By the time the major retrospective of Gabriel Orozco’s work, curated by Ann Temkin, opens at the Museum of Modern Art in December 2009, Orozco will likely have reinvented his practice of making art yet again. Museum director Glenn Lowry served as moderator at a lecture and discussion on Wednesday evening, the fourth of this year’s series of “Conversations with Contemporary Artists” at MoMA. There, the artist explained the multiple levels of research—whether cultural, historical, political, or phenomenological—that go into each of his projects.

Orozco, born in Jalapa, Mexico in 1962, characterized himself as a nomadic artist, interested in representations of the body completely devoid of anecdote—and thus, of specificity. Each of his works can, as the artist claimed, “be occupied by everyone.” Orozco uses sculptural materials like plasticine, chosen for its continuously malleable—and therefore skin-like—qualities. Like a human being, the plasticine ball that Orozco sculpted to match his own weight (Piedra que cede, 1992) retains the marks and characteristic materials of each of the environments in which it was displayed before it finally came to rest in a museum gallery. The surface of the ball is marred, with pieces of stone, grass, and several other types of unidentifiable matter subsumed into its pliable surface.

Orozco also seeks to generate accidents or provoke disorder in everyday life. To this end, the ultimate success of his projects is uncertain until their installation. One recent example is a sculptural work that the artist described as a complete failure. “Photography saved my neck,” said Orozco, whose photographs of the marks made by the sculpting process filled the void left by the disintegrated sculpture.

Orozco is so adept at solving such logistical problems that he based an entire body of work on the idea. His “Penske Project” (1999) found Orozco driving through the streets of lower Manhattan in a rented moving van in search of everyday refuse—or, for the artist, sculptural materials. Orozco’s strategy was different from those of other contemporary scavenger artists, such as Phoebe Washburn, who amasses large quantities of indistinct waste in her studio for use on multiple projects. In comparison, Orozco worked with the waste in the physical location it was found, appropriating the space of the sidewalk as his studio and using the moving van as a means of mobile storage. The works from this series have a definite likeness to the ideal of the “readymade,” as defined by Marcel Duchamp, an artist Orozco counts as having a significant conscious and unconscious influence on his work. This comes as little surprise, as the depth and variety of Orozco’s oeuvre is perhaps even more impressive than Duchamp’s.