Post-arctic actions: Gabriel Orozco and the vaporous object

• Main Author: Robb, Charles
• Format: Conference Object
• Language: unknown
• Published: 2019
• Subjects: Orozco; Gabriel; Topology in art; contemporary sculpture; Post-humanist theory; Arctic; Iceberg*
• Online Access: https://eprints.qut.edu.au/227079/

In Some Notes on the Phenomenology of Making (1970) the American artist Robert Morris refers to the making process as “the submerged side of the art iceberg” (Morris, 1993). Viewed from the perspective of our Anthropocene, with its cleaving ice cliffs and polar melts, Morris’s arctic metaphor seems due for reconsideration: icebergs are no longer invisible entities but dynamic agentive objects that force themselves upon our consciousness with increased insistency. The motif of the iceberg is now redolent with notions of capricious threat and material dissipation. Drawing upon the work of Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco, in this paper I will propose a revised account of Morris’ iceberg of practice in terms of the contemporary sculptural object as an agentive form, or what I will refer to as a “taw” – a playing piece in a game. As Orozco’s work reveals, the contemporary sculptural object can act as an intrinsically topological entity, capable of varied spatial and temporal movements. I contend that the motif of the cloud – another kind of aqueous form - acts as a useful contemporary rendering of the ‘iceberg of practice’ for the creative researcher, in ways that supplant fixity with fluidity, containment with leakage and past and present.