Gabriel Orozco Written Matter

Written Matter presents selections from the notebooks of Gabriel Orozco. These texts, sketches, and images from notebooks spanning 1992 to 2012 offer insights into Orozco's artmaking process, revealing his thinking, methods, and rationales. The texts, translated from the original handwritten Spanish, offer personal truisms, compelling insights, observations, and notes on process and method, forming a subterranean stream that runs parallel to his artwork.

The notebooks are fundamental to Orozco's work, serving as a travelogue and personal dictionary that, when consulted, allow him to resume the trajectory of his thought anywhere. Because Orozco chooses not to work in a studio, his notebooks act as a different kind of studio space, on paper and bound between covers.

Although much of Orozco’s work seems to consist of the action of immediate gesture—often momentary and fleeting—his manuscripts show that many of his ideas come from a place of gestation, incubating for several years before their final execution. Written Matter is the daily work of an artist who has paused to think and to write, as if words themselves were the only way to specify or describe his intentions and define the impulses that compelled him to carry out his projects.

Profusely illustrated and designed and edited under Orozco's own direction, Written Matter offers an unusually intimate look at an artist's process and practice.

Paperback
Published by The MIT Press and Koenig Books, London
384 pp.
5 3/4 x 9 1/8 in. (14.6 x 23.2 cm)
77 color illus., 5 b&w illus.
ISBN: 9780262538879