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Damián Ortega
Matters and Mytheme: A Proposition
Matters and Mytheme: A Proposition by Eungie Joo
An experiment. That is how Damián Ortega describes the action Moby Dick, an antiheroic fight between man and machine, between an artist and his anthropomorphized vehicle. In it, the artist places a Volkswagen Beetle in a five-meter-wide circle, greases its bald tires, ties a rope to its rear bumper, and cues the driver to accelerate. A live band jams to the Led Zeppelin song of the same name while Ortega pulls. As an innovative act or the test of a hypothesis, this experiment in sculpture serves as a telling focal point in Ortega's practice, one that refracts numerous strands in his idea production: mechanized systems, contemporary myth, linguistic metaphor, states of matter, chaos, humor, energy.
Moby Dick is one of a trilogy of works that revolve around the Beetle as an icon of the promise of modernity — its challenges and failures. This promise is the fuel for a practice of propositions that explores "a sculptural relationship in understanding how matter works, how it reacts, and how it can be activated in nature in order to channel or convey energy.’1 Often these explorations are temporary, involving organic materials and variables of location and time as gestures of momentary resolution open to evolution and reiteration. It is a constellatory system wherein gravitational tensions maintain constant, if imperceptible, motion and balance.
The series Homos (1996) — a group of twenty photographs exploring simple homologous relationships of color, value, function, and name — elucidates the core of Ortega’s practice. In it, the artist proposes marriages of new relations in an extended play on word and image. Activating the quotidian and natural through systems that are linguistic and non-linguistic, verbal and nonverbal, Ortega dissects the communicative structure of meaning by inaugurating his own elemental vocabulary. The collection considers a variety of words in the Spanish dictionary beginning with the prefix homo-, reorganizing the synapses triggered by notions of sameness and their relationship to man. Each proposition features a word’s dictionary definition inscribed on the Plexiglas of the framed image or images as an activation of a sequence of open systems of relations encoded in language — a series of foundational beginnings. Ortega explains the propositions of Homos as phonemes.'2
Homónimo (Homonym) articulates a direct association through language: a mango (mango) equipped with a mango (handle). The resulting object is an absurd bulbous knife, a comiclike rendering in three dimensions. Clothing mimics the physical context of the city in Homogeneo (Homogeneous). An orange shirt and khaki pants offer the passerby a kind of urban camouflage against the painted wall and concrete courtyard he traverses. In the second image, the architecture of the street follows the same rules as the uniform dress shirt and trousers of a passing white-collar worker. These moments of synchronicity suggest coincidence but also the disciplinary function of urban planning. The word homólogo (homologous) is defined as "similar in position, value, structure or function." In the work of this title an echo or counterpart is resolved by combining equal parts of the same fin a mirrored image that admits the impotence of (signification in language (pears), art (Camp-Bell's Soup cans), and function (pencil). In Homoplastia (Homoplasty), a red onion has been grafted with the skin of a white onion and a white onion with that of a red onion. The transplants enact possibilities in domestic scientific discovery while questioning the parameters of membership within a species and the capacity of the organic to naturalize difference.
Homosexual conjures a slightly different relationship between text and image through a consideration of gender in language. Here Ortega is experimenting with the possibilities of construction with the same element, a concern that foreshadows several later works. Appropriating the rather crass slang term tortilla (lesbian) and playing off the word machete (macho), he concocts interlocking repetitive structures, each an orgiastic union of the same. This recuperation of gendered artifacts—domestic staples and farming tools—acts as a humorous anthropological revelation on the genealogy of the hembra (female) and macho (male) in language and the built environment. Homologar (homologate) means to confirm or corroborate an idea. Objects from the supermarket are the accidental tools of Ortega's articulation of this concept. One closed structure has merged with another closed structure to produce a new body, a new molecular structure. Two bananas share one skin, two matches a head, two rolls a crust.
Value is the indeterminate question of the whimsical compositions that make up Homografo (Homographic). Using materials gathered from local shops, Ortega juxtaposed pairs of items of the same price, "but rather than simply placing them side by side, he accentuated an aspect of their material or functional qualities within the composition. Yellow glue has dried over several ping-pong balls, suspending their once-fluid movements into a solid mass that appears both architectural and molecular. A small prendedor, or pendant, in the form of a gun lying in a can of fuego (solid fuel) stimulates their representational and actual functions. Earplugs attached to a baseball resemble a kind of figurative sculpture while recalling the roar of a stadium crowd. With a parasitic fishing lure hooked atop, a white candlestick takes on the qualities of a huge fish or whale.
Another Beginning: Tools, Ruptures, Engineering
In Language as Work and Trade, Perrucio Rossi-Landi offers a homological schema of production in which utensils or tools are elements of material production that are homologous to and constitutive of linguistic production. These tools can be likened to a sentence, the essential linguistic element upon which a complete idea can be built. In this schema of production, the linguistic and material, or physical and internal, must be understood as evolving simultaneously and interdependently to create meaning, a system of production that is "constitutively and continually circular, oblique and retroactive, all the more so the more mature it becomes."3 Ortega's tools possess a multidirectionality similar to that of Rossi-Landi's operations of production in that they are neither sketches for future works nor finite resolutions, but constitutive elements in a constantly mutating genealogy of meaning and sculptural form, his mythemes.4
The political cartoon is an elemental tool in Ortega's works. In Violencia sutil (Subtle violence, 2000—2005), he makes reference to his earlier occupation as a political cartoonist—a practice that relied upon a vocabulary and objectives that he ultimately found too narrow and didactic, although the humor, irony, and
aesthetic of the medium continue to interest him.5 Humor props open a crucial variable of chaos in Ortega's work. It is an absurd, Dadaist humor owing much to the political cartoons of Rogelio Naranjo and Helioflores. Ortega has made several sculptural interpretations of such cartoons-such as America letrina (America latrine, 1997), based on the 1975 Helioflores drawing America Latina, or Prometeo (Prometheus, 1992), based on an illustration by Manuel Ahumada, which consists of a burning candle inside a light bulb casing. Inspired by a Naranjo drawing, Ingenieria genetica (Genetic engineering, 1994) is an elemental strand of pickaxes growing out of a stack of cut wood, each axe head embedded into the wooden handle of the preceding axe and each handle cut by the following axe. In a reversal of death and life, each cut augments the spiral structure, simulating the progressive rings that mark a tree's growth or a molecular structure in nature.
The same satirical humor fuels many of the artist's works on nature or man's relationship to nature. One of Ortega's first works, Carrito aplanadora (Little steamroller, 1991) is an operational personal-size steamroller. The vehicle suggests an attempt to control one's destiny and the individual innovation necessary to combat the privatization of urban development. But there is also a desperate futility in the tool, reminiscent of a riding lawn mower and its feeble attempt to maintain and discipline nature. Chaos prevails in Pato Bosch (Bosch duck, 1997), an orbital sander outfitted with a carved wooden duck's head. Supplanting the ideal of the calm, subtle motion of a duck gliding over the surface of a lake, this pato travels unpredictably, aggressively destroying the surface of a hardwood floor, reducing wood to dust in a demonstration of the conquest of nature's serenity by technology's mayhem. Pico cansado (Tired pickaxe, 1997) is another Frankensteinian anthropomorphism. Resembling the sleek neck of a swan, the pickaxe's handle has evolved with the flexibility of a spine but lacks the necessary musculature to support the weight of its own head. Its function made obsolete by heavy machinery, the axe must reimagine itself as an entirely different kind of tool.
In Ortega's practice, domestic sculptures act as imperfect mirrors to a lived reality, countering the heroic quest for conquest or transcendence with modest transformations of commonplace materials as a way to excavate meaning and redirect it as a source of energy. Some two hundred books are arranged for a spiraling domino fall in Conduccion de energia (implosion/ explosion) (Conduction of energy [implosion/ explosion], 2004). In a sequence of images, two separate but interdependent lines of action are triggered, recording the fluidity of falling energy. As a meditation on mass, acceleration, and gravity, the action posits the accumulation and dispersal of knowledge as a form of manipulate energy. Energy can also be false, deceptively invigorating. Hundreds of soda bottle caps of different brands and colors are strung together into an expanded glucose molecule in Molecula de glucosa (1992). Alluding to the massive consumption of sugar in Mexico, Ortega's schema is a kind of headless monster growing in all directions, even climbing the walls in defiance of gravity. Ortega's home experiments in sculpture continue with the engineering feats of Puentes y presas (Autoconstruccion) (Bridges and dams [self-construction], 1997). Thinking about his studio practice in the confines of his apartment, Ortega appropriated the energy of his living space by compulsively reorganizing furniture, boxes, jars of paint, baskets, and cords into unlikely dams, bridges, extensions, and arches. A table is the foundation for an extension that travels from one room into another. On it balances a dresser, then two chairs, a metal planter that grazes the ceiling, and a plank of wood, followed by progressively narrower sticks. Seven chairs and an inverted table balance precariously, like Chinese acrobats or evidence of a poltergeist's antics, to form an arch. As in Gonduccion, the works are made of and within the domestic territory, their scale determined by the limits of floors, walls, and ceilings. The persistence of this scale defines much of Ortega's work, here converting a manic need for transformation into architectural possibilities.
