Pretentious Art Criticism Watch
Posted on December 30th, 2009 in Uncategorized | 5 Comments »
Emphasis added:
For a real wallop… visitors can step into a small gallery where MoMA has installed [Mexican artist Gabriel] Orozco’s Yogurt Caps, the artist’s ultimate small-gesture-with-strange impact work and an homage to the Empty Gallery as Work of Art. Made in 1994, and consisting of four clear blue-rimmed Dannon lids, each nailed to the center of one wall of an otherwise bare room, it’s one of the most vexing artworks of the past two decades. Somehow Yogurt Caps transforms the gallery into something both more and less visible. The space becomes about emptiness and fullness, caring and not caring, the drained and the charged, passivity, portals, pissing people off, location, dislocation, irony, sincerity. It destroys the temple of Richard Serra. (It’s also, weirdly, about the first, third, and final letters of Orozco’s surname. There are so many circles in his art that you might think Orozco walks around the world seeing and re-creating his initial. He turns Walt Whitman’s omnipresent ‘I’ into an ‘O,’ and it’s wonderful.)
—From Jerry Saltz’s essay on Gabriel Orozco in the new issue of New York magazine.
I know writing about art isn’t easy…particularly when that art is four Dannon yogurt lids nailed to the wall. But as someone trying to learn about Orozco, I found myself befuddled and irritated by this pompous, lazy writing. How do yogurt lids transform a room into being about “emptiness and fullness, caring and not caring, the drained and the charged”? Would it make any difference if I threw in two more antonymic adjectives just for the heck of it?
The only conclusion one can arrive at about the art after reading this criticism—a conclusion that may well be unjustified— is that it can mean anything one wants it to.
It is—how should I say it?—about everything. And nothing.
5 Responses
12/30/2009 10:54 pm
Read The Painted Word.
12/31/2009 4:31 am
The Raw and the Cooked. (My suggestion for two additional antonymic adjectives).
And thank you Harry, for the reference. I missed The Painted Word when it came out, but it’s now in my Amazon basket.
12/31/2009 11:02 am
The Tao that can be told of is not an Unvarying Tao;
The names that can be named are not unvarying names.
It was from the Nameless that Heaven and Earth sprang;
The named is but the mother that rears the ten thousand creatures, each after its kind.
5/14/2010 5:04 pm
Burn it all, the devil will know his own.
6/21/2011 2:26 am
reverse lookup
http://www.findwithnumber.com/