efforts around’ (57).
The artist’s own approach to the controversy caused by the shoebox highlights his strategic implementation of surprise and disappointment. Acknowledging that many people were shocked while others remained indifferent, Orozco observes that for some, the encounter with the box was a special moment in the midst of this massive exhibition (Orozco 2009b, 194). The artist writes in his notebook:
Truly new art tends to be disappointing, especially for the public that already has an idea of what art should be. This is because new art shatters the public, forcing it into a crisis based on the simple fact that there can be no public for an art that did not exist before. (Orozco 2009a, 88)
In other words, this kind of art effectively ‘represents a new reality’ and while reality is banal, ‘it is also a space where something marvellous may happen’ (Orozco 2009a, 88–89). This effect is also demonstrated in Orozco’s first solo exhibition at the Marian Goodman Gallery in New York in 1994, that is, the year after the Biennale, where the artist showed four yogurt lids, each installed on one of the four walls of the gallery space (see Figure 36). Visitors entered the room to find that there was hardly anything there to look at. After the initial disappointment, many left the room but when some of them returned, possibly ‘with a different consciousness, with a new attitude toward what was happening – which was banal, which was real – a new surprise could occur’ (Orozco 2009a, 91). In Orozco’s words, ‘this art cannot be spectacular, since reality is not spectacular, except by accident’ (91).
It is worth noting that, somewhat ironically, it was this ‘slight’ work, the modest shoebox, which brought Orozco to international prominence. Buchloh considers the box as one of Orozco’s paradigmatic objects ‘that has gained – with hindsight all the more so – an epistemological authority approaching the status of Duchamp’s first, pure unadulterated readymade’ (2006, 177). Bonami (2011) also describes the box in retrospect as a ‘mythical gesture’ now belonging to ‘the trinity of conceptual art’ alongside Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) and Piero Manzoni’s Merda d’artista (1961). Even if the work is now canonized as part of art history, it still triggers dispute, providing a key example of how an almost imperceptible work can disrupt the art establishment, challenge the limits of art discourse and question the assumptions that sustain it and the bureaucracies that constitute it as an institutional system.
As a mass-produced object inserted into the museum context, Empty Shoe Box undeniably evokes the Duchampian readymade, while it further resonates with Duchamp’s Box-in-a-Valise (1935–41), Green Box (1934) and White Box (1967), albeit emptied of their contents. Indeed, Duchamp constitutes an important figure for Orozco, and the readymade has been crucial in the reading of Orozco’s work by numerous scholars and art critics. In addition to the Duchampian echoes, Buchloh situates Orozco’s work within a historical framework of sculpture that spans the one hundred years from the early twentieth to the early twenty-first century, ranging from Brancusi’s sculpture and Duchamp’s readymade in the 1910s, to Conceptual Art, Minimalism, Post-Minimalism, and Arte Povera (in Temkin 2009, 34–43). Guy Brett further relates Orozco’s practice to Latin American art, particularly the Argentinian artist Alberto Greco’s Vivo Ditto (1962) and Hélio Oiticica’s Bólides (1963–1964) (2009, 53). Indeed, Empty Shoe Box is a work rich in art historical reverberations, ‘infinitely knowing, art-historically speaking’ (Clark 2011, 32). However, these accounts fail to link the work to Breton’s found object, a link which would connect with Orozco’s investigation of reality.
… a fact [fait] is always made up of [fait de] discourse. No one has ever seen a received fact. That is not a fact. It’s a lump, something you bump into, all the things that can be said about something that is not already discursively articulated.
