Benjamin Buchloh at Artforum:
WHEN MARCEL DUCHAMP mounted a challenge to Constantin Brancusi during a joint visit to an exhibition of new airplane technologies in Paris in 1912—asking Brancusi whether he could ever sculpt anything as perfect as an airplane propeller—he figured a contradiction that haunted sculptural production for the remaining part of the twentieth century and into the first two decades of the twenty-first: the dialectics between traditional artisanal and artistic modes of sculptural production and the ever more compelling paradigm of the technologically produced readymade. Obviously, this dialectic has been constitutive of Gabriel Orozco’s work from the very beginning and determines it to this very day.
But the challenge addresses an even more pertinent question: Which, if any, of the traditional modes of sculptural production—e.g., modeling, cutting, and casting—is still viable and credible in the present at all? And how do we relate to a sculptural oeuvre like Orozco’s in which the artist continues to deploy all these supposedly outdated modes simultaneously (occupying in fact an almost unique position among sculptors since the second half of the twentieth century)?
more here.
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