Newsletter #27 by Angel Orensanz Foundation

#27

ANGEL ORENSANZ FOUNDATION

NEWSLETTER September 2013 1

NEWSLETTER #27 Contents

16 Director Al Orensanz Graphic Design Yuliya Novosad Articles Al Orensanz Zoe V. Speas

Origins: The Influence of Space and History on the Angel Orensanz Foundation for the Arts....................................................................................................6 The Spaces As Extensions of The Self.............................................................................12 Language, Mind and Memory......................................................................................16 What is Art? Louder Questions, and more Colorfuly...................................................23 3

Museum. Events. Art Gallery. 172 Norfolk Street, New York NY 10002 Tel. (212) 529-7194 www.orensanz.org 4

Angel Orensanz Foundation building

Origins: The Influence of Space and History on the Angel Orensanz Foundation for the Arts By Zoe V. Speas

All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players: They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages. -William Shakespeare; As You Like It Time marches on. Tempus fugit. The world changes and we have to change with it in order to move towards the future. And yet everything we might become has been shaped by our past, our origins. There’s no way to separate ourselves from our shared history; it flavors our identities and influences everything we hope to build in a lifetime. No surprise, then, to find the same unbreakable link between art and the history that surrounds it. Inside the Angel Orensanz Foundation for the Arts location at 172 Norfolk Street, the rich cultural and religious history is inextricably linked to the mélange of art that exhibits in the multiple-floor galleries. The work of Angel Orensanz - a rich variety of sculpture, prints, and paintings - inevitably refers back to the context of the building in which it is housed. Therefore, the viewer who stands before a fragment of the totems used as part of Angel Orensanz›s Flying Sculpture experiences both the work itself and the environment in which it is staged. They complement each other to create a viewing event unique to the art and the Foundation.

The Foundation is an indefinable space of endless possibilities. Indefinable. Defying definition. And why? Think of the generations of rebirth and reconstitution which it has undergone since the building was erected in 1849. Each shift in the building’s identity contributes to the palate that exists today upon which our artists display their work. In order to understand the way in which the space impacts the art within, we must understand the space itself. The Foundation originated as a synagogue in the midnineteenth century. Congregation Ansche Chesed, or “The People of Loving Kindness”, hoped to create a space that mirrored reformed views of their religion. They searched for an architect with the ability to integrate their German heritage into the nature of his design. Alexander Saeltzer incorporated iconic emblems of European religious monuments into his facade, evoking the Cathedral at Cologne and the Friedrichwerdesche Kirche into the synagogue’s construction. What resulted from Saeltzer’s efforts was the establishment of a revolutionary center of Reform Judaism in the Lower East Side. Men and women sat side-by-side to attend services. Organ and instrumental music became an essential element of religious ceremony. The pulpit faced the congregation who looked to it for guidance and clarity. This inclusivity and emphasis on community has endured throughout 7

the centuries and continues to be an extremely significant aspect of the Foundation’s mission today in 2013. But the period of Reform was not permanent. The synagogue returned to the hands of traditional, Orthodox Jewish leaders as the Reform movement migrated from the Lower East Side in the 1880s. Women and men were separated once again, the pulpit turned away, and the massive organ removed and relocated. Finally, the synagogue fell to ruin. By the 1970s, the Slonin Congregation, which used the location for its worship, had dispersed and the property was overtaken by an increasingly transient population. By the time artist Angel Orensanz purchased the building in 1986, the synagogue was nearly unrecognizable as the hub of culture and religious community from its previous life. How far we’ve come. Walk down Norfolk Street and take in the Foundation today.

The top and bottom images of the old exterior & interior sketches by Alexander Saeltzer

Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, the building emerges stronger and more vibrant as a direct result of its diverse history. In this way, the Foundation ages and develops like a human being as she passes through Shakespeare’s “Seven Ages of Man.” You can read her story in the lines on her face, in the wisdom in her eyes, and in the shadow of her smile. The lives she touches are more enriched for the experiences that have made her who she is. The art harbored by the Foundation is likewise enriched by the history that has shaped our building. Look at the totems, for example. Totems appear as a motif in much of Angel Orensanz’s work, which carries forward the tradition of embracing the influence of history in creating the present. Since the late 1960s, Orensanz has re-imagined the use of these totems in work ranging from the miniature to the massive. Each cast of enameled steel has a particular origin, just like the members of the population that views it. These historic totems are everywhere. You’ll find them throughout the interior of the Foundation, and more abundantly than you realize, once you start looking for them. Some of the smaller totems are used structurally as part of our gallery exhibitions. They hang in the stairwells on the climb to the second floor Clerestory. On the front steps, as you climb from the sidewalk into the stronghold of the Foundation, these fragments stand as pillars of history and

Inside the Angel Orensanz Foundation at 172 Norfolk Street

harbingers of the future of art to come. They are reflections of former works, such as the 1973 piece in Los Angeles entitled Flying Sculpture 2 or the colossal installation, South Music, in Atlanta, Georgia. Their bright, bold colors mirror the paint that coats the archways and corridors within the Foundation doors. The columns, by nature, are mobile and can be installed anywhere quite easily. Yet in their current position outside the front of our building, they seem as permanent as the complex system of stone and woodwork that supports the Foundation itself.

This duality of embracing both permanence and change can be seen as a frequent theme in the work of Angel Orensanz, and appropriately reflects the very character of the Foundation. Venture into the heart of Manhattan’s Lower East Side and see for yourself. The building invites it. The totems are waiting. Why are you?

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 Out Now! 11

THE SPACES AS EXTENSIONS OF THE SELF By Al Orensanz

Art Installation by Angel Orensanz – The Self and Space 12

From the ancient times to the present, man has affirmed the self or himself. Man has externalized himself and built himself as a beneficiary of architecture and a contending force with buildings and architecture. It seems that the building formalized a set of tasks that manifest the extensions of the human self into the surrounding environment. The first “construction” was the adaptation of the surrounding materials both for protection from the environment and for affirmation of the self. The indoors is where the thought and the dialogue grew into selfintrospection and organization from an intractable and uncontrollable surrounding. The interior space helped defined the proper proportions of the individual and of the group. