Newsletter #20 by Angel Orensanz Foundation

#19 ANGEL ORENSANZ FOUNDATION

NEWSLETTER 1 August 2012

NEWSLETTER #20 Contents

14 Bringing Angel Home.........................................................4 The Transience of Angel....................................................8 Anshe Chesed to Angel Orensanz: Over 162 Years at 172 Norfolk Street Special Preview.......................................12

Towards a Methodology of the Work of Angel Orensanz................................................................14

New York Welcomes Burning Bronzes by Sana Qazi The sound of bottles of wine being uncorked and a crowd from the streets of New York City marked the impressive opening of Angel Orensanz’s latest exhibition, Burning Bronzes. Presented in none other than the Angel Orensanz Gallery, this exhibition stays true to the foundation’s name by celebrating the great work of Mr. Orensanz himself. Though Orensanz is an active artist, traveling where his art takes him, it has been quite some time that a collective display of his work had been presented. Burning Bronzes marks the end of this period by displaying some

of Orensanz’s great works including several bronze sculptures, the Body Series, and a few of his famous totemic sculptures. Burning Bronzes is an exhibition that pays homage to the true, unique work of Angel Orensanz. Displaying a few of his signature totem sculptures, which rise to an impressive height, the artist has brought some of his creations home for all to see. The classic totems that express a native war like feeling set the stage for Burning Bronzes. The artwork presented in Burning Bronzes seems to mimic the expressions of the totems, by displaying

a sense of a process that deals with human struggles. Orensanz makes a statement by creating expressive images that depict struggling or withering with the sculpted metal. His sculptures include the Long Hand, which reaches up in an attempt to grasp; the Blue Head, a portrait of his brother, Al Orensanz; and El Cid, which depicts a knight mounted on a horse with a sword in his hand.

another. Though they are quite simple with the use of dark tones and sharp lines, the depth of each individual drawing is phenomenal. The war preparatory expression from the title of the exhibition, combined with the sculptures and drawings translates into a building tension. The entire tone of the exhibition stays true to the unique style of Orensanz and revolves around the mystery of what is to come.

Along with the sculptures, Burning Bronzes also diplays the Body Series. The series of drawings are quite simple, with the images of human bodies struggling, fading, and twisting into one

The Angel Orensanz Gallery invites you to come celebrate the art of Angel Orensanz in Burning Bronzes, open September 12th- October 25th. 5

ANGEL ORENSANZ

BURNING BRONZES

Angel Orensanz Untitled Sculpture 2011 Pilas Short Film Festival

THE TRANSIENCE OF ANGEL By Cathleen Oberholtzer

By definition transience, be it an individual or an object, is a temporary thing – a state of perpetual transition. For a person who sees themselves as a transient, to them, everything is only present for a short period of time before it shifts into another entity or at other times simply vanishes. As a result of this outlook on life, transients travel from place to place, never staying somewhere for long, like a hitchhiker hopping from train to train in order to see as much as possible. They have no home to call their own except the road. They always seem to be in a state of transition, moving and flowing from one moment to the next. For many, the work of Angel Orensanz could be viewed as having a certain transient flare. His breathtaking and imaginative installations – such as the totems – are often temporary. They appear one day for all to see, only to disappear the next. There are even times when his installations are only present until a photo is snapped to document its existence. The work

is never permanent. It is always moving and changing. Even for the installations, changes are often made after they are completed. Angel never allows his work to remain stagnant and he always strives for a new creative way to present his art. His Sphere is a prime example of the transience in his work. It is an installation that is never the same, even though it has made appearances countless times. Sometimes it is inflated, other times deflated. There are times when Angel paints on it, other times it is clear. It can be carried, rolled or driven down the streets of countless different cities. The Sphere is forever transient. Its very existence is a constant transition from one thing to the next, and everything it becomes is only temporary. It travels alongside Angel from place to place – much like a traveler hopping on a train car to their next adventure, not knowing just exactly what the next day will bring, but looking forward to it nonetheless.

On October 4-7 the Affordable Art Fair comes to New On October 4-7 the Affordable Art Fair Yorkcomes City! Located at The in at Chelsea, the fair to New York City!Tunnel Located The Tunnel Chelsea, fair will house 60 galleriesother will in house over the 60 galleries as wellover as countless as well as countless other contemporary and contemporary and up-and-coming up-and-coming artists. This is aartists. uniqueThis fair,is a gathering together together the countless galleries found unique fair, gathering the countless galleries all over the City and giving them a venue to found all over theartist’s City and giving venue to display display the work thatthem they arepresent, as well aswork promoting gallery as itself. year the artist’s that theythe represent, wellThis as promoting the Orensanz Gallery will be there with some the gallery itself. This year the Orensanz Gallery will be drawings of Angel Orensanz. there with some drawings of Angel Orensanz. The price for General Admission to the Affordable Art Fair is only $12, and for students/ The seniors price for General Admission Affordable only $10. We invite youto to the come and see Art worksand on for display. Fair Angel’s is only $12, students/seniors only $10. We invite you to come and see Angel’s works on display.

Amy Maas I Guess That is Why They Call it the Blues 10

Wilfredo Soto Visual deceit

11 11

Special Preview: 1986 to the Present: The Orensanz Years On one evening in February 1986, Angel Orensanz, having recently arrived from Atlanta, Georgia, took a stroll around the Lower East Side looking for a building where he could establish his studio. He walked from Delancey street, past the corner of Rivington and Norfolk streets, and up to Houston, finally stumbling upon the former Anshe Slonim synagogue on Norfolk Street. Grim, silent and abused, the building seemed to look grounded and frightened. Thomas McEvilley, an accomplished art critic and scholar, imagined the building sitting “like an ancient spirit with folded wings.” Orensanz moved up the steps and peeped through a crack in the cinderblocks covering the entrances. The sun was setting, casting a ray of light over the ark and the eastern wall of the temple. Support beams from the balconies were leaning into the main space, and the entire area was strewn with debris, broken glass, and decaying books. Orensanz still saw something wonderful in the space, and later set about locating the owner, a developer with numerous holdings in the neighborhood, who eventually sold him the building. Angel Orensanz had arrived in New York after doing sculpture projects in Atlanta, Boca Raton, Los Angeles, and other parts of the country. However, it wasn’t until after his return to Europe that he discovered the Lower East Side and was charmed by its European colors and flavor. Soon after purchasing the property on Norfolk street, he unsealed its doors and windows. He then had proper doors and windows installed to protect the space from pigeons and the wind and snow. Next he secured the floors and brought in electric light for the first time in years.

Coming Soon!

14 Angel Orensanz

Towards a Methodology of the Work of Angel Orensanz by Carlo McCormick

So fluent in transcribing the most relativistic of terms as a dynamic matter of site specificality, and so at ease in his capacity to embellish the quotidian with an unmistakable import, we could only imagine what a supreme mediator, or interpreter, Angel Orensanz would have made. He most definitely is, in the tacit means of visual expression, a true poet. And no doubt we can well be contented that he is a remarkable artist. But working across all manner of materials and media over these many years, Orensanz has done something beyond the basic task of creating a truly idiosyncratic language and an undeniably personal body of work. Embracing ambiguity while eschewing ambivalence. Orensanz makes art that is formally open ended to the point of being problematic. If the answers then must lie in the litmus of audience subjectivity, so be it. However, if to these eyes it is impossible to read the work as not inherently political, and subversive at that, let it also be confessed that such is neither any more valid nor any more complete a purview than another. There is never a right or wrong in these things, it’s just that in the case of Angel Orensanz there is a definite possibility that all such absolutes are deliberately collapsed into one another, such that we have a hermeneutic text whose reading is based upon its misapprehension. It is This, for all its fallacy, that is the great pleasure here.