Upon Fragments
The traditional image of architecture has always been linked with the idea of solidity and stability. Endless reconstruction with pieces of used material, which in itself contains a constructive history, comprises the temporality of this other way of building. Temporality is also the key to fragmentation, the contemporary drive to break, tear, shatter, explode, crush, divide, rip, in other words, to convert to pieces. . . . Disorder is the sum of a temporal order that seems complex. The unfinished imposes itself: order is incomplete and mutable. This is a potential movement in the direction of completion, or something like the uncertainty of the future and the suggestion of endless possibilities of expansion.
Paola Berenstein Jacques6
During a residency in Brazil in 2003, Ortega frequently walked around the favelas, becoming fascinated with stacks of bricks that families stored outside their homes. Often these stacks were protected by makeshift tarpaulin roofs or sheets of plastic or cardboard. A kind of public bank, growing in number and size until enough bricks have been collected to construct a complete structure, the stacks also demonstrate a communal longing—patient energy, patient desire awaiting fulfillment. The stacks inspired Ortega's Materia/energia (solido. liquido y gaseoso) (Matter/energy [solid, liquid, and gas], 2003), a changing work made up of seventeen hundred local bricks. In Materia/energia each brick is like an atom, a minimal particle of matter. During the first week of the exhibition, the bricks sat just as they had been delivered, in a casual pyramid-like pile, the way one would encounter them in everyday life. In the second week, Ortega arranged the bricks in three variations representing phases of matter: a cube (solid), scattered on the gallery floor (liquid), and suspended in three dimensions (gas). Each variation was on view for a single day. Finally the bricks were returned to an incidental, nonuniform pile.
An accumulation of energy and a meditation on objects and classification, Materia/energia embodies the artist's ongoing concerns both with how the physical properties of molecular structures transform with changes in state and with how energy shifts from activity to dormancy, remaining intact. The following year, Ortega created the related work Clay Mountain (2004), in which thousands of pounds of raw clay formed a four-meter-high mountain of potential energy. The clay was kept malleable, and visitors were allowed to touch, squeeze, and poke at the huge mass. In fact, the latent energy and its open possibilities were overwhelming, inciting several visitors to unleash this energy by hurling chunks of the clay at the gallery walls.
For the same exhibition, Ortega created Iglesia en rotacion (Cathedral in rotation, 2004), a labyrinthine system of red clay bricks that outline three cathedral footprints, one, three, and five bricks high, scaled to the human body. The structures are incomplete, but rigid enough to determine the visitor's path of movement through the gallery. Inspired in part by a cathedral that lay adjacent to the museum, each crosslike plan is a stand-in for a city with one center. Seen from a bird's-eye or satellite view, the city shifts and rotates constantly, losing track of its center and instead leaving traces of multiple centers, multiple truths. While an official town center is defined by the formal architecture of power-religion, government, and commerce—this somewhat theatrical representation of power demarcates a multicentric structure, a mixed reality of chaotic relations in which real forces, accidents, and the instability of a lived reality produce a system of relations in flux. Within Ortega's bounded environment, we traverse the labyrinth, a metaphoric passage to God that fails to provide an absolute path to the truth, but instead offers fragmentation, reassessment, and possibility.
The structure of Iglesia en rotaeion echoes Ortega's Reglas e instintos (Rules and instincts, 1997), a work in which the walls of a scaled-down floor plan of a gallery are troughs filled with food and water for fifteen white rabbits. For one month, the rabbits inhabited the space within the space, unable to be disciplined by the assigned use of an architectural plan, instead destroying the pristine nature of the gallery space through need. Reglas is not a representation or mimesis of nature, but nature at work, with the rabbits embodying the changing states of matter by ingesting solids and liquids, digesting, and excreting feces and urine everywhere; the interaction of nature's order and man's order reaping chaos. For Ortega, the Utopian promise of modernist architecture actuates a kind of lived disorder. In Gonjunto habitacional. Habitantes del lenguaje (Housing unit. Inhabitants of language, 1999), twenty Venetian-tiled concrete bricks can be arranged to spell the work's title. Recalling the high-density housing districts common in Mexico City in the 1950s and 1960s, the work examines the microcosmic and macrocosmic implications of architectural and linguistic structure and its producing effects —and how those effects do not follow a simple chronological or phonetic order but require bounded leaps of reconsideration to achieve meaning. As the building blocks are arranged to posit a tenable urban landscape, linguistic meaning is summarily destabilized. As this linguistic production transforms back to a material one, the phonemic blocks suggest a functional use beyond the maquette, calling for an assembly of thousands of similar bricks and their use in the construction of a usable structure.
