Gabriel Orozco – Inner Cycles

This is the artist's first solo show in Japan. But in it we find a laundry receipt (the basis for one of the works) to the name of "Olozco-sama"; reading it, we notice it dates from 2000, and that the hotel is far from Tokyo, in the southern island of Kyushu. Orozco in Japan is somehow natural, giving the artist's clear assimilation of the "living Zen" methods of Fluxus and the Beats, as expressed in his way o recognizing and reconstructing reality through unexpected gestures: moments of clarity that do not remain in him or drive reminiscences, but take the space and times that inspire them by assault. Born from playfulness, they record amiable subversions, where a certain tenderness towards the inanimate is the fuel for an exhortation to purposelessness. That purposelessness is the nucleus of Orozco's break with the pomposity of the modern, and it is not by chance that the artist often refers to Zen and similar ideas in Hinduism, albeit keeping his distance. And even as he admits that he does not make devotional art, two Sanskrit terms summarize well the connection: apranihita (purposelessness, not emphasizing goals over the experience of the now) and lila (divine creation seen as a set of simple pastimes without ulterior objective). The itinerant retrospective that changes as it travels is a metaphor for Orozco's methods. The shell of a hermit crab, which in Tokyo takes on a circular shape, segments the gallery at the MOT into a nine-part itinerary. We go in and out of the circle through a series of photographs of the artist's renowned actions and ephemeral sculptures. Neither there nor in any of the other spaces do we distinguish a time-defined sequence. Already the first gallery asks us to see the show as a timeless collection of revelations and invitations. We have wanted to see La DS, which debuted in Paris in 1993, since we first knew of it via photographs. The artist indulges us with a reconstruction (La DS Cornaline) where he shifts colors, a wink towards the implicit commodification of reconstructing a moment in order to turn it into a spectacle. He does the same also by setting lengths of toilet paper to wave over the blades of some ceiling fans, similar to those he must have found in India, where the action was originally executed. Although works like the Corplegados remind us that traveling is Orozco's preferred territory, his characteristic skillfulness in understanding space make us wonder about the arrangement of the works in the gallery, somewhat lacking in the rhythm and humor present in other exhibitions of his work. We also await to see the consequences of this Japanese sojourn, which will last six months. The retrospective nature of the selection illustrates Orozco's well-deserved position as a central figure in contemporary art, but it is perhaps pertinent to ask whether the extension of this anthology tour obscures the present of a master artist who is entering his mature stage in full vitality, prolific, with fascinating new series such as Inner Sequence and River Stones.