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Photogravity by Gabriel Orozco Philadelphia Museum of Art Philadelphia, Pennsylvania October 12-December 12,1999
Photogravity by Gabriel Orozco afterword by Ann Temkin Philadelphia, PA: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1999 183 pp./ $29.95 (hb)
JESSE LERNER
"Photogravity," Gabriel Orozco's 1999 project for the Philadelphia Museum of Art, revisits the modernist appropriation of non-western objects and forms. Orozco's commission, currently touring as part of his mid-career survey, consists of a series of large-scale black and white cutout photographic reproductions of pre-Columbian carvings mounted on stiff board backings. These boards are in turn supported by playful, biomorphic iron stands that give a sculptural form (at least when viewed from the rear) to the otherwise two-dimensional, photo-derived objects. The images on the faces of these objects fall into two categories. Roughly half represent previous sculptures of Orozco's, among them some of his better-known works: La Deesse (1993), a Citroen DS sports car with its midsection removed; Yielding Stone (1992), a large plasticine ball bearing the traces and impressions of its having been rolled through the street; and Four Bicycles/There is Always One Direction (1994), an improbable eight-wheeled Cycle. The other half reproduce objects from the Walter and Louise Arensberg collection of ancient Mesoamerican sculpture that forms part of the permanent collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. By pairing flattened representations of his own work with cutout replicas of these ancient Mesoamerican stones, Orozco interrogates the history of modernism and its relation to non-western aesthetics. The Philadelphia Museum of Art, with its canonical holdings from the Arensberg collection, functions as a politically and historically charged arena in which Orozco may play. The success of his project rests in an ambiguous interrogation directed at the museum space, his own work, the modernist project that he references, the postmodern critique implicit and his own neo-Duchampian practice. But first, to better understand what is at stake here, some background on the Arensberg collection is helpful.
Donated to the museum in 1954, the collection consists of around a thousand objects accumulated over half a century through the aggressive (though intermittent) collecting practice of the couple Walter (1878-- 1954) and Louise (1879-1953) Arensberg. The larger portion of the collection consists of early twentieth century paintings and sculptures, many from France. Particularly well represented are Constantin...