“Gabriel Orozco insists ‘I didn’t want my house to be utopia.’
The word ‘utopia’ has become, it seems, profane: confused with ideology, meta-narratives, and universal normative claims to be thrown out, like a muted baby with postmodernism’s murky bath water. The idea that architecture could enact major social change, indeed that any utopic space could be staged, ought be added to the list of descriptive obituaries featured in Orozco’s series of large prints, Obit (2008). However, considering the semantics of ‘utopia’, which comes from a neologism of the Greek ‘no place’ (οὐτόπος) and ‘good place’ (εὖτόπος), it might be asked why the concept is any less accessible today, than it has been historically. What might be called for is a semantic distinction; a stripping of the ideological baggage attached to the word ‘utopia’ and a new articulation of it contextualised within recent epistemological shifts. It will be the attempt of this paper to suggest how a rearticulated understanding of utopia might be understood to manifest in the twenty-first century, looking primarily at the work of Orozco. Inverting the usual understanding of Thomas More’s ambiguous pun to posit that ‘no place’ offers the ‘good place’, I will look at how Orozco explores ‘no place’ throughout his work in pursuit of his ultimately visionary ambition of transforming reality. How, through methods simultaneously subversive, redemptive and humorous, Orozco offers an enduring utopic pulse, salvaging the utopic baby, with both its ludic redemptive laughter and its wailing call to attention, that something, somewhere is still wrong.”
This is an extract from Impossible Utopias, Lily's graduate thesis, which is available through Claire De Rouen Books.
“Impossible Utopias is an original and elegantly-written meditation on the political potential of Gabriel Orozco’s subtle body of work. Starting out from a close reading of Observatory House, a lesser-known work by the artist that also doubles as his holiday home, Lily Cole develops a persuasive account of the momentary utopias that are opened up by Orozco’s playful experiments with everyday reality. In so doing, Cole also contributes to an urgent project to reassert the impossible possibility of utopian thought in and for the twenty-first century.” —Luke Skrebowski, University Lecturer in the History of Art, University of Cambridge