London’s Tate Modern is one of the most renowned art museums in the world. And right now Tate is exhibiting the work of Gabriel Orozco, a 48-year-old Mexican artist. Orozco garnered international acclaim in 1993 when he reconfigured a junked Citroen by carving the icon of French industry into three parts, making the vehicle appear at once more aerodynamic but, paradoxically, immobile. In the process “La DS,” as the car is called (French for “the goddess”), captures the magical realism of Latin America’s literary heritage and parodies modernisms infatuation with technology.
While the Orozco exhibit is being hailed by some critics as a just homage to the likes of Marcel Duchamp, and his work is often positively mentioned in comparison to Damien Hirst, perhaps the world’s most famous living artist, Orozco’s creative ejaculation might have been a thing of the halcyon ‘90s. A critical review in the Financial Times compares Orozco to other modern artists and concludes: “Orozco’s was a more superficial talent from the start and, especially as expressed in his recent work, does not begin to bear the weight of a museum retrospective.”
I suppose in the world of the art the only thing more discomforting than an artist’s search for talent is a critic’s search for relevance.
Orozco’s work will be on display at Tate until April 25.
(Photo from Bombsite.com)