Jacques Lacan (2008, 72)
At the 1993 Biennale, the shoebox was displayed alongside Orozco’s Yielding Stone (1992), a lump of plasticine the weight of the artist, rolled into a roughly spherical shape and placed on the floor of the Arsenale. Having picked up debris and bearing visible traces of its trajectory, the plasticine ball was situated between two imposing brick pillars. Bonami recounts that the work was handled roughly by visitors to the exhibition and was even stabbed with a plastic fork at some point (1996, 41). He moreover explains that both Yielding Stone and Empty Shoe Box were born to be destroyed, ‘abused without pity’, discarded, thrown away (41). Bonami finally argues that in their encounter Empty Shoe Box and Yielding Stone bring together the two most common techniques of classical sculpture, by subtracting in one work, and adding in the other (42).
Brett has compared Yielding Stone to Alberto Giacometti’s Object to be thrown away (1931) from his set of Disagreeable Objects, ‘a sort of ugly thing that would not fit or function within established, expected protocols’ (2009, 54). Indeed, Yielding Stone is also this kind of ‘disagreeable’ object that absorbs dust and dirt, and fails to set into a permanent form because of its oily, malleable substance in contrast to the hard and shiny surfaces of more spectacular sculpture. The artist explains that he was interested in plasticine because of its ‘constant mutability’ and that he used this quality ‘to shape its appearance: camouflage, not of stone into sculpture, but of sculpture into stone; modeling a rock which is not a rock, nor a sculpture, but a ball of plasticine, dirty’ (Orozco 2011, 22).4 However, while these objects revisit the histories and redefine the category of sculpture in order to generate a critique of spectacle, they do so in their capacity as found objects.
In his book Mad Love (L’Amour fou, 1937), Breton gives a detailed account of his encounter with two found objects while strolling around the Saint-Ouen flea market on the outskirts of Paris with his friend Alberto Giacometti. One of the objects that caught his attention was a curious wooden spoon whose handle was supported by a small, carved shoe (see Figure 37). Breton immediately bought the spoon and soon realized that this unique and unusual object corresponded to a certain pre-existing desire of his:
Some months earlier inspired by a fragment of a waking sentence, “the Cinderella ash-tray” and the temptation I had for a long time to put into circulation some oneiric and para-oneiric objects, I had asked Giacometti to sculpt for me, according to his own caprice, a little slipper which was to be in principle Cinderella’s lost slipper. (Breton 1987, 33)
Breton wished to have this object cast in grey glass but Giacometti never realized the project and Breton reports that he felt the pressing lack of this slipper. He further says that even though the flea market wooden spoon is different in all points from what he had planned, its beauty comes precisely from ‘the lack of resemblance between the desired object and the discovery. […] it takes all the beauty that I see in it from what it is not’ (Breton 1978, 42–43). Breton is moreover thrilled to find ‘the marvelous slipper potential in the modest spoon’ (34).
By opening up an expansive space of possibility, far from the dominant forms of spectacle, Orozco’s modest shoebox operates in a similar way. Interestingly, the shoe has gone missing from the shoebox in Orozco’s story, further invoking ideas of loss and desire. In addition to these allusions, the origin of the shoebox as the container of the artist’s notes and working objects, as well as the common use of shoeboxes for storing photos, letters and other personal memorabilia, also point to ideas of loss, memory and desire that counterbalance the work’s status as a readymade, mass-produced object.
