Curator, Ann Temkin: Orozco undertook the Penske Work Project in 1998 for an exhibition at the Marian Goodman Gallery.
He would rent a Penske Truck, and drive around New York City. And then, he would look through the dumpsters, build a sculpture on the sidewalk, that would last only for the few minutes he was able to park there, take a photograph of it so that he would remember what he had done, toss those materials into the back of the rental truck, and then ultimately, [drive] it all up to the gallery using the photographs he had taken, to remind himself what to do with each of these bits and pieces that he had tossed in.
Chance is something that’s very important in Orozco’s work. It’s a strain of avantgarde art that has been important throughout the 20th century.
We think about chance as the exception, and yet, if you think about your life, what composes the paths that you’ve taken probably has a lot more to do with chance than with the planning that you’ve done. And what work like Orozco’s points out is that it’s actually completely appropriate to foreground chance as the way that life, and thereby art, happens.