Gabriel Orozco: "Mobile Matrix" | Art21 "Exclusive"

Episode #029: Gabriel Orozco discusses the process behind his sculpture "Mobile Matrix" (2006), a permanent installation for the José Vasconcelos Library in Mexico City.

Gabriel Orozcos sculptures and photographs disrupt conventional notions of reality. Drawing our attention to slips in logic, philosophical games, and hidden geometries, Orozco uncovers the extraordinary aspects of the seemingly everyday. His use of humble materials and means (graphite on bone, a ball of clay, a 35mm camera) engages the imagination through its disarming simplicity and intimacy.

Gabriel Orozco is featured in the Season 2 (2003) episode Loss & Desire of the Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS.

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Learn more about Gabriel Orozco: http://www.art21.org/artists/gabriel-orozco

VIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller and Sofía Olascoaga. Camera & Sound: J. Manuel Bravo Arriola and Larissa Nikola-Lisa. Editor: Mary Ann Toman. Artwork Courtesy: Gabriel Orozco. Thanks: Biblioteca José Vasconcelos, Mexico City; Kurimanzutto, Mexico City; Marco Barrera Bassols; and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York.

Normally, I don't do public work,

I don't do commissions.

You know, the library is the National Library

So it was like a major project.

So they approached me, but I told them,

"If I have an idea I like, I will do it."

So when the building was ready, I had a couple of ideas,

And one of these ideas was to have this skeleton of a whale in the center.

Somehow, it was like an image, more than an idea.

But it came to me like a very clear image

Of this floating whale in the center of the bookshelves in the library.

When I am dealing with a ready-made object

Or something from reality,

I try to understand the logic of the object,

How it works.

So I took some joints in the different centers of movement of the whale,

And from those points, I start to draw circles.

They're like rings,

And those rings intersect,

So you have different points in the body.

So, from the different centers of the skeleton,

I was drawing rings expanding,

And they were touching in different ways,

Surprising ways,

Until it was really huge rings.

At the end was a lot labor to fill it with graphite.

And I like the graphite because its lead

Has certain qualities that is not like painting on the bone,

It's more like dust.

I always liked the idea of this dark mineral

Against the whiteness of the bone,

How they contrast.

If you think, in my work, as a way of taking from reality

And then extracting something, and then revealing just one central part,

Or the part that I'm interested in.

It's a kind of collage.

Getting involved with that, and remaking the structure again.

So it still is what it is originally,

But then is revealed in a different way.

I mean, I know that when you do something like this

In a big building like that one,

The symbolism and the mythology starts to play a factor,

And humanity has a lot of legendary tales and stories

And mythologies in relation with the whale.

On the other hand, normally in a building like this,

You will do an eagle or something symbolic about Mexico or something like that,

That they love to do in the old times, you know?

But I think now, being more about knowledge,

and also the building has an ecological side.

But I think that all that is in the work

Without me saying anything.

I think for me, what is important is the translation

From real experience.

But then how you translate that experience into a sign,

into a language, into art,

That you can communicate your discoveries to other people.