Gio Ponti
vs
Gabriel Orozco

"I have built a hotel in Sorrento" wrote Gio Ponti "And, although there wasn't really any need, I wanted each of the hundred rooms to have a different majolica pattern on the floor''.






-------------------

" The circle for me is a very useful Instrument in terms of movement,
in relation to gravity and erosion. It's the tendency of objects when they're
in movement and are eroded by friction..."

Gabriel Orozco

Gio Ponti
vs
Gabriel Orozco





1. Have you ever seen a floor more beautiful?
Parco dei Principi in Sorrento, Italy
The luxury hotel remains as Gio Ponti intended. He designed everything in the hotel, from the pale wood furniture upholstered in blue fabrics in the bedrooms to the 30 different geometric patterned blue and white tiles that adorn the floors to the design of the blue ceramic pebbles and tiles that cover the walls next to the lifts and the pillars in the lobby. Even the crockery is specified as Melotti majolica plates..




2. "What is most important is not so much what people see in the gallery or the museum, but what people see after looking at these things, how they confront reality again." - Orozco

Gabriel Orozco's MOCA show here in Los Angeles 10 years ago changed the way I look at art. I left the building that afternoon in silence. These circles, the toilet paper spinning on the fans, tables full of ceramics and memorabilia of some sort of journey left me confused. Ever since, I've been looking for wet tire marks on the pavement. Simple delights after a city's summer rain.

image above: From the Samurai Tree series, IM (2006), egg tempera on red cedar panel with gold leaf, 21 5/8 x 21 5/8"














----------------------------

sleeping
foxes, dogs
and rats,
and
failing systems.

image, Mark Manders, 1992
foxes and rats

One thing that I’ve had to learn as an artist—considering how everything that I had learned about what art should be and what art was, and what an artist should be like (disciplined, following the love of the craft)—was that this didn’t work for me. Suddenly I had to take all of these notions apart, because they weren’t mine, they weren’t enough for me; they bored me and threw me into despair.


It was a system that really didn’t work for me.


Realizing this gave me a very different vision; I think it has repercussions in the way in which my pieces started to turn out, because I understood at last that my urgent struggle was to find something that was not art. In that sense, I’m not sure if people who consider themselves “educated” understand what art is; I think not.

photo by Gabriel Orozco

I saw that “educated” people as well as “ignorant” ones immediately viewed my work with disapproval: the yogurt lids, the balls of Play-Doh. With ignorant people, it’s obvious that you have to try to destroy their prejudices, but with educated people it’s the same thing, you also have to destroy their prejudices—and their judgment. In their case, it’s a prejudice regarding what they ask of and from art.

But as Borges said, we don’t know what art should be, and we don’t need to find out, either; what we seek is to understand the reason why art exists.

interview with
gabriel orozco here..

----------------------------------