In one of his notebooks, Orozco quotes Slavoj Žižek’s (1992, 19) discussion of Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square (1915):
The ‘reality’ (white background surface, the ‘liberated nothingness,’ the open space in which objects can appear) obtains its consistency only by means of the ‘black hole’ in its center (the Lacanian Thing that gives body to the substance of enjoyment) i.e. by the exclusion of the real, by the change of the status of the real into that of a central lack.’ (Quoted in Temkin 1999, 37; emphasis in original)5
In formulating the psychoanalytic concept of the objet petit a, (formerly the Lacanian Thing), it has been convincingly argued by Iversen (2007) that Lacan had Breton’s found object in mind. Vice-versa, given this relation, the Lacanian objet petit a, as that which partakes of the Real, can tell us something in retrospect about the found object. It becomes apparent from Orozco’s notebook citation, that the idea of lack that constitutes Breton’s found objects, and which retrospectively resonates with the objet petit a and the Lacanian Real, is crucial for Orozco, who often claims that he works ‘in reality’ (cited in Joselit 2000, 173). David Joselit considers the problems of this claim from an art historical perspective, as one informed on the one hand by the readymade, and on the other by (Lacanian) psychoanalytic theory (2000, 173). He argues that, first, in the case of the readymade, there is a danger of simplistically collapsing art into life, and vice-versa. Secondly, in relation to psychoanalytic theory, working ‘in reality’ poses the following paradox: how can the Lacanian Real, often understood as that which lies outside representation, be incorporated into a system of representation? That is, ‘how can reality be incorporated as an artwork?’ (173). Joselit writes: ‘From both art-historical and poststructuralist perspectives, […] working in reality calls forth “impossible objects”. Such things must simultaneously emerge as representations and fall back into the unmediated condition that is “reality”’ (2000, 173). In other words, as Žižek asks in relation to the Real defined as lack: ‘How can nothing beget something?’ (1992, 8).
To address this problem, Joselit reads Orozco’s objects through the Duchampian rendez-vous, an encounter between the artist and the object, which can nevertheless be circumvented by all sorts of delays and where, he suggests, ‘the stain of reality remains pungent’ (2000, 173). By cultivating the dimension of the readymade as an encounter, Joselit proposes that Orozco’s works reach beyond issues of ‘aesthetic validation conferred on ordinary commodities’ (2000, 173). Indeed, aspects of the rendez-vous are present in Yielding Stone, for example, where the artist set a date and time for himself to roll the ball around the streets, much like Duchamp’s instructions to inscribe a readymade on a specific date at a certain time. However, I suggest that the pungent ‘stain of reality’ in Orozco’s works is more aptly captured by the Surrealist chance encounter with the found object, which engages more fully with the questions Joselit identifies. While the rendez-vous implies intention and choice on the part of the artist, the accidental character of the chance encounter helps bring into relief the precarious state of Orozco’s everyday objects as artworks, and allows us to get a better understanding of the claim they make to being ‘in reality’.
The city is the privileged site of the chance encounter in Surrealism.6 Orozco also often finds his objects in the streets and outskirts of cities, which he believes to be rich in such encounters. He sometimes uses film or photography, which he likens to a container as well as a hole, to record his interactions. Describing his films, comprised of unedited sequences of things he encounters in the streets, Orozco admits there may be similarities with John Cage’s recordings, as well as with Surrealist automatic writing. However, he is careful to distinguish his work from these practices because they are about ‘losing control’, while his work entails ‘focusing on concentration and intention’ (Orozco 1998, 115). As he puts it, ‘the flow of images in my work is extremely controlled. I trace certain intentions with the camera, and then suddenly the tension between my intentions and reality becomes too great and the whole thing breaks down’ (115). Rather than a simplified conception of Surrealist automatism and the corresponding strategy of the chance encounter as ‘losing control,’ it is exactly this tension between intention and chance, the discrepancy between the imagined and the found object demonstrated in Breton’s story of the found wooden spoon that finds expression in Orozco’s work.
Further addressing Orozco’s interest in reality, Briony Fer (2009) draws our attention to the word REALIA written in capital letters in one of Orozco’s earliest notebooks. The term concerns ‘such items as objects, specimens, samples, relics, artefacts, souvenirs and even models and dioramas. And realia which one uses in construction of exhibition and bulletin boards. Real things, actual facts’ (Fer 2009, 23). Fer maintains that these physical things can be connected with the objects collected in cabinets of curiosity because, like those objects, Orozco’s items, however small and mundane, maintain something ‘immense and mysterious’ (23) (see Figure 38). In her reading, Fer effectively dissociates ‘reality’ from the simple amassing of factual information, highlighting an unresolved tension in Orozco’s engagement with it. There is, then, a difference between ‘reality’ and the Real, which is not clear in Orozco’s statements and is also obscured in Joselit’s discussion of Orozco’s work. Working with ‘real things, actual facts’ is one thing. Incorporating the concept of the Real, on the other hand, as that which escapes representation, is a different matter. Breton himself is well aware of this distinction when he differentiates the real, from ‘given data’ (2002, 276). Understanding this important distinction is essential if we are to comprehend Orozco’s version of realism.
