Gabriel Orozco: "Obit" | Art21 "Exclusive"

Episode #032: Gabriel Orozco discusses his installation "Obit" (2008), on view at Marian Goodman Gallery in New York.

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. Camera & Sound: Larissa Nikola-Lisa. Editor: Mary Ann Toman. Artwork Courtesy: Gabriel Orozco. Thanks: Marian Goodman Gallery, New York.

I am not a person that reads obituaries

but sometimes I came out in the New York Times especially

with some headlines that I found very funny like

"Master of Light Bulbs" or

you know, "Once Known as a Rival to Shirley Temple"

or "The Pioneer in Frozen Juice."

And I start to collect and get all the

obituaries possible and then select from them the headlines that I found most

provocative or intriguing or funny or banal.

It's a little bit like a mausoleum.

Normally when you...you see something commemorating the dead,

it's a listing thing, you know?

You have the list of the names.

In this case you don't have the list of the names.

You have these floating sentences of the memory of somebody.

That it doesn't matter who was, but it matters what they did.

I think it's a very existential piece in a way.

It's like we are all language, in a way

we are all not just like an organism

that eats...from the very beginning

we are communicating with people...we are

the way we behave and how we interact, we are language.

For me what is important is not

so much what you see in the show

but what you see after,

how your perception of reality is changed.

Then next time they open the newspaper

they are going to look for the obituary

to see if the sentence is funny or is intriguing or is original

and then the people who is connected with this work

they will be collecting these obituaries in their head

you know, and maybe I'll do the same

And then my obituary is going to be

"The Most Important Collector of Obituaries in the World"