Mexican-born conceptual artist Gabriel Orozco's first American retrospective, at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (2000), was met with mixed reviews from the American press. Los Angles Times art critic Christopher Knight slammed the exhibition with witty vitriolic headlines: "Orozco's Artwork is Derivative of Duchamp's" and "Conceptually, It's Not Exactly New" (The Los Angeles Times. June 7, 2000 F1+).

Gabriel Orozco, Home Run (close-up), 1993

Orozco's work is clearly in dialogue with the artistic legacy of Marcel Duchamp. The readymade model of artistic production, developed by Duchamp, transformed the traditional conception of a work of art by challenging the dogma that the artist had to physically construct or "create" it. An artist could now create a work of art by simply declaring it as such. Knight says that an "academic tyranny of citing sources [especially Duchamp] can weigh down Orozco's work." He also labels Orozco's work as "Duchampian In-breeding." However, Orozco absorbs Duchamp's precedent of artistic production and uses Duchamp's mode of thought to move art in a new direction. Orozco transforms the space that surrounds the work of art to make art dissolve into reality. He challenges the museum/gallery space as a privileged medium of exchange between patrons and artists.

In Home Run (1993), Orozco places oranges in cups, vases, and other containers in the windows of apartments across the street from New York's Museum of Modern Art. The gallery walls no longer function as the structural framework to display the work: the actual artwork is outside of the institution, visible just by looking out the window. The gallery walls function differently from how they usually do; in this case, they serve only the purely functional purpose of supporting the architectural framework of an edifice that allows the viewer to see the sculpture from its vantage point. The work of art only exists because of a wall label in the museum. So, instead of the artist creating the work of art simply by signing it, as Duchamp did by signing "R. Mutt" on a urinal, the work exists solely due to the curator creating a wall label. Thus, Orozco has the institution invest an outside object with the status of the work of art.

In Empty Shoebox, Orozco radically reorients the tripartite interaction of space, viewer, and object. He specified for an empty shoebox to be placed on the floor, in the corner of a room. Museum directors and curators had problems insuring it, since it could easily get kicked or thrown away.

		Gabriel Orozco, Elevator, 1994

Perhaps especially because Orozco had specified for there to be no placard for the work, it was actually thrown out by a janitor when it was first exhibited at the XILV Venice Biennale. The theme of the lack of boundary between art space and reality is played out once again in Parking Lot, in which Orozco opened downtown Antwerp's Galerie Micheline Swajcer to weary drivers unable to find a parking space on the city's crowded streets. The discursive space of the gallery becomes a matrix, a literal physical grid for the work of art. It becomes an architectural container of the readymade. In Elevator (1994), Orozco inverts the schema of Parking Lot. He removes all use value from the elevator by positioning it as a readymade in the gallery. By inviting viewers to step inside the elevator, he draws attention to its interior, a space of awkward social interaction, where personal space is violated by strangers.

The beauty of Orozco's work comes from his to ability fold art out into reality, not unlike Duchamp, but in new ways. His retrospective at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art did not include any new work (artists usually include a few new pieces in a retrospective). Instead, in a self-referential gesture, he recombined his old pieces to create new pieces. Orozco's gesture should not be mistaken as the equivalent of a dog chasing his tail. He is generating something new. His art activates the space around it. He makes a total space, the type of space that one experiences in the real world.