Tracing aspects of Breton’s found object in Orozco’s works provides the necessary theoretical tools with which to answer questions regarding the artist’s ambition to work ‘in reality’. In addition, a central objective of Surrealism was to propose a fundamental reformulation of the notion of reality, which is also Orozco’s proclaimed aim for new art – that it ‘represents a new reality’ (Orozco 2009a, 88). I have thus far suggested that the found object, which in its very conception maintains a dialectical tension between representation and reality, effectively allows us to think through this tension without simplistically collapsing the one into the other, as Joselit was concerned may occur.
There is, however, another important dimension to the Lacanian Real that rests beyond longstanding debates on the dichotomy between representation or symbolization and a supposedly unmediated reality. In How to Read Lacan, Žižek emphasizes the complexities of the Lacanian Real which exceed the idea of it as ‘a fixed transhistorical “hard core” that forever eludes symbolization’ (2006, 65).7 The Real, as Lacan insisted, is different from Immanuel Kant’s ‘Thing-in-itself’, ‘reality the way it is out there, independently of us, prior to being skewed by our perceptions’ (Žižek 2006, 65). To illustrate this elusive concept, Žižek further identifies the Lacanian objet petit a, the marker of the Real, with an example taken from popular culture: the barely perceptible detail which distinguishes aliens from humans in the films of Ridley Scott. Furthermore, he claims:
Are we not dealing with the same in our everyday racism? Although we are ready to accept the Jewish, Arab, Oriental other, there is some detail that bothers us in the West: the way they accentuate a certain word, the way they count money, the way they laugh. This tiny feature renders them aliens, no matter how they try to behave like us. (Žižek 2006, 67)
On the level of representation and its relation to the Real, Žižek refers to Lacan’s well-known example of the mysterious object depicted in Hans Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors (1553). When viewed frontally, this object resting at the feet of the Ambassadors is nothing at all, just a void, an indecipherable stain. It is only when we shift our position and look at the object from an oblique angle that the figure of a skull appears. This anamorphic distortion, referring here to death, reveals the objet petit a as a strange object which ‘acquires a definite shape only when looked at from a standpoint slanted by the subject’s desires and fears – as such, as a mere “shadow of what it is not”’ (Žižek 2006, 68–69).
