Gabriel Orozco’s 'Empty Shoe Box', Tate Modern.

Orozco's 'Empty Shoe Box'

Is the status of ‘artwork’ contained within the piece or endowed by the surroundings? Is the avant-garde reduction of art nearing the void? These are just two questions inspired by a recent viewing of Empty Shoe Box. Orozco’s piece seems in a similar vein to Marcel Duchamp’s presentation of a glass vial containing Parisian air to an American art buyer in 1919. Is Orozco challenging our perception of the exhibition space or audaciously rehashing an old, provocative joke based on the artistic void and modern consumption, which incites mild confusion and veiled indignation in the average viewer? Whiteread’s sculptures are explicitly concerned with the space between and within objects but they satisfy the viewer’s desire to see something unfamiliar, not merely an unusual context for the most banal of objects. In his focus on containers, including his lift installation, modified Citröen DS and of course Empty Shoe Box, is Orozco alluding to the notion of the artist as a receptacle for creativity? Is he playing with space, as his does in much of his spatially-centred work including the installation of lint hanging delicately and dustily in its own exhibition room? Or is he commenting on the effect institutionalising any object within an exhibition space has on the object, endowing it with a certain distance that gives it value? Whatever his message, it is certainly an interesting one.

Orozco's 'La DS'