The sleep of wakefulness us de arena, 1991id to mes You have not woken into wake: ‘4 previous dream. ‘That dresin is hin another, and so on tu the infinite. which is the hat you will ha Sore number of grain of sand, The pal sminable and you will i ie Las Borgen! We are on a beach at C tu, collectively engaged in the process of ork by Gabriel Orozeo. Before us is an ocean of infinite horizon and beside us a wall of crazay rocks. « site carefully chosen by the artist. We have instructions t0 make balls of sand and to place them in whatever tiile hollows we ean find in the rocky surface. The balls are to be made by gathering a handful of wet sand, for- ing it into a sphere und dusting it with dry sand. Miraculously, this works, There is, of course, a childish pleasure in this activity, but it also carries an erotic charge the weight of the bull of sand in my hand is sensual, lke erating breasts or male genitals. I lose sense of time in my preaccupation with making « perfect sphere, and it is only after several attempts that the impossibility - absurdity even - of this beco- mes apparent. Nevertheless, my best efforts are born from an aitemiveness to the relation henecen the volume of sand and the space that my cupped hands can encir- cle: with too little sund, the hands seem too elumay to get sufficient purchase on the material and it falls apart: with too much, the fingers grope over a surface too large Jor them to mould. One could say, therefore, that the ‘most perfect” sau ball, is an index of the interior space of my cupped hands, and thus becomes their extension in- to the world, just as we, in making the balls, are the extension of the artist’s hands. (Later: @ group of small boys take equal delight in smashing our litle spheres with their oren sand missiles, accelerating the process of disintegration.) [ices ie nt mat uk af ai rae he inden aut presente bli ier enema tug ete ae wr ante wc. Ta ane 1 the eveut on the beach ia an attempt (o convey, however inadequately. iMleutifiable content gives the work au opacity: it does nol surrender ite nls of Fanguawe, Rather its the emotions aud seuses, producing a somatic resonance often approach: y the sigh of his inflated rubber ball in Natu- raleza recuperuda (Recaptured nature) (1990); “Teel” in the finger-tips the boniness of the firvid lick clay of Mis manos son mé corazon (My hands are my heart) (1900): or generally seuse the dangerous implications of the conceptual marriage of ‘un in Cuerpo abierte (Open body) (1991). ‘The body, its tender vuh ws tiever far away in this work. (nd yet, to empl self instantly. to the analytic den nedliate appeal is to ue the this aspeet with isto trap the work in aesthetic frameworks to whieh it daes not belo ‘nature’ is not the veiled subject of represenis the artist him to the viewer ina transferred moment ol epiphany from one transvendental ego to another elf made “pres ‘Two works of simple cleyanee, Mis manos som mi corazén and Mi mano es fa memo: ria del espacio (My hand is the memory of space) (1991) suggest what is a ‘The former is a small heart-shaped sculpture fingers om a ball of brick clay held qualities simultaneously: thy and the vulnerability of in hardness of bone. The conjunction of hand a gesture of toueh and emotion by which one hui ile hy the pressure of the the hands, It evokes « number of hard protective carapace of an invertebrat ins that generous to another, Mi te offers tse mano os la memoria del espacio also begins with the hand: spre round, its bound: approximately ales Tike those of a butterfly wing y becomes the point of departure for a radiating wave. extending 5 metres. of woolen ice-cream spoons. now transformed into golden the hody as stich but present a 1] of east or impression of the space it occupied und the possible limit of its este sion, Tn the former work, an evisceration of a turning inside out takes place whers aan impression of the exterior of the body (the ands) becomes a prajeetion of thy iw the spoons eatend the fingers to touch the limit of ht be an inhabitable space. The body — the hand — is no more than a yet itis precisely this that gives a ity 10 the self in the place of its absence. This extension, moreaver, implies perhaps a search for an orientation in the world, a reaching out towards the other, towards the limits of the knowable: or. like the magician in Borges” tale Las rwinas eireulares.t an attempt to dreai into Ive ing a reality beyond the uncertainties of the self. The hands have « erucial function here, not simply as hasic human tools, but as signifiers of the ereative aet and ‘movement from the singular ta the collective, As such. Orozce’s work may best be described as a profomnd meditation on the act of muking and the psychic impulses which gencrate it: a vigilance to the proceses by whieh the benthic pulsations of de: sire, an inchoate mental representation, an act of the imagination, find a languags, ble form. terior (the heart); in the latte ‘That the sentient body remains a referent in Orozco’s work! goes against the grain of the dominant Euro-American aesthetic debates of 1 which “reality” disappeared into Jean Bandrillard’s “hyperreal” to emerge as the infinity uf mirors that is simulation, All fabricated images und objects are, to some extent, surrogates for the body in what Elaine Searry proposes is a necessary divembodiment — at im pulse towards the transferral of and release from the pain and sliseomfort of physical existence through the ageney of the sign. As Karl Mary insisted. in makis man re-makes himself, And yet, among the privileged sectors of overideveloped soci ties, an excessive proliferation of signs of signs — Bauddillard’s “precession of sin ulaera” — becomes self-defeating, he world versions of themselves 6