Love and hate and Gabriel Orozco

Gabriel Orozco Pinched Ball

If you want to know how central Gabriel Orozco is to contemporary fine art, ask any artist who's seen his show at Tate Modern what they think. "You know that thing he did with the dryer lint/blown tyre debris/breath/puddle/redundant lift [delete as necessary]," they'll say. "Well I wondered about doing that."

He makes art out in the world with what comes to hand - ordinary things you find lying about the place; he makes it look so casual, so easy.  But what he really does is very hard - or at least, very rare.  He takes those fleeting thoughts that pass almost unnoticed through everyone's head and makes you notice them. He catches hold of them, and turns them into something profound and resonant. The resulting artefacts are no more complex than they need to be - yet hugely thought provoking.  And he does it time and again.

My own story is that, back on my degree course, I worked with dust for a while, examining it forensically to look at the history of everything in it.  I made photograms of dust (Orozco, it turned out, made far more beautiful etchings), I collected and displayed it (but not as poignantly as he does with Lintels his hung mats of hair and dust), and I rolled sticky balls around to gather it from the floor. Only at the end of this process did I discover Orozco's Yielding Stone, a Plasticine ball of his own weight that he rolled around the streets of New York. It was one of those moments when you feel both the warmth of a kindred spirit and the dismay of knowing you've been fair and squarely beaten to it by a better artist. 

Now I've been to the exhibition and felt it all over again. Gabriel Orozco - I love him and I hate him.

At Tate Modern, London until 25th April 2011.