GABRIEL OROZCO

Gabriel Orozco talks to Filep Motwary

Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco has many fans—not just in the art world, but in the fashion
industry too, proof of which can be seen in his unofficial collaborations with Dries Van Noten and Ann Demeulemeester. He often wears Yohji Yamamoto and, dividing his time between Mexico City and Japan, regularly bumps into the designer when getting his morning coffee in Tokyo—although the two are yet to be officially introduced. With no studio of his own, Orozco is a nomadic artist. For 30 years now, he has kept many of his works in storage at the Marian Goodman Gallery in New York, which has led to an impromptu exhibition titled Spacetime, on view until the end of 2023.

FILEP MOTWARY: Where are you right now?

GABRIEL OROZCO: At the beach, in Acapulco. I have a big palapa [an open-sided structure with a thatched roof] with access to the ocean, so I like to take my swims and work here in the wintertime.
My wife and son are here with me too. My house was made 20 years ago, in a very simple way. It’s like an observatory on the beach, in Oaxaca, five hours driving from here. It’s not big and it doesn’t have glass windows. It feels like camping at the beach, which is something I did for all my life on that coast in the Pacific Ocean. There we are just looking at nature and swimming in the ocean and there is not that much around. There is no internet! Soon I’m having friends visiting too: among them a biologist and a philosopher, along with some other people. We like to play chess here.

FM: Have you always been close to nature?

GO: Yes, since I was a kid. My first drawings were animals, and fish—a lot of it was about marine life. But also I like astronomy, so I used to draw a lot of planets and constellations. I guess from that came my fascination with spheres and circles and movement.

FM: How important are form and discipline to you?

GO: As a kid, I was very much interested in geometry and chess and some structures that were not visible by just simple observation, but they were behind many of the things that were happening around me. Form comes by trying to understand the structures of nature, the universe and our bodies.
Discipline is how you use or study those forms to build up some structure that is based on the concept behind the idea you are trying to express, but also the form or the structure in the functionality of the canvas or the house or the sculpture concerning gravity and technique in terms of the form and the way you are disciplining it. I have always been curious about doing different things and avoided repeating myself. I’ve always been trying to look for materials and new things that I am attracted to, and then I try to transform and apply them in a new way. That’s why the fixed location of a studio or laboratory did not resonate with me. I work outside, in the open and in constant movement, always looking for new experiences after observation, contact and desire. The environment of a laboratory is less interesting for me. I am more about the discipline of constant experience in the real world. That’s what enables the form…

FM: I’m not an art specialist, yet, as an observer of your work, when I focus on your installations, you almost appear like an archaeologist who, after a great period of excavation, suddenly shares their findings, which are mostly from regional resources. Is this the case?

GO: Yes! I try to work with specificity and timespecificity also. It’s not [just] about the location you are in or the street you are walking on or the culture you are researching or experiencing, but also the time and the moment that things happen to you. This becomes a moment of awareness and you end up being intrigued by it, and then you want to explore a bit more. It can be in various situations, especially in common situations. It’s more interesting to find big surprises and then work with them. Everyday life becomes your studio, your laboratory, your working place. You can call it archaeology but, on the other hand, I try [to make it] that they are still about functioning objects. They are not relics, and they are not museum pieces, but they can have new functionality in society, in the public space, in the imagination of the people. I try to recycle everyday objects while their functionality for me is important.

FM: For the most part, your work seems very systematic: everything is put in a certain order, almost like OCD. Where does this come from? What is it that you want to say?

GO: I can work with very small things and humongous things as I like a sense of scale in what I do. All works should have that I think. You always have a connection with a larger scale or with a micro-scale, and that is just a structure that is a little bit geometric, but also in connection to the human body and the perception of the individual.
I’ve always been a chess aficionado and I think that has been influential in my way of looking at art as a game, in a good way, but also at some things about their geometry and behaviour. Scale and metaphorical situations have a lot to do with chess. When I see a landscape or I try to generate landscapes in every object and installation—even in paintings—I think it’s because I try to relate to my landscape in that sense, not just whatever is on my table or on the street, on the floor, but also the horizon, the sky. To have that sense of scale all over, you can achieve that with small objects and also with big ones. In the end, all is connected.

FM: Do these objects reflect some sort of evolution, maybe?

GO: Evolution in what sense?

FM: Evolution in the sense of re-establishing their use in our heads.

GO: Evolution seems to be a very linear world, like developing, or evolving into something better. I think more in cycles, in loops, in processes of spiralling situations up and down, when you transform matter into something else—and that is already something political.
There is no such thing as prime matter or virgin matter. Everything is political, and social content! Even colours, a pigment, a stone, obviously a car and an elevator or an aeroplane. You use those materials that can be ready-made or a piece of what we consider trash—which is also a temporary state because trash is a moment in a matter that can become something else later.
My practice is to generate cycles or regenerate cycles of meaning and transformation of the perception of that thing into, again, making them functional or alive or meaningful.

FM: With what criteria do you collect these objects? How do they resonate?

