Empty Club: press coverage

The Daily Telegraph, 10 July 1996

The New York Times, 27 July 1996:
"The ballroom of 50 St. James's Street is empty except for an oval billiard table with a red ball suspended like a pendulum above its center. Some visitors pick up a cue and take a shot at it, others just stare as the ball sways hypnotically back and forth. What used to be a stuffy men's club on a street of stuffy men's clubs has been turned into a kind of grown-up playground by the 33-year-old Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco."
(Carol Vogel - read full article)

Flash Art, November - December 1996:
"By introducing the public into the private, Orozco perverts the heavily coded rituals of the games, altering their rules. One of the snooker balls is hanging from the ceiling, the miniature spectators that populate the cricket pitch have trees growing out of them, the bowling green is made of pinstripe material and the xeroxed sports pages are embellished with geometric shapes, mimicking the kind of art you might find in a financial headquarter." (Gianmarco Del Re)

The Daily Telegraph, 10 July 1996:
"Orozco has filled the empty building with games (or symbols of games) such as you might find in any English park or pub. On the main floor there's a snooker table, on the second floor posters of football and cricket players, and on the third some striped deck chairs and a game of bowls. Like Whiteread with her concrete house, he is making interior spaces available to inspection by the public." (Richard Dorment)

Financial Times, Weekend 13/14 July 1996:
"The unexpected has returned to 50 St James's Street, in the heart of London's clubland. This solid Georgian building was home to Crockford's scandalous "Temple of Chance" in the 1820s before silting up for over a century as the Devonshire Club. Now it is, temporarily, a place of surprises again. Artangel has taken it over for its 1996 artistic happening."

Time Out, 17 - 24 July, 1996:
"There are five discreet pieces, all dealing obliquely with notions of British identity and specifically its sporting manifestations. The most striking turns an office into an indoor bowling green laying lanes of pinstripe fabric and providing deckchairs for spectators. The invigilator has dozed off in one of them; mute homage to the persuasiveness of this eccentric representation of the relaxed leisure activities available to the few." (Mark Currah)