Realizing The Beetle Trilogy
I thought process was not dual, but that there was always a third view of a work, it could be a "perhaps," or a "maybe," something better, an afterward, always a third perspective that was more ambiguous.
Damian Ortega7
Ortega’s interest in the original Type 1 Volkswagen sedan relates to both its notorious history and a personal identification with this important relic of democratic industrial design. As is now well known, Ferdinand Porsche had been secretly trying to produce an affordable car that he called the Volksauto when Adolf Hitler assigned him the task of realizing the Volkswagen, or people's car, around 1934. The car was to be fast, small, fuel efficient, and affordable, and Hitler’s promise of personal transportation and the vast autobahns it would necessitate were key components of his political agenda during the
Nazi Party’s rise to power. While the prototype and several military versions were realized by the late 1930s, it was not until after World War II that the car's promise became a reality. It eventually became the best-selling model in history, with more than twenty-one million Volkswagen Beetles manufactured between 1945 and 2003.
Crucial to the car's popularity was the fact that, thanks to its widely available replacement parts and service manual directed at the consumer, it was the first car with a fix-it-yourself capacity. Since it was also affordable, the democratic ideals of the car were realized internationally. With the introduction of more stringent safety laws and new fuel-efficient cars in the 1970s, the popularity of the Beetle waned in Europe and the United States, and its manufacture eventually became exclusive to Mexico and Brazil. In Mexico, availability of cheap used parts and the simplicity of its construction extended the car's life, and when production halted, as many as one in eight cars on Mexico's roads were Beetles, including thousands of taxicabs and the artist's own car. Its ubiquity on the streets of Mexico, its DIY possibilities, and a personal attachment to the car have led Ortega to liken the vehicle to a pet.
Three individual works —Cosmic Thing (2002), Moby Dick (2004-5), and Escarabajo (Beetle, 2005)-make up The Beetle Trilogy. Although their dates correspond to their realization as exhibited works, Ortega has admitted that he is not sure of the order in which the works were conceived. At different times he has offered various orderings of the episodes to demonstrate possible narrative structures that relate to the development of a myth or origin for the Beetle as a protagonist. The works can be seen as plan (diagram), hypothesis (maquette), and experiment (action), with each of these elements overlapping within the realization of each episode. For this exhibition, the works of the trilogy are reiterated as sculpture and action, complemented by three additional works: Auto construccion, Expanded Geometry, and System of Groups. The first work is a diagrammatic deconstruction of the internal machinery of the Beetle, an alternate proposition to Cosmic Thing. Expanded Geometry and System of Groups took shape as sculpture after the second iteration of the experiment Moby Dick and are installed in direct tension with the work, producing physical and perceptual relationships to the action. Escarabajo is the final action of the trilogy as hypothesized in Beetle '83, an experiment in exploration, resolution, and return.
By the late 1990s legislation in Mexico aimed at minimizing the number of cheap Volkswagen taxis on the streets threatened their extinction, and it was around this time that Cosmic Thing was born. For this work, Ortega hired three young men to disassemble a Volkswagen Beetle. Given the vitality of the used and stolen car parts market in Mexico City, he was only a little surprised that it took just a few hours.
Each of the parts was then meticulously mapped out to hover in an exploded display above the ground. Attached to the ceiling by aircraft cables, the dispersion moves along horizontal and vertical axes, reminiscent of a natural history museum display —a museological remnant of utopic but obsolete design.
