The Chevy pickup full of eco-adventurers suddenly changed course. Up in the front seat, the artist Gabriel Orozco turned around, updating everyone on the latest changes to the itinerary. "Okay," he said. "We're heading to the border of Colombia. I wanted to do the most dangerous thing." He laughed, somewhat demonically, and pointed to the huge rubber boots they'd all been instructed to bring down to the Ecuadorean rain forest. "After all, I have my wellies."
Fredy Jiménez, the local guide and driver, turned north out of the Texaco-founded oil boomtown of Lago Agrio, across a volatile stretch of highway in one of the most dangerous parts of the country. The road to the Río San Miguel, which divides Ecuador from Colombia, was new, built with oil money, but empty except for the occasional military vehicle patrolling for the guerrillas and narcotraficantes who regularly cross the border. At one point, Jiménez turned to Orozco and asked, "So what kind of artist are you exactly?"
"A sculptor is the easiest way to put it," Orozco said. "Except that I work with unconventional materials."
No critic has come up with a better description of Orozco's highly unpredictable body of work. In 1993, for his first New York show, he set oranges on apartment windowsills across from the MoMA sculpture garden. That same year in Paris, he cut a full-size Citroën DS right down the middle and refashioned it as a slim one-seater shaped like an arrow. Over the past 13 years at New York's Marian Goodman Gallery, Orozco, who turned 45 on the second day of the Ecuador trip, has presented artworks made out of yogurt container lids, lint from a dryer, and sand. He built a custom four-way ping-pong table with a lily pond in the middle—his Ping-Pond Table. He invaded a supermarket and arranged cat-food tins on watermelons. Last year, just before a major mid-career retrospective at the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, Orozco took a trip along the beaches of Baja California and unearthed a whale skeleton that he covered end to end with bold patterns in pencil. The whale—titled Mobile Matrix—now hangs, permanently, in Mexico City's José Vasconcelos Library. Last year, London's White Cube gallery sold a second whale piece, Dark Wave, for $1.5 million.
Ann Temkin, now a curator at MoMA, was at the Philadelphia Museum of Art when she acquired Orozco's Black Kites (1997) for the museum. More loan requests come in for that work, a human skull that Orozco took six months to cover with a checkerboard grid in pencil, than for almost any other piece in its contemporary collection, which includes Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2.
"One of Gabriel's talents," Temkin told me, "is that with a very simple language he manages to open a window onto a lot of very profound issues. That skull had such enormous resonance in the history of art; it just seemed like a little grenade of meaning."
Orozco refuses to do what most artists do: turn out subtle variations on the handful of bold works that first brought them attention. He's always coming up with new methods and new signature works. This unpredictability has considerable marketing value—collectors of Orozco own highly individual pieces whose value will never be reduced by a flood of later versions. He doesn't want his art to become a brand or a style, and in conversation he protects this amazing adaptability by stressing not what he is but what he isn't: He hates surrealism; he avoids technique; he is not a New York artist, nor is he essentially a Mexican one; he is not religious; his work has no sexual identity. The one tag he seems comfortable with is ecological artist, probably because it justifies his habit of popping up almost anywhere on earth to see what he can come up with.
