The art universe jet set descended on Mexico City final week for a Zona Maco art satisfactory and a battery of gallery openings. The many buzzed about? Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco’s designation during a tony Kurimanzutto gallery, where he commissioned a entirely functioning Oxxo preference store inside a gallery’s walls — finish with cigarettes, coffee and Malibu rum.
Titled “Oroxxo,” a piece, by a famed Mexican conceptualist who once put an dull shoe box on arrangement during a Venice Biennale, is dictated to play with a inlet of markets.
Upon entering a gallery, visitors are given an “Oroxxo” dollar: A feign check that is a collage of U.S. and Mexican income and bears a geometric settlement devised by Orozco. These can afterwards be exchanged for products inside a shop, including soda, extract and cookies.
What a “Oroxxo” dollar won’t buy we is one of a roughly 300 objects inside a emporium that a artist has altered with round stickers, in ways that relate a geometric patterns of his abstract paintings. (Think stand circles in blue, red and gold.) These objects, that embody cookies, drink and delicate napkins, will be sole as Orozco’s art and prices for them will vacillate depending on supply and demand over a march of a show, that runs by Mar 16.
“It’s a approach of collapsing in a same earthy space dual opposite systems — a art market, that is about exclusivity and high prices, and a marketplace for bland consumer products with their mass accessibility and low prices,” Orozco told a New York Times. “I’m meddlesome in a turmoil that creates.”
What arrange of marketplace turmoil this low-brow marketplace inside a high-brow marketplace will means stays to be seen. What it has generated is a steer of designer-clad socialites photographing a neon-lit aisles of an Oxxo emporium while backing adult to buy corn chips and white bread sandwiches.
It has also spurred during slightest one theft.
An unknown artist, in an letter for Vice Mexico, claims to have stolen one of Orozco’s altered objects — a bag of Whiskas cat food — and fed it to his or her cat.
“Do not be confused,” wrote a artist in Spanish, underneath a nickname “Peligro” (Danger). “Oroxxo isn’t a critique of capitalism, it is an act of capitalism.”
“This isn’t a burglary or an act of vandalism, it is a protest, a performance,” wrote Peligro of the action. “It is an act of emancipation for all those who feel cheated by art but content, for those who consider that a readymade was a newness 100 years ago.”
I didn’t buy anything during “Oroxxo” with my Oroxxo dollar. (The drink was off limits.) But we did reason on to it, and one afternoon, during a non-art Oxxo in a Mexico City area of Coyoacán, we asked a assistant if he’d accept my Oroxxo dollar for an ice cream bar.
“We usually accept pesos,” a assistant told me.
Art universe currency, it turns out, is of really singular value.
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Where: Kurimanzutto, Gobernador Rafael Rebollar 94, San Miguel Chapultepec, Mexico City
When: Through Mar 16
Info: kurimanzutto.com
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carolina.miranda@latimes.com