Brought home a couple of video works to screen/consider by the artist Gabriel Orozco, and they're amazing. It's been about five minutes, and already I'm taken. The artist made five videos as part of Recordings and Drawings, a 1997 show at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. They are 40-60 minute streams of things Orozco sees through his video camera on the streets of New York and Amsterdam. The title for each video is comprised of the first and last images on the video. [I'm watching From Flat Tyre To Airplane right now. From Dog Shit to Irma Vep is next.] Here is an excellent discussion of Orozco's use of video and the genesis of this project. The museum finally got around to publishing a book based on the work.
They're quite rough, raw, really, edited solely in the camera. As such, though, they get pretty close to the "eye of the artist," especially in the case of Orozco, who makes a specialty of working with the most mundane, unprecious materials possible (his last show at Marian Goodman Gallery included works made of dryer lint, plastic bags, and rubber balls with dried palm fronds). I'm not sure which way it works: 1) either Orozco points out the art/beauty we overlook everyday in objects and situations around us, in which case he's extremely self-effacing and magnanimous, or 2) through his art made out of these commonplace objects and concepts (reflections, circles/spheres, leaves, etc.) he takes over the world, or at least our vision/viewing of it (now everything looks like an Orozco!), in which case he's a megalomaniac. Do those options have to be mutually exclusive? I mean, I plan on stil being nice to people when I take over the world...
