Gabriel Orozco’s cultivated nomadism has recently taken him to Japan, where he has resided since early 2015. His exhibition “Visible Labor” showcases the outcomes of exposure to Japanese culture, especially Zen philosophy and its intrinsic considerations of spatiality. On the gallery’s main floor, Orozco has installed discarded wooden beams and columns carved by traditional Japanese carpenters, highly skilled artisan laborers, that he sourced from old houses and temples. These now obsolete wood fragments, stripped of their context and repurposed as post-Minimalist materials, appear in their skeletal form with joints, rods, and cogs exposed.
In a gesture of respect for these woodworkers, Orozco presents a supplementary series of photomontages illustrating joinery techniques developed over time. Not unlike the ancient Zen garden of Ryoanji, there’s a mathematical precision to Orozco’s arrangement of the beams, which transforms the voids between them into pregnant spaces. Further accentuating the geometry of their installation, Orozco has painted the surface of the beams white and has added a playful touch by randomly placing miniature red Ferraris on top of the sculpted beams and alongside wooden Buddha statuettes. Such haphazard logic recalls the constellation of oranges dotting the depopulated outdoor market in his photograph Crazy Tourist, 1991.
In light of Zaha Hadid’s much derided recent plan to build a mammoth Olympic stadium in Meiji Jingu park—criticized as an international starchitect’s meddling on a historic local site—Orozco’s reinterpretation of the country’s centuries-old craftsmanship is a different nature of architectural intervention. “Visible Labor” could be read as a commentary on the increasing gentrification of Tokyo in the lead-up to the city’s hosting the 2020 Games.
