On a recent trip to New York, I had a chance to visit the exhibition of Gabriel Orozco entitled “Asterisms” at the Guggenheim that just closed and I thought it might be of interest. Orozco mined the beach of a protected reserve in Baja California Sur, Mexico, retrieving piles of flotsam and garbage that he carefully laid out on the floor of the museum in a type of topographic taxonomy of waste. Of course, this aestheticized garbage was beautiful (as garbage in museums tends to be); its patina and rough edges contrasted with the pristine floor of the white cube.
The representation strategy of bringing physical material from a distant site into the gallery is reminiscent of Robert Smithson’s “Site and Non-Site” as a way of creating a portrait of that distant site that is abstract (it does not attempt to “look” like the beach) but also representational (the materials are from the beach, creating a direct physical link.)
Orozco’s Asterisms add a layer of contemporary environmentalism to the Non-Site, but it causes one to wonder whether this organized and pretty garbage may be forgiven.
Oh, and elsewhere in the Guggenheim there was the Picasso exhibition, “Black and White”, but that’s another story.