Pinching Paper: On Self and Medium

Sitting in the Museum of Modern Art’s Drawings and Prints Study Center, I realized I needed a pinch. I knew this because I was immediately enveloped in Gabriel Orozco’s 1992 untitled work of a pinched and rubbed page. The paper itself was ripped from a spiral-bound notebook, and each ridge of its spine was plucked off. I imagine Orozco ran one finger along the edge of the paper then, deciding it was too soft, pulled each protrusion from its roots.

At the center of the page was the pinch. I sat slightly to the side of it, viewing the Orozco-induced bump at an angle that emphasized the height of the pinch. I squatted beneath it, fingers anchored into a plastic table. I angled my neck sharply to the left. From my new view, perpendicular to the paper, the pinch became a mountain. When I released the table, my fingers left behind small pools, reservoirs of a livelihood I had not felt in weeks.

Just as the cold days grew shorter and happened more frequently, Orozco shook me awake. Before I saw the pinched paper, I had slipped into a mild, non-lethal melancholy. Everywhere I went, there was the distinct smell of something burning. I felt I was part of the smell, too. One by one, the buildings I visited released that odd odor of heaters spluttering to life, and we blamed it on the forest fires in Western Massachusetts. Maybe the burning trees had blown into our city, too. Though the changing leaves were beautiful, I was privately fixated on the fact they were each suffering a separate, beautiful death.

I had been struggling to identify my melancholy’s source. First, I looked for an aesthetic explanation. I put on my art historian cap and tried to find a visual logic for something I could not put into words. I looked to my hair, splitting at its ends and drying out and up. I looked to the dust collecting on my record player. I drew faces in it sometimes but never wiped it off completely. I looked to new holes in old socks, constricting the toes and draining them of pinkness.

Yet, nothing sits behind these physical readings. The static in my hair could be resolved with a more diligent hair care routine. I could have taken off my socks and the pinkness would have returned to my toes. Nothing weighed down dust besides what it symbolized to me.

***

Compared to Orozco’s other earlier works, “Untitled” (1992) seemed deceptively simple and deeply strange. While Orozco previously engaged with the ‘ready-made’ concept, this piece was immensely human. It felt entirely man-made, a direct action of the hand upon the paper. The paper bears the evidence. On it, there is a lingering fingerprint, skin cells and sweat marked into the pulp. If the paper is skin, not land, it is something that can be tattooed, pinched up. Seeing Orozco’s fingerprints is painful if you feel empathy for the paper. It is more painful, though, when you realize the paper is forever altered by the pincher.

The paper is fragile. It could be burned so easily, swept away and turned to something ashy, something to fill up old heaters of brick buildings miles away.

Yet I re-learned how to view something so small, so “trivial” as a pinch, as deeply important, in a hopeful way. From Orozco, I learned that something could come from nothing, that a limitless expansion of temporal and conversational space could be created from two greased fingers and a notebook page. “Untitled” was probably created in minutes and provoked an epiphany and energetic zenith that outlasted its precipitous birth. It is a daring provocation to the viewer — how little can one do while retaining the right to call the action art-making?

This was more than just the perennial question of contemporary art: “What is art? Does this count?” This was about the action that precipitates art: art-making. It is also about the viewer’s arrival at their own conclusion, about this journey as art in itself.

I used to hate this sort of contemporary art — the kind that needs elaboration, that hinges on the labor of the critic. But maybe this elaboration is not a simplification or dulling of artistic skill. Maybe it is a spacious chasm that we are obligated to fill.

***

I have this tendency to analyze and tear apart the smallest things: holed socks, collected dust, chunks of hair on shower walls. Trying to explain away the holed socks prevented me from buying new ones. Collected dust was usually not cleaned off the record player if I was just staring at it instead. Losing 100 hairs a day is pretty typical.

It was not the analyzing that exhausted me; it was the negative light I had placed my observations under. To me, this was pattern-recognition at its worst and a habit I haven’t quite been able to shake on my own. I rely on art to make sense of the world and as a reminder to escape the interpretive trap my brain occasionally sets for itself. Orozco pinched me that October afternoon and said that I, too, am art worth cherishing.

He reminded me gently that I am paper — pinchable, prone to burning, and bearing the dead skin cells of all those who have touched me.

— Associate Magazine Editor Rose C. Giroux can be reached at rose.giroux@thecrimson.com.