The Inescapable Patterns of Garbage

There's a sort of zoom you experience when looking at “Astroturf Constellation,” one half of artist Gabriel Orozco's Asterisms, currently at the Guggenheim in New York through January 13: this trash is so tiny and so carefully organized!

The other half of the show, a work titled "Sandstars," contains large items, items that were washed up on a beach in a protected Mexican coastal biosphere. Those items are big enough that they rise to hip height and carpet a third of the gallery's floor space like a color-coded skyline. But "Astroturf Constellation" is composed of micro-items placed on a four-foot platform just in front of the elevator up to the top-floor gallery: Pennies, bottle caps, glittered barrettes, pistachio and sunflower shells, plastic bracelets, bits of red foam, lavender foam, lime foam, two Ferrero Rocher foils, a Blistex, and so on. These are pieces of garbage that Orozco plucked from the blustery astroturf field where he likes to throw boomerangs and play soccer on Manhattan's Pier 40. Standing over the lucite box that converts trash to art object, you can almost feel Orozco's fingers worrying the flimsy orange plastic circle that fell off a Gatorade bottle, see him as he walks on a brown chocolate wrapper and hears it crunch under his sneakers.