
OK, I admit it. It isn’t hard to find packaging-related artwork in the oeuvre of just about any contemporary artist you could name. Like shooting fish in a barrel, really.
Better known for works like “La DS” —(where he cut a silver Citroën down the middle, removed a portion and then reassembled a 1/3 slimmer car)—Gabriel Orozco has also done quite a few of the sort of package-related artworks that we like to feature here. “Empty Shoebox,” for example.
In 1993, the year that he created “La DS,” Mr. Orozco’s career took off with multiple exhibitions. Among them was one that Marian Goodman arranged at the Venice Biennale, where he showed “Empty Shoebox,” an open cardboard box left on the floor to be kicked about. “It shocked everybody,” Ms. Goodman said. “He has a lot of courage in what he does and can be quite radical.”
An Artist’s Return, The NY Times, December, 13, 2009
Another package-related example: “Yogurt Caps”
Some interesting perspective on “Yogurt Caps” from the The New York Observer:
Earlier this fall, Ann Temkin, the chief curator at the Museum of Modern Art’s department of painting and sculpture, was working on the checklist for the upcoming Gabriel Orozco retrospective (opening Dec. 13) when it occurred to her that one of the pieces she wanted to include in the exhibition might no longer exist.
The work in question was Yogurt Caps, which Mr. Orozco, the Mexican conceptual artist, had installed at the Marian Goodman Gallery in 1994 as part of his first solo show in the United States. The installation was a provocative one, consisting as it did of nothing more than four clear, blue-rimmed Dannon lids, each attached to one of four walls of an otherwise empty room in the gallery.
“We had a little panic, my colleague Paulina Pobocha and I, because suddenly we had this flash, like maybe they don’t have those yogurt caps at Marian Goodman’s anymore,” Ms. Temkin said at a MoMA press breakfast earlier this fall. She added later: “I was curious if they had just been thrown out at the end of the exhibition.”
... The panic over the yogurt caps was swiftly allayed when Ms. Pobocha, the MoMA curatorial assistant who is working on the show with Ms. Temkin, called the gallery director and confirmed that the lids were indeed safe and sound and in their possession.
Or, well, they basically were.
The truth was that the original set of lids—the four that were used in the Marian Goodman show—were sold long ago to a private collector. What the gallery had on hand instead was a set of exhibition copies—decoy lids, you might say—that Mr. Orozco had purchased and put into storage just in case a need for them ever arose...
“I don’t remember if we ever thought they were the originals or not, or if that question ever came up,” said Ms. Pobocha last month. “It was never really talked about in [those] terms.”... “The importance of the work, I think, lies in the gesture more than it does in the actual artifact,” Ms. Pobocha said.
Goodman Gallery director Andrew Richards, who has worked with Mr. Orozco for many years, agreed. “It’s not so much the object that matters in this instance—it’s the idea.”
Fair enough! Except that the principal motivation behind using the exhibition copies instead of the originals, at least according to Mr. Richards and Ms. Pobocha, is that because the lids are so small and delicate, they could get damaged or even stolen in the course of the exhibition.
“You can’t just lift a painting off the wall and walk out of the museum with it. These are just much more fragile in that sense,” Ms. Pobocha said. “I’m not saying anyone’s going to steal them, but they could, if they wanted to. Also, if you think about how crowded MoMA gets on Friday nights, one of them could easily just be knocked off the wall and stepped on.”
As far as the regular viewing public is concerned, in other words, all yogurt lids are the same. But when it comes to the collector who paid good money for the original set, distinctions must be made. Such are the contradictions one must tolerate when monetizing conceptual art.
Hey, Are Those The Real Yogurt Caps? By Leon Neyfakh
The New York Observer, December 1, 2009
(More package-related artworks by Orozco, after the fold...)
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