GO: It’s very basic. First, it’s just some attraction or curiosity that I have had since I was a kid. But, funnily enough, over the years, and now that I’m quite old, I am still attracted to the same things, like frogs, for example. I used to collect frogs just to look at them. I grew up in Mexico City, but in the south of the city, there were some abandoned lands before they were developed. I grew up in a place that was quite close to nature, but also Mexico, and travelling through Mexico was also a big part of my childhood. Books and fantasy have, as well, helped me love nature. Also, I have loved cars for as long as I can remember. I like Formula One and in primary school, all my books were about cars and dragons.

FM: With what criteria do you select the objects to make these systems, these collections?

GO: The first thing is specificity. I try to be open, to not have a preconception about what I want to see, but just be open and then suddenly let myself be surprised by something that I don’t understand. That’s why travelling has been important to me. You are attracted to something because you don’t know what it is or because it’s just attractive for some reason. Like rubber from the tyres of cars;
I love that material. When I see rubber in different forms, its elasticity, colour, flexibility, and plasticity have always been interesting to me. There is something maybe about soft and organic materials that I’m more attracted to about metal, which I don’t use that much in my work unless it’s a car. There is something physical that makes me get closer to some things, some materials and objects. But also there is somehow attraction in the ways they work, how they move and so on.

FM: What comes first, the idea or the findings? What is the role of chance in what you do? How open are you to that?

GO: Maybe finding is first. If you have an idea before you find something it is because you have a preconception. You have a Platonic idea, and I’m not very Platonic. I’m trying to find those squares triangles and circles in life as if they were the essence of nature and the universe. Everybody has prejudices and preconceptions and a culture behind [that]. I have those things too and I tend to look for some things, but I’m also trying to be neutral without prejudice about anything. Finding something is interesting and so is when you know what that something is. I start to explore it and experiment physically or conceptually with possibilities and my connection with that thing or that idea or that landscape or that entity. Then the idea starts to develop. It’s a process.
Chance is very important, yet I don’t call it a chance operation. I call it more of an awareness of the accidents that might occur during the process. Accidents sometimes become the strongest idea. When you are manipulating something or you are moving things around or something crashes or behaves in a different way than you expected, this can become more important than your preconception. Stability is just a momentary moment, a momentary stage of life. We live in constant accidents and unpredictable situations. You have to enjoy that in a way, to embrace unpredictability and accidents in life because that is the constant. In art, it’s the same. That’s why I have my working tables because I like to keep all the accidents that happen in the process of making big pieces and small pieces and things. If I put ideas on a table the brain starts to travel with those objects to generate their universes, developing them and enjoying all the little accidents and leftovers.

FM: Your projects are often incredibly complex. What role does longevity play in what you do? Are you trying to leave your mark?

GO: You mean longevity of the objects or the works, the durability of the works?

FM: As in the work becoming part of this world as something permanent. Earlier you mentioned time as something important in the way, you work. Yet time includes longevity and memory. Time could be short or could be forever, whatever forever means.

GO: I don’t see time in linear terms, but I find that sometimes a small gesture, that happens in reality for just a few minutes, you are able or lucky enough to take a picture of it or make a drawing of it or just remember it. It can have a long-lasting impact stay in your memory and influence your life. Even if it’s a small little thing that is ephemeral, and that has an unpredictable longevity because it is just how life happens.
The discovery of something can be just in one moment. When you make art, you also have that experience if you are aware of these things because sometimes larger works, that take you two years the make, in the end, don’t have longevity, don’t last very long—the impact of that painting or that sculpture or that house. Other times, an ephemeral gesture a joke or just a good romance that lasts for a week can have longevity and be meaningful for the rest of your life. That happens in art too. I decided to not be much concerned about longevity because I will not be able to control it anyway.

That’s why some of my installations or my objects are gestures that look fragile—they are truly fragile. It’s important to accept vulnerability in terms of physical strength. Also in terms of a statement we are trying to make or a discovery we did that can be vulnerable too. We don’t know exactly how people were looking at the Mona Lisa when it was painted.
The contemporaries of the Mona Lisa were looking at the painting that they were looking at in terms of their perception of reality and art, etc. Today, we see it in a very different way. In 100 years, it’s going to be perceived in a very different way. We change our way of seeing things. Longevity is just a social question.

FM: I want to ask you about the Bosque de Chapultepec. The Pedestrian Bridge that you designed in Mexico City, was commissioned by the President. When will it be finished, how did it come about and why is it important to you?

GO: What I was asked was to coordinate a huge project. I did the master plan for the integration of the whole park, which is a historical place around four times the size of Central Park. I just needed to do some interchange so it would start to behave as an ecosystem as it was subdivided with some of its areas abandoned. We have our big Museum of Anthropology and the Museum of Modern Art of Mexico there, also the Castillo de Chapultepec, the château that used to be the presidential palace for a very long time. We needed to work out from zero, to do some landscaping. I proposed to do three bridges on different levels so that a family or someone in a wheelchair can cross it with ease and enjoy it.

During the process, we hired a couple of architects but it didn’t work out so well so I ended up designing it myself and made it happen with very good engineers. It’s also based on my circular structures and arcades and things that are very prominent in all my work. When you are there, you feel that you are in a park. You don’t feel that you are crossing the periférico [ring road]. It’s a nice promenade…