Ortega's plan to deconstruct the Beetle began just prior to the work Desocultamiento (Unveiling, 1993), an attempt to break down the separation between the inside and outside of an object. In this sequential triptych, a trash can's lid is removed, causing its four sides to fall to the ground. A perfect perimeter is broken into four equally perfect concave parts, its potential volumetric capacity both destroyed and expanded by the dissolution of the closed structure. These deconstructions also recall Gabriel Orozco's La D.S. (1993), a manipulated Citroen that the artist trisected, reattaching the outermost thirds to create a perfectly compacted individualized vehicle. While The Beetle Trilogy explores a complex system of social, economic, and political relations, ultimately following a different trajectory, Ortega acknowledges the influence of Orozco on Cosmic Thing. In a way, the work emerges from an ongoing dialogue that began in the late 1980s, when Ortega and fellow artists Abraham Cruzvillegas, Gabriel Kuri, and Jeronimo Lopez (Dr. Lakra) descended weekly upon Orozco's studio in what was then called the Friday Workshop, a conversation that mutated through the 1990s but continues to this day.8 Perhaps most importantly, this conversation honed Ortega's interest in the deconstruction of the object, an interest that "began with the relationship I developed with Gabriel Orozco in his studio, trying to understand the notion of how to show an object, not just represent it, and also of technique, or the working process, as something fundamental, not neutral or insignificant."9
Like the Melville tale from which the work takes its name, Ortega's Moby Dick is about the hunt for a demon, obsession, the battle between man and God, and modernity. The action us an investigation of man's desire to conquer his environment and, equally, of how that desire is subject to nature's order and how man is in turn transformed by nature. The second incarnation of Moby Dick took place on Lower Grand Avenue in Los Angeles in June 2005. Where the street meets the loading dock of the complex in which REDCAT is located, it creates a kind of accidental amphitheater below the overpass of Grand Avenue. It is a favorite location for Hollywood action films, and it is here that Ortega staged his tug-of-war, an urban hunt in which the artist attempts to master the freedom of a white Volkswagen Beetle with a series of ropes and pulleys.
The action is accompanied by live musicians performing Led Zeppelin's "Moby Dick" —an aural directive to its crescendos and pauses and also a second mythic reference, to the musician John Bonham (1948—80). Bonham, one of the founding members of Led Zeppelin, is credited with inventing the thirty-minute drum solo and transforming the formal drum kit by dispensing with his drumsticks in the middle of a solo and pounding the drumheads with his hands. Bonham remains a legendary figure of rock, his car-racing dream sequence in the film The Song Remains the Same, his penchant for heavy drinking, and the mysterious symbols that the band used in its untitled 1971 album contributing to his mythic stature.
The three interlocking circles in which Ortega's musicians stand as they play "Moby Dick" reference Bonham's self-chosen symbol from the 1971 album. This symbol has been decoded as the trinity of man-woman-child or the Ballantine beer logo. Whatever the case, Ortega has magnified it into a kind of footprint in his new work System of Groups. Planking the gallery floor as a reference to the Moby Dick action, the low concrete outline invites the gallery visitor to step inside the closed structure, as in Iglesia en rotacion. Whereas the latter challenged the official structure of the city, the three interlocking perimeters in System of Groups recall investigations of the three phases of matter and Ortega's use of the photographic triptych, as well as the physical architecture of his labyrinthine works, such as Spirit and Matter (2004). The system is interdependent and molecular, three atoms forming a single closed structure, three orbits forming a gravitational system.
Moby Dick contains a third mythic reference, to Chris Burden's Trans-Fixed (1974), in which the artist lay prostrate on the rear of a Volkswagen, his hands nailed to the roof of the car. For two minutes the car's engine screeched at full throttle, then the vehicle was pushed back into a garage. This and other transformations of energy into different forms of communication—such as Five Day Locker Piece (1971), Bed Piece (1972), and White Light-White Heat (1975), in which Burden explored the body as a site for the accumulation, transformation, and dispersal of latent human energy—are deeply relevant to Ortega's practice. So too are Burden's interests in systems of power and tension, of mythology and information, and in functional machines such as B-Gar (1975), in which he conceived, designed, and constructed a single-passenger vehicle that would be able to travel at one hundred miles per hour with a fuel efficiency of one hundred miles to the gallon —the true Volkswagen, and a functional predecessor to Orozco's La D. S.
Ortega's interest in the malfunction of mechanical systems is also apparent in Auto con-struccion. Like Cosmic Thing, the work begins with a physical deconstruction of the object, here the internal systems necessary to operate the vehicle. In Auto construccion, the Beetle's transmission and motor are dismantled into dozens of individual elements, and each piece is then cast in concrete. The parts of each mechanism are regrouped but not reassembled, in a destruction of their mechanical function. Distanced from their utility by material and disorder, the elements are simple units, pieces, words—pirated, self-made parts that resist commerce as the only system of exchange. The rough, fossil-like concrete casts imply a primitive level of development and decay, as though the machine's evolution is in a process of reversal or decomposition. Reformed as bricks or stones, the pieces have devolved into phonemic cells, awaiting structural organization to establish function.
