Written Matter

Written Matter is a selection of texts and images from artist Gabriel Orozco's notebooks. The book takes its start in 1992 when Orozco began to travel and exhibit around the world, without maintaining a permanent studio. The notes and drawings in these workbooks became indispensable to the development of his ideas and projects. Edited by the artist himself, this book constitutes a chronological flow of analytical thought, a kind of subterranean stream running parallel to his art. The notebooks are fundamental to this work, serving as a portable studio and personal dictionary that allow him to resume the trajectory of his though while traveling. Although much of Orozco's work seems to consist of the action of immediate gestures-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. His practice as an artist without a studio and without a pre-established technique led him to forge the tools he used to question and innovate his artistic practice and to be recorgnized as one fo the most influential contemporary artist working today--Back cover.