“Black Kites” (1997) by Gabriel Orozco

Black Kites

What I’m after is the liquidity of things, how one thing leads you on to the rest… The works are about concentration, intention, and paths of thought: the flow of totality in our perception, the fragmentation of the river of phenomenon.  Gabriel Orozco

The face of death. Herein lies emptiness,
The open maw of a still unfilled vase.

Are they bird-hollow, the bones of happiness?
Constructions wrapped around the voids of space,

Swallowed by or swallowing snaky time,
Stillness reverberating under fronds,

Caught in the knotted lattices of rhyme?
What the pencil aims to capture absconds,

Dashes into the underbrush of thought.
How can we remember that we will die?

Look at the old photos. See where you ought
To be now: On the outskirts, asking why

You were born? Or dead-on and central, quite
implicit in this dance of black and white?

Leslie Schultz

I first encountered the work (“Black Kites”) by the conceptual artist Gabriel Orozco at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, a great ark of art history on the banks of the Schuylkill River. His powerful memento mori was created with graphite pencil on the blank white curved surface of a purchased skull after a life-threatening illness arrested his attention.

The photograph of my great-grandmother (Clara Pressel) and her daughter-in-law (Marie Pressel–my grandmother) with neighbor Raidibelle Krueger in the middle was taken near their compound on the banks of the St. Lucie River in Florida, on the Atlantic coast. These women of my family are all dead now, of course, but as I remember them dimly they somehow live on, like an underground river below the dome of my own cranium.

This sonnet homage is broken into faux couplets to reflect the interlinking of shadow and light, memory and aspiration, one never existing without the other.

“Hibiscus Drapes” (1959)–Mom, pregnant with me, seated with Aunt Shirley)

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