Installed as a photograph alongside Cosmic Thing, Beetle '83 prefigures the weightless transformation of the exploded, expanded car-evidence of the end of its life on earth, its four wheels peering through the dirt and grass like grave markers. Exhibited as a work since 2002, it is also a maquette or proposition. Ortega only recently completed the third episode of the trilogy as an action in the film Escarabajo. On a journey of return, the Beetle travels through the stolen parts district of Mexico City, meekly identifying with disembodied fenders, walls of hubcaps, and mangled Volkswagen I taxis. But the adventure has just begun. Cruising down small highways and meandering along country roads, the Beetle rests among a flock of sheep, takes in the view along a canyon cliff. Finally it glimpses its destination, the North American Volkswagen factory in Puebla, its likely place of birth.10 From Mexico City to Los Angeles and pack to its origins, the vehicle has traveled on a mythic journey of exploration and return. Now, on a plush lawn along the back roads of Puebla, the car has reached its end. Immobilized, the escarabajo is rolled on its back and dragged into its grave. Plastic grain bags serve as a makeshift burial shroud, rendering the departed a mummified time capsule awaiting archaeological discovery. This last action completes the epic journey of the prodigal son, the homecoming of the hero and the end of a life cycle. But as the trilogy closes with the burial of the artist's car, we are in fact at another beginning. The car is obsolete, trapped in a decaying shell, but it is also a germinating seed slipping under fertile soil, a resting mass of latent energy orchestrating its own regeneration or reincarnation for an as-yet-undetermined future.
Notes
1. Damián Ortega, in Alma Ruiz, "The Beetle Trilogy: Interview with Damián Ortega," in this volume.
2. "The signifying function of the phoneme consists in its designating a relationship of alteration or opposition to other phonemes; even though the phoneme lacks meaning, its position within the word and its relation with the other phonemes makes meaning possible. . . . Phonology shows that linguistic phenomena obey an unconscious structure: we speak without knowing that, each time we do, we are setting a phonological structure in motion" (Octavio Paz, in Claude Levi-Strauss: An Introduction. trans. J. S. Bernstein and Maxine Bernstein [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1970], 13).
3. Ferrucio Rossi-Landi, Language as Work and Trade: A Semiotic Homology for Linguistics and Economics, trans. Martha Adams et al. (South Hadley, Mass.: Bergin & Garvey, 1983), 131.
4. "The constituent units of myth are phrases or minimal sentences which, because of their position in the context, describe an important relationship "between the different aspects, incidents, and characters of the tale. Levi—Strauss suggests that we call these units mythemes. . . . Mythemes are 'nodes or bundles of mythical relationships' and they operate on a level above the purely linguistic" (Paz, in Claude Levi-Strauss. 26—27).
5. Damián Ortega, conversation with the author, Mexico City, August 2005.
6. Paola Berenstein Jacques, Estetica da ginga: A arquitectura das favelas atraves da obra de Helio Oiticica (Rio de Janeiro: Casa de Palavra/RIOARTE, 2001), cited in Damian Ortega (Basel: Kunsthalle Basel, 2004), 56.
7. Ortega, cited in Ruiz, "Beetle Trilogy," in this volume.
8. See Abraham Cruzvillegas, "G.O. Untitled Workshop," in Gabriel Orozco (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art; Mexico City: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, Institute Nacional de Bellas Artes, Museo Internacional Rufino Tamayo, 2000), 174-96.
9. Ortega, cited in Ruiz, "Beetle Trilogy," in this volume.
10. Between 1969 and 2003 1.7 million "classic" Volkswagen Beetles were produced at the Puebla plant.
This essay appears in Damián Ortega: The Beetle Trilogy and Other Works (Los Angeles: CalArts/REDCAT, 2005) available at www.redcat.org.
More on Damián Ortega
 | Related Texts |
| CV | |
| Bibliography | |
| The Beetle Trilogy Interview by Alma Ruiz | |
| Moving Parts by Mark Godfery | |
| Exhibitions | |
| Nine Types of Terrain 18 Jul—8 Sep 2007 | |
| Spirit and Matter 10 Sep—8 Oct 2004 | |
 | Related Links |
| http://www.tate.org.uk/mode... Tate Online | |
| http://www.icaphila.org/exh... Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia | |
| http://www.redcat.org/exhib... REDCAT, Los Angeles | |
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