Gabriel Orozco in "Loss & Desire" - Season 2 - "Art in the Twenty-First Century" | Art21

GABRIEL OROZCO: I like to work here.

I like to walk.

Wakes me up. Just a few blocks of 
walking can happen many things.

And I like to observe these 
things, and to enjoy them.

The camera is an instrument 
that I use to, as a way of,

as an excuse to look at these things.

So the camera is a way of awareness.

Even when I was a kid,

I remember the streets that I walked in Mexico,

going from my house to school.

I can remember all the puddles in between,

and all the accidents in the sidewalk.

I always liked this, to look at this.

I don’t have a studio, so I don’t 
have a specific place of production.

I found that sometimes the 
studio’s an isolated place,

an artificial place, like a bubble.

That I’m not so interested because 
I think it gets out of reality.

What happen when you don’t have a studio

is that you have to be confronted 
with reality all the time.

You have to be in the street,

you have to walk around,

you have to be outdoors.

I try to be intimate with everything I can.

To be intimate you have to open yourself

and you have to trust what is around you.

And then you generate signs 
of intimacy with these things.

And then all the other people can have 
that same relationship with the world.

I don’t have a technique, I have 
many different ways to work.

So when I finish something,

I need to invent something else,

in a different medium, in a different place.

This Citroen is not just 
a car, it’s a special car,

and charged with significance 
because it’s a cultural object.

But it’s not just an icon because it’s 
also a machine that has a function.

And to remake it on it’s own logic,

you are at the same time analyzing this icon

so that it becomes something active again.

I mean I did it with one assistant.

Cutting it together, we worked 
for a month in a garage.

It was quite intimate work, it was very nice.

It was a lot of work.

I extracted the center and put it back together.

On one side, laterally, you 
see it like a normal car

and then when you walk around you 
have the perspective distorted.

Here, I wrote something, which 
will read something like,

"transport system beyond the vanishing point.""

And then, also these are more 
like, organic drawings, just loose.

But the real drawing was in the car itself.

Because you have to make the line very 
precise and that took like a week.

You can keep cutting it.

You can do another cut and another cut

and another cut until infinite 
and you will never finish.

MARIA GUTIERREZ DE OROZCO: He had 
to come to the supermarket with me

to help carry stuff back, but of course there,

he started playing with the food,

because he was bored about me reading 
all the labels and the ingredients.

He realized what an ordered, 
perfect world the supermarket is,

and he realized the minute you put it back

and it’s not it’s place there’s 
this chaos that generates just from

putting something that’s not right and you 
feel immediately that something is wrong.

And that’s when he brought the 
potatoes with the notebooks

and he put the cat food with the watermelon.

It’s actually all very banal with him, there's little mystery

It’s all very basic.

It’s just this incredible curiousity that he takes for granted that suddenly he gets fascinated.

GABRIEL OROZCO: What I like about games is that

a game is a thing on it’s own.

So you have a little world in 
this board or in this table,

designed to perfection so 
you can play in a landscape

and when it is a good game,

it’s so passionate that you can really 
get into this world and just live in it.

When you have normal ping pong game

you have a net which is a 
non space between two spaces.

But instead of two people playing you 
have four people playing in four tables,

you open that space so the net is open.

And what you have there is a new space.

And that is the space I am interested in,

in the in- between space.

Because it’s a new space I 
could do anything I wanted.

I decided to make a pond.

I will say it’s just an arbitrary decision,

but then if you want to connect 
that with the pond in Indian culture

and relate it with the lotus flower 
and the beginning of the universe

and the pond as the center of the universe,

you can.

One day I saw the Foucault Pendulum,

and as you know it’s the way that 
was proved that the earth moves.

Because you have this pendulum 
hanging from very high

which is constantly moving 
because the earth is rotating.

Then I decided, ‘What happens if one of 
the balls in the billiard is a pendulum?’

and then also instead of 
having a rectangular table,

I decided to have an elliptical 
table or an oval table.

So then we will play more 
closer to laws of the universe.

In billiards, because it’s rectangular,

you can calculate how the ball is going to bounce.

But in this case when the ball 
starts to touch this oval,

it just starts to bounce around, around,

and then just gets lost totally.

Anyway it’s a totally different game and, and,

and it’s more complex in many ways.

It’s also much more boring 
than a normal billiard game,

but uh, and also I didn’t put any rules except

the basic rules of hitting 
two balls with your own ball.

And people play it. I play it sometimes.
And the rules, they have to be invented.

I tried to use the tools that everyone can use.

I don’t want to be a specialist.

A technique, that is very difficult.

I prefer to be a beginner.

I like to learn how to fix cars 
and then I did the Citroen.

I mean, I’m not an expert in cars.

Even I think sometimes when I do, like ceramics,

it’s like a hobby for me, I think.

It’s more like well I like ceramics, it’s nice,

I want to learn a little bit. It’s 
exactly how you define a hobby.

Normally when you do potteries

you are very much aware of 
this empty center space.

In this case I was not so interested 
in the center but as a mask.

For that reason I need a clay that was special.

And this workshop used to 
be a brick factory before;

they have these machines to 
produce clay that I need very fast.

So in one day you can do a whole amount of hours

almost like a worker doing a mechanical thing,

and for me that was important.

The thinking process is related 
with the ball in many ways.

To be moving in a train or 
to be looking at the ocean.

To be working with my hands 
with the clay and very physical.

All generates a stimulus in 
the brain and you are thinking.

But the connection between 
the brain and the breathing

and the sweating and the time that you spend

and how you slow down thinking 
or you accelerate thinking—

you just generate the 
different aspects of thinking.

So when I feel that it should be 
ready is a quite subjective thing.

It’s just that the shape should 
represent what just happened before.

Pottery’s a very complex 
instrument in human history.

It can be related to Mexico if you want,

but it can be related with Greece,

it can be related with everybody in the world

because pottery is just part of history.

The division between work and 
everyday life is very strong.

In Mexico it’s the same.

And that space in between work 
and life is the space that is

very hard to negotiate for everybody.

Leisure time or pleasure time or knowledge time

or research time or, that space that is left over

because the important thing is to work,

and then to sustain your life or something.

But then all the spaces in between are a bit lost.

So every citizen has to fight for those spaces.

When you live and work in the same place,

everything is part of the work.

Every furniture is important, every little thing.

Even the trash.

The contradiction that I have is that 
when I say I don’t want to produce things,

but at the same time there is this necessity 
of producing signs of communication,

a kind of mirror of what I’m doing.

And maybe it’s an obsession of building 
bridges of communication with other people.