A collection of writings on a conceptual and installation artist who has been called "one of the most important artists of the decade." Gabriel Orozco's work is sometimes considered uncategorizable; but his sculpture, photography, drawing, collage, and installations are unified by their devotion to the antispectacular, to the everyday, and to the explorations of complexities that are not immediately obvious. Orozco (born in Mexico in 1962) pays meticulous attention to what he calls the "liquidity of things" as seen in mundane and evanescent objects and elements of everyday life-the momentary fog upon a polished piano top, a deflated football, tins of cat food balanced on watermelons, light through leaves, the screech of a tire, chess pieces on a chessboard. "People forget that I want to disappoint," he has said. "I use that word deliberately. I want to disappoint the expectations of the one who waits to be amazed. When you make a decision someone is going to be disappointed because they think they know you. It is only then that the poetic can happen." This collection of critical writings on Orozco includes two interviews with the artist and a lecture by him (this last published here for the first time in English) as well as essays by such prominent critics as Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Briony Fer, Molly Nesbit, and the editor of the volume, Yve-Alain Bois. It serves both as the summation of critical thinking on Orozco's work up to now and as a starting point for future consideration. Contents Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Refuse and Refuge (1993) * Jean Fisher, The Sleep of Wakefulness: Gabriel Orozco (1993) * Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Gabriel Orozco: The Sculpture of Everyday Life (1996) * Guy Brett, Between Work and World: Gabriel Orozco (1993) * Molly Nesbit, The Tempest (2000) * Gabriel Orozco Lecture (2001) * Gabriel Orozco. In Conversation with Benjamin H. D. Buchloh (2004) * Briony Fer, Spirograph: The Circular Ruins of Drawing (2004) * Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Cosmic Reifications: Gabriel Orozco's Photographs (2004) * Gabriel Orozco and Briony Fer, Crazy about Saturn: Interview (2006)

Author Biography

Yve-Alain Bois studied at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes under the guidance of Roland Barthes and Hubert Damisch. A founder of the French journal Macula, Bois is currently a professor in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Modern Art in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University and an editor of October magazine. He is the author of Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975 (MIT Press) and other books. Jean Fisher lectures in Art and Art Theory at Middlesex University and the Royal College of Art, London. She is the editor of Global Visions: A New Internationalism in the Visual Arts and Reverberations: Tactics of Resistance, Forms of Agency in Trans/cultural Practices. Molly Nesbit teaches at Vassar College. She is a contributing editor at Artforum and is the author of Atget's Seven Albums and Their Common Sense. Gabriel Orozco is an internationally renowned contemporary artist. He has had solo exhibitions at venues including Muse e d'art moderne de la Ville Paris, the Serpentine Gallery in London, and the Guggenheim in New York. Traveling retrospectives have been presented at Kunsthalle Zu rich; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Tate Modern, London; and elsewhere. He has participated in the Venice Biennale (1993, 2003, 2005), the Whitney Biennial (1997), and Documenta X (1997) and XI (2002). Yve-Alain Bois studied at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes under the guidance of Roland Barthes and Hubert Damisch. A founder of the French journal Macula, Bois is currently a professor in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ.