Photogravity on Gabriel Orozco Philadelphia Museum of Art Philadelphia.

Photogravity

on Gabriel Orozco

Philadelphia Museum of Art

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

October 12-December 12 1999

Photogravity

at Gabriel Orozco

afterword from Ann Temkin

Philadelphia, PA: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1999

183 pp/$2995 (hb)

"Photogravity," Gabriel Orozco's 1999 exhibit for the Philadelphia Museum of Art, revisits the modernist appropriation of non-western uses and forms. Orozco's commission, commonly touring as part of his mid-career overlook consists of a series of large-scale black and white cutout photographic reproductions of pre-columbian carvings go uped on stiff board backings. These boards are in turn round supported by playful, biomorphic iron stands that give a sculptura form (at least when viewed from the rear) to the otherwise two-dimensional, photo-derived drifts The images on the faces of these realitys fall into two categories. Roughly half delineate previous sculptures of Orozco's, among them more [i]or[/i] less of his better-known works: La Ddesse (1993) a Citroen D sports car with its midsection removed; Yielding Stone (1992) a large plasticine ball bearing the traces and impressions of its having been turned through the street; and Four Bicycles/There is Always undivided Direction (1994), an improbable eight-wheeled period The oth er half generate objects from the Walter and Louise Arensberg collection of ancient Mesoamerican plastic art that forms part of the permanent collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. at pairing flattened representations of his confess work with cutout replicas of these ancient Mesoamerican stones, Orozco interrogates the history of modernism and its relation to non-western aesthetics. The Philadelphia Museum of Art, with its canonical holdings from the Arensberg collection, functions as a politically and historically charged arena in which Orozco may play. The succes of his delineate rests in an ambiguous interrogation directed at the museum space, his acknowledge work, the modernist project that he hints the postmodern critique implicit and his possess neo-Duchampian practice. But first, to better understand what is at stake here, a certain quantity of background on the Arensberg collection is helpful.

Donated to the museum in 1954 the collection consists of around a thousand intents accumulated over half a centenary through the aggressive (though intermittent) collecting practice of the pair Walter (1878-1954) and Louise (1879-1953) Arensberg. The larger portion of the collection consists of early twentieth hundred years paintings and sculptures, many from France. Particularly well exhibited are Constantin Brancusi, Georges Braque, Marcel Duchamp and Pablo Picasso. Other important Europeans (Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee Joan Miro, Piet Mondrian) are also included, as are late artists from the United States (Alexander Calder, Charles Sheeler) and Mexico (Roberto Montenegro Rufino Tamayo). A smaller number of non-western phenomenons complete the collection. This cluster includes about 200 pre-Columbian goals as well as a smaller number of phenomenons mostly sculptures, from Africa, Oceania and diverse North American Indian agricultures The Arensbergs purchased these "primitive art" percepts from pioneering dealers instrumental in the aesthetic reevaluation of non-western carve including the gallerist (and next-door neighbor during their years in observes Angeles) Earl Stendahl, plus the caricaturist, writer and filmmaker Marius de Zayas, who sold the man and wife their first pre-Columbian piece in 1915 [1]

As an acknowledgment of the acquisition of the Arensberg's unrivaled collection, the Philadelphia Museum published, also in 1954 a two-part catalog, the same volume documenting their holdings of twentieth-century art, the other of their pre-Columbian collection. The twin tomes, matching in size, binding and design, acknowledge the brace components of the Arensberg donation and establish a sort of equivalence between the couple collections. Each volume features black and white reproductions. [2] Orozco's "Photogravity" finds a number of intersections with the Arensberg collection and the couple Museum publications that document it. Orozco's choice of black and white photography rouses the images in the catalog; in fact, his pre-Columbian pieces are enlargements of the reproductions from the 1954 publication, that is to say, photographs of photographs. [3] Other constituent principles of "Photogravity" conjure up forms reminiscent of individual artworks, similar as the curvilinear iron supports, that reverberate the lines of the Miro oil paintin g The circular rubber attachments that have relation the flat photographs with their sculptural supports not simply strengthen the evocation of Miro's Female Torso (1931) unless recall the multiple discs and circles that present itself elsewhere in Orozco's work. [4]

Just as there are echoe of these seminal modernists in Orozco's work, in like manner too are there connections that might b made between Orozco and pre-Columbian art. The exhibition "Soleils mexicains," for example, installed in the "Petit Palais, Musee de Beaux-Arts de Ia Ville de Paris" in 2000 juxtaposed a carved snake from the ancient Yucatecan Maya site of Uxmal, a human figure (or perhaps divinity with human form) emerging from its expand mouth, with Orozco's Serpent (1991) still more than any of these specific links, the central relate to of "Photogravity" is the formal equivalence implied between the pre-Cortesian and the contemporary, coupling that summons the Philadelphia Museum's two catalogs of the Arensberg collection and, more generally, the gesturing that brought these ancient views into the art museum.