Category: language

Gabriel Orozco, Sculpture between spectacle and use value, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh. ArtForum, Summer 2005.

How can the sculptural object resist the process of fetishization (especially in a historical moment when universal technological object production and digitality make us crave compensations for the universal loss of tactility)? And how can sculpture accomplish the experience of simultaneous collective reception that was formerly its greatest social promise? Lastly, how can sculpture resist its transition into the sphere of spectacle culture, when this is indeed the universal regime governing sight, sound, and tactility, as the British art historian T. J. Clark has formulated most succinctly: 

Spectacle, as a concept, was accompanied by the idea of “the colonisation of everyday life.” That meant several things. Pervasive surveillance. The monetisation of more and more of the species’ so-called unproductive life. The recruiting of more and more of us to the task of providing our masters with “information” about our every doing. The shrinkage of time out. The commodification of play. But perhaps what the situationist theorists most saw in the “everyday”—most regretted as they saw it vanish—was the body clock, the lapse of attention, the recalcitrance of the organism, the idle interest in what someone else was doing, was feeling, was like. Bodies spoke a different language from that of their leaders. They were a reservoir of insubordination. They looked up at the pyramid or the Statue of Liberty and shrugged.

Is all that counter-language a thing of the past? Has the spectacle extinguished it, or managed a life for it on a set of reservations? Art. Sex. Poetry.

[…]

Ever since Nauman (and corresponding figures in Italian Arte Povera like Giuseppe Penone), sculptural production has comprised, if not even required, the presence of photography as a discursive element. The photograph corresponds, complements, or even dissolves the sculptural object’s manual and artisanal production procedures, functioning not as document but as its dialectical technological counterpart.

[…]

the reintroduction of the ancient Marxist concept of use value,the dialectical opposite of exchange value, and, more recently, also the sole form of resisting exhibition value, which has totally effaced the concepts of material use and function. But use value had of course also been the archenemy of modernist sculpture. For one, its simplistically radical withdrawal from functional objects like a urinal had been one of the great mysteries of Duchamp’s readymade since 1917. Now Orozco resurrects one of the archaic and at the same time transhistorical models and actually functioning structures that had always fused function, use value, and immaterial spirituality: the architectural typology of the bridge.

Gabriel Orozco: Politécnico Nacional. 01.FEB. – 03.AUG.2025