In ‘Refuse and Refuge’ (1993), a discussion regarding Orozco’s implementation of found objects in his early sculptural practice, Buchloh describes the works as silent, muted objects which actively circumvent an explicit political dimension. Their function, however, is to take a stance against the instrumentalisation of art from developing countries, ‘expecting artists of marginalized cultures (both of the urban ghettoes and the non-Western world) to redeem the crisis of the artistic object and reimbue it with a credible auratic dimension, defying as it were the now generally governing principle of simulation and political instrumentalisation of artistic practices in the centers’ (Buchloh 2009a, 4). Buchloh continues: ‘How can an artist escape these projections operative in the process of “othering”?’ (4), suggesting that, in a postcolonial context, Orozco’s work plays out the tensions between the ‘projections of the hegemonic world’ while refusing ‘to be subjected to these expectations, answering in each instance with a precise analysis of the mechanism of othering itself’ (4). Buchloh describes Yielding Stone, for example, as follows:
Orozco’s atavistic object, with its relapse into a primary concept of mere tactility as a participatory mode, appears to prefer muteness over the myth of public speech. But this muteness would be in and of itself merely reprehensible if it was presented emphatically and with the reactionary conviction and minimalist spite, in the manner of Donald Judd, for example. Orozco’s objects exude a silence that is always aware of its inflicted and transitory status, neither ostentatiously displayed as an aesthetic privilege nor internalized as an inescapable condition. It is the muteness of elementary materials before they achieve the status of an instrumentalized object. (2009a, 4)
Orozco’s stance towards Surrealism is indicative of these concerns, partly due to the perceived exoticisation of Mexican culture through a Surrealist lens. Rather than understanding them as ‘mute’ objects, however, I suggest that reading Orozco’s early sculptures through the lens of Breton’s found object and the Lacanian Real, as I have done in this chapter, enables us to conceive the more complex process of identity construction that goes on in these works. In his book Lacan and the Political, the political theorist Yannis Stavrakakis discusses the fundamental impossibility, in a Lacanian context, of the formation of a stable identity through the notion of the Real as lack. He writes:
Symbolisation, that is to say the pursuit of identity, introduces lack and makes identity ultimately impossible… Identity is possible only as a failed identity; it remains desirable exactly because it is essentially impossible…. Thus, it is rather misleading to speak of identities within a Lacanian framework. What we have is only attempts to construct a stable identity, either on the imaginary or the symbolic level, through the image of the signifier. The subject of lack emerges due to the failure of all these attempts. What we have then … is not identities but identifications, a series of failed identifications or rather a play between identification and its failure, a deeply political play. (1999, 29)
I have argued here that Orozco’s ‘impossible objects’ partake of the Real, maintaining ‘the stain of reality’ that Joselit wanted to preserve, but they do so as found objects. These ‘slight’ objects that marked the artist’s entrance into the international art world by reverting to the Real as central lack with its rich connotations of identity and desire, effectively negotiate identity formation and reverberate with all the complexities that this process entails, without reducing the work to an exotic Otherness or seamlessly incorporating it into dominant institutional discourses. In their iconoclastic negotiation of the void, the empty space, they imply a slanted view upon the art object. By effectively sabotaging representation as the premise behind the works, they cause a mild crisis in the museum context and they call into question the status of art as spectacle.
Surrealist Legacies in Latin America
In an interview with Briony Fer, Orozco speaks about his relation to the early European avant-gardes, highlighting his preference for the geometric aesthetic of pre-World War II art and the infantile attitude of Dada that, for him, were more connected to reality (2006, 113). In contrast to that, he rejects the ‘self-indulgent, teenage attitude’ that emerged in the Mexican context with the work of Frida Kahlo and Surrealism (113). Elsewhere, Orozco acknowledges the lasting legacies of the Surrealist movement in Mexico fuelled by Breton’s visit to the country in 1938, yet he reads Surrealism through the prism of the ‘fantastic’ as something extraneous to reality that dominated its reception in Latin America, explaining:
I got more and more distant from the idea of fantasy or Surrealism in the work of art, which I found [in the end] ornamental or artificial. Surrealism was a very important trend in Mexican art through the twentieth century and I wanted to break with that. I wanted to break with the idea of attaching an object with special powers or psychological expression. One way to put it is that I was searching for realism. I was searching for the object as a thing that was real, not Surreal. (Quoted in Morgan 2011, 9)
In the introduction to Surrealism in Latin America, Vivísimo Muerto, the authors address the often negative reception of Surrealism in contemporary Latin American art as amounting to ‘a partial and limited historiography and stereotypical characterizations that aligned it with the gratuitous fantastic and the charge that it appropriated artists such as Frida Kahlo in a neo-colonialist manner’ (Ades, Eder and Speranza 2012, 1). They further suggest that the treatment of Surrealism as ‘a closed historical chapter’ which is met with suspicion, discomfort or silence when discussed in a contemporary context hinders possible readings of unexplored connections and may partly derive from ‘the collateral effect of recent strategic re-readings’ (8). To highlight this point, Ades refers elsewhere to the impact of Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier’s real maravilloso [magical realism] who sought to distance Surrealism from Latin America in the context of ‘initiatives aiming to stamp a distinctive, unique cultural identity on Latin America in the second half of the 20th Century’ (Ades 2009, n.p.). For Ades, Carpentier’s real maravilloso sets up a sharp opposition between ‘surrealist fantasy’ and ‘magic reality’ which misleadingly ‘consolidated the identification of Surrealism with “fantasy” and a fantastic divorced from the real world’ (2009, n.p.). Furthermore, the reception of Surrealism in Mexico during the 1940s did not include consideration of Surrealist objects but was focused mainly on painting (Usabiaga 2011, 8).8 This also resulted in a partial reception of Surrealism, one which was lacking an understanding of the complex issues surrounding the fusion of art and politics negotiated by the Surrealists in the form of the Surrealist object in the 1930s (9).
