In 1991, Gabriel Orozco visited a brickworks in Cholula. Two photographs of the visit have been conserved, although there are certainly others. My Hands Are My Heart, the images are entitled. A peculiar self-portrait, without a face, without that face anyone would expect to see, disappointing like other Orozco self-portraits, that one of the Yielding Stone, that greasy ball that weighs the same as him and gathers the dust of the street, or the Yoghurt Caps and the Elevator, in which he takes himself as the measure, deceptive metonymies of himself in which he unveils, reveals and hides himself at the same time. My Hands Are My Heart records, documents, bears witness to a simple, very simple but very effective gesture: leaving his handprints on a mass of clay. A banal gesture that almost sums up what he considers one of his responsibilities as an artist: to discover a new meaning – or show a hidden one – in an existing reality by bringing about a minimal accident; and which plays, as in many of his works, with pairs of opposites, with the paradoxical suspension of contrariness, with being – like that dust that gathers between statues and their pedestals, like himself between Mexico, Paris and New York – between media: between the real and the imagined, between the everyday and the event, between the organic and the inorganic, between the natural and the artificial, between craft and industry, between the document and the work of art, between photography and sculpture… Being between media, because he does not like labels, he always shuns boundaries and constantly crosses borders, looks for a mysterious ambiguity – we are never sure what we are seeing – and an ungraspable permeability – as what we are seeing might be defined –, an ambiguity and permeability which he calls the “liquidity of things”.

Orozco has never thought of himself as a photographer – “I had never studied photography, I was not particularly interested and I am still not”, he said in 20011 –, and nor, despite some critics, could he be considered purely a sculptor or painter, though he has also painted, because one of his interests is moving between disciplines, or rather the moving itself, the happening, for him the happening is the everyday, stability is the exception. “Normally we consider stability a constant and accidents the exception,”2, he warns. And it was as a “container”, like that Empty Shoebox kicked around by the spectators in the corridor at the 1993 Venice Biennale, that he began to use photography at the end of the eighties; a normalised – the photographs were developed in industrial laboratories on standard sized paper, 40.64 x 50.80 cm – and inexpressive – the images were always taken in the middle distance with a centred viewpoint – “container”, which allowed him to collect and then take away – to transport in space and time – his interventions in public places, those “productions of accidents”3 – at the moment of the action and at the moment of looking at it afterwards– which he regarded as the artist’s duty to destroy the mass of the public and transform it into independent individuals. But little by little the actions – placing oranges on the deserted stalls of a market in Crazy Tourist (1991); leaving wheel marks between two puddles in Extension of Reflection (1992), moving potatoes or tins in the aisles of a supermarket in Five Problems and Cats and Watermelons (1992), or building an Island with an Island (1993) with rubbish – were not necessary because reality itself provided those accidents in his continuous wanderings through the streets, the cities, the countries, the continents… The photographs became “iconic”, as he calls them, ceasing to record “the results of his physical encounter with the world around him” and becoming “images of objects and situations he finds”. Now taking a photograph not only serves as a record “but constitutes his encounter with the real”4. He no longer needs to intervene, just to signal with the styleless style of his images: “There, that’s an orozco”.

On his journey to Mali, eleven years after My Hands Are My Heart, after leaving his print on the mass of clay, he found and photographed: a stone road, a bicycle leaning on an uprooted tree, stones that had fallen off a precipice, a city that had grown on the skirts of a rock… “The roots of all that are in my piece for Documenta. I was interested in saucepans because of my concern with the container and transport systems. When I did the Pots I was working with containers that rotated. It was at that moment when I became interested in Mali ceramics and that is why I travelled there. […] After that journey to Mali I continued my work in terracotta, thinking about the containers but also […] about other forms of container and means of transport, and about […] the making of bread, food or the landscape”5. Photographs which despite their “strong documentary character” once again create a journey, a being between media, establishing a constant coming and going not only in the terracotta sculptures he was doing at that time – as he himself showed when he exhibited them together at Galerie Chantal Crousel, making the journey somewhat spatial –, but also from a perverse mnemotechnical game with earlier works, turning the journey into something temporal as well: a Stone Road that recalls the Rubbed Bricks (1991) or Yellow Hose (1996); a Standing Bicycle that refers to There is Always a Direction (1995); stones that construct a Drawing similar to that of a Big Bang (1995); or a city – Roof and Rock – which is almost a ninety degree turn from My Hand Is the Memory of Space (1991). And in that special journey – between streets, cities, countries and continents; between past, present and future; between techniques and materials; between dimensions and depths, between the made and the found –, the real – the world – seems to have been orozcoised.

Sergio Rubira