Curator, Ann Temkin: La DS is actually a Citroën DS, which is a classic French car from the middle of the 20th century and, what Orozco did was emphasize the notions of speed and beauty, in the DS, by actually taking an actual car and eliminating the central
third of it, surgically, so that if you look at it now, you realize the steering wheel is right in dead center, and it’s only big enough to fit one body, presumably his.
Artist, Gabriel Orozco: It was done by me and an assistant over a period of a month, in a garage, and was a very intense and a very rich experience of understanding and interacting with this very complex machine.
Most of my work, there is always this connection with the body, or representation of the body, but not a kind of figurative way, but the body as a machine.
Ann Temkin: The notion that we have from 20th century streamlined form is that the skinnier and sleeker something is, the speedier it is. So, in effect, what Gabriel has done by of course turning this into a car that actually won’t move at all, because the engine, is rendered useless, he turns it into an image of something that’s even speedier, and sleeker than the DS car itself. Kind of making a Barbie doll version of a Citroën, you could say, where the exaggeration of the supposedly attractive features is so hyperbolic that is almost reaches a kind of funny level.