As early as 1924, at the beginnings of the movement, Breton declared in the ‘First Manifesto of Surrealism’: ‘What is admirable about the fantastic is that there is no longer anything fantastic: there is only the real’ (1969, 15). Even though aspects of Orozco’s work draw on Duchamp’s readymade and its legacies, it is in Breton’s found object that he finds an apt theoretical and aesthetic tool to re-negotiate the position of the art object, by shifting it into an indeterminate status between representation and ‘reality’ and by finding a new vocabulary for a critique of spectacle. Despite Orozco’s proclaimed resistance to the Surrealist legacy, this chapter has identified that he shares with Surrealism an understanding of the Real as not simply a place outside of representation, as Joselit maintains, but as a marker of desire linked to issues of identity and Otherness. For Orozco, the Real understood in this way is a key concept, effectively shaping his ‘impossible objects’.
References
Ades, Dawn. 2009. “Surrealism and its Legacies in Latin America.” Lecture presented at the British Academy, 27 May: http://www.britac.ac.uk/audio.cfm/assetfileid/11824. Accessed: 12 June 2014.
—— Rita Eder, and Graciela Speranza, 2012. Introduction to Surrealism in Latin America. Vivísimo Muerto, edited by Dawn Ades, Rita Eder, and Graciela Speranza, 1–11. Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute.
Bonami, Francesco. 1996. “Back in Five Minutes.” Parkett 48 (Spring): 41–47.
—— 2011. “The Early Adventures: Gabriel Orozco.” Tate Etc., 21: 92–95.
Breton, André. 1969. “First Manifesto of Surrealism.” In Manifestoes of Surrealism, translated by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane, 3–47. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
—— 1978. “Beauty Will Be Convulsive.” In What is Surrealism?, edited by Franklin Rosemont, 42–43. New York: Pathfinder Press.
—— 1987. Mad Love, translated by Mary Ann Caws. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.
—— 1999. Nadja, translated from the French by Richard Howard. London: Penguin Books.
—— 2002. “The Crisis of the Object.” In Surrealism and Painting, 275–280. Boston, MA: MFA.
Brett, Guy. 2009. “Between Work and World.” In Gabriel Orozco (October Files 9), 51–58. Boston, MA: The MIT Press.
Buchloh, Benjamin. H. D. 2006. “Sculpture as Recollection.” In Gabriel Orozco, edited by Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh and Briony Fer, 154–207. London: Thames & Hudson.
—— 2009a [1993]. “Refuse and Refuge.” In Gabriel Orozco (October Files 9), edited by Yve-Alain Bois, 1–15. Boston, MA: The MIT Press.
—— 2009b. “Sculpture Between Nation-state and Global Commodity Production.” In Gabriel Orozco, edited by Ann Temkin, 34–43. New York, NY: Museum of Modern Art.
—— Carrie Lambert Beatty, Megan Sullivan, and Gabriel Orozco. 2009. “To Make an Inner Time: a Conversation with Gabriel Orozco.” October 130: 177–196.