What Angel Orensanz makes is a kind of unmaking; an architecture, anatomy and action of the interstice. His art takes place in a topography of the in-between. He provides a frame of deconstruction that resides within the permanent as both a temporal incursion and an aesthetic disassembling that alters not so much the original but its reception. There is ample virtuosity here, even a degree of classicism, but in spirit Orensanz is something of a magician - a possessed jester whose fine compositional hand is employed in the choreography and orchestration of a visual riot He would never succumb to absolute chaos, but just as well he takes an inordinate pleasure in dancing close enough to oblivion as to invoke some anarchic insurrection. It’s certainly not comedic per se - I’d think dramatic on the verge of operatic really - but rather, it is what is called always for lack of a better term, “art”, a specialized space granted by society for those less aggressive disruptions in the hegemony, where Angel opts for play as a strategic methodology. This we must consider to be a modesty born out of great ambition. How else, one has to wonder, could anyone so consistently and effectively perpetrate the iconic assaults on world landmark shrines of authority such as the United Nations and the Red Square, or visit the sites of tragedy and disaster, from Kosovo to the World Trade Center, other than as a bit of minstrelsy? Orensanz produces fine art by the most conservative

estimations, but as it talks in tongues, it utters a savant global lingua of vagabond vernaculars, gypsy thieves and outsider observations. Be it in the most public of realms or isolated in a remote nature, be it monumentally permanent or momentarily passing, Orensanz’s art always seemingly exists as an apparition. Conjuring forms as entities or spirits, Angel Orensanz gives us the familiarly foreign, a nexus of the archetypal and protean assembled as forested totems, florid agricultural crop circles, supernatural visitations, meta-primal (but post-graffiti) rock paintings, and carnivalesque pageantries. From guerrilla art insurrections to participatory parades, from sublimated primitivisms to studio expressionisms, from the well tilled field to the overly traversed civic esplanade to even the unvisited shores, Orensanz travels the world leaving his multicultural impressions - not so much as statements of self but more as parenthetical questions that challenge all that is given and taken for granted in the landscape. As such Orensanz is truly a social artist in the more democratic sense of the word, providing a provocation simply as a command to re-imagine the world by allowing his art to function as a surface of pure interface with audience and environment. The truth that is offered here is hypothetical, a conjecture of a possibility that serves as a flash point for the interpretation of multiple alternatives. A call from the wild of our own culture of Diaspora, Orensanz offers the shards of our perpetual discontinuity as embodiments of a holistic embrace - holes we must visit to get to the whole itself.

the dissipated processes and lost artifacts of Orensanz’s work is through another media, one that is convergent with and yet antithetical to the arc itself. If a totem falls in the forest, a terra-cotta slips into the sea, a choreographed crowd eventually disperses, or rain obviates a newly plowed field, who can hear the artist’s voice in this? Ultimately Orensanz’s art is one of record. And in a world where the documentary form has become so dominant it would seem there is hardly any more space for actual life itself. Everything Angel does, which is so direct and non-didactic, ends up for most of us in the most mediated forms of photography and video. It is quite a contradiction in terms, yet one that supports rather than diminishes the creative effect. The documentation of his work, be it a picture of skiers on the slopes or tents long ago folded up, is a kind of parallel text, not the work itself so much as the only way we can actually read it. This itself constitutes a kind of political dimension, a strategy borrowed from public activism and the conceptual strains of guerrilla art actions, in which the knowledge that nothing is accomplished unless there is some media witness necessitates something more than the gesture itself - the camera. This then is the record. Run it at any speed you want, listen to it backwards for secret messages, amp it up or tone it down. However we may play the visual discords, sympathetic harmonies and tonally abstract melodies of Angel Orensanz, it is music to these eyes. This is what the silence sings for us, what the void of existence might tell us if it were ever given a tongue. And of course, it is utterly unutterable. — Carlo McCormick, March 2003

Built upon some greater dislocation, as much a personal fact of this artist’s life as a condition of artistic production today, Angel Orensanz’s art only really comes together in the catalogue form, and this is a worthy trick that demands some consideration. The only way we actually have to piece together

Carlo McCormick is the senior editor of Paper magazine. His social and cultural commentary keeps New York awake.

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