Bürger, Peter. 1974. Theory of the Avant-garde. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Charles Ray. 1993. “Charles Ray.” In Aperto ‘93: Emergency/Emergenza, edited by Helena Kontova and Achille Bonito Oliva, 380. Milan: Flash Art International/Giancarlo Politi Editore.
Clark, T.J. 2011. “At Tate Modern.” London Review of Books, 33 (4): 32–33.
Eyers, Tom. 2012. Lacan and the Concept of the ‘Real’. Palgrave MacMillan.
Fer, Briony. 2006. “Crazy about Saturn.” In Gabriel Orozco, 113. London: Thames & Hudson.
—— 2009. “Constellations in Dust: Notes on the Notebooks.” In Gabriel Orozco, edited by Ann Temkin, 22–33. New York, NY: MoMA.
Iversen, Margaret. 2004. “Readymade, Found Object, Photograph.” Arts Journal 63 (2): 44–57.
—— 2007. Beyond Pleasure: Freud, Lacan, Barthes. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Joselit, David. 2000. “Gabriel Orozco.” Artforum (September): 173–74.
Kingsley, Patrick. 2011. “Watching Gabriel Orozco’s Box.” The Guardian (7 February): http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/feb/07/gabriel-orozco-tate-modern. Accessed: 12 June 2014.
Kuri, Gabriel. 2000 “General Orozco: By Way of Introduction,” in Gabriel Orozco. edited by Alma Ruiz, 34–65. Los Angeles and Mexico City: MOCA and the Museo Rufino Tamayo.
Lacan, Jacques. 2008. My Teaching, translated by David Macey. London: Verso.
Morgan, Jessica, and Gabriel Orozco. 2011. “Gabriel Orozco: In Conversation.” Tate Modern, London, 19 January, http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/video/gabriel-orozco-conversation. Accessed 6 January 2015.
Orozco, Gabriel. 1998. “Gabriel Orozco Talks About his Recent Films,” Artforum (June): 115.
—— 2007. “Gabriel Orozco: Interview with Carmen Boullosa.” Bomb 98: http://bombmagazine.org/article/2862/gabriel-orozco. Accessed: 12 June 2014.
—— 2009a [2001]. “Lecture.” In Gabriel Orozco (October Files 9), edited by Yve-Alain Bois, 85–104. Boston, MA: The MIT Press.
—— 2009b [2004]. “Gabriel Orozco in Conversation with Benjamin H. D. Buchloh,” in Gabriel Orozco (October Files 9), edited by Yve-Alain Bois, 105–120. Boston, MA: The MIT Press.
—— 2011. “An Artist without Frontiers.” The Economist, 12 January: http://www.economist.com/node/17899563. Accessed 12 June 2014.
Sook, Alastair. 2010. “Gabriel Orozco: All the Right Moves.” The Telegraph (30 December): http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-features/8207377/Gabriel-Orozco-all-the-right-moves.html. Accessed 12 June 2014.
Stavrakakis, Yannis. 1999. Lacan and the Political. London and New York: Routledge.
Temkin, Ann. 1999. Gabriel Orozco: Photogravity. Philadelphia, PA: Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Usabiaga, Daniel Garza. 2011. “André Breton, Surrealism and Mexico, 1938–1970: A Critical Overview.” Arara, 10: https://www.essex.ac.uk/arthistory/research/pdfs/arara_issue_10/usabiaga.pdf. Accessed: 12 June 2014.
Žižek, Slavoj. 1992. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. Boston, MA: The MIT Press.
—— 1993. “Violations of the Fantasy Space.” In Aperto ‘93: Emergency/Emergenza, edited by Helena Kontova and Achille Bonito Oliva, 110–112. Milan: Flash Art International/Giancarlo Politi Editore.
—— 2006. How to Read Lacan. New York and London: W.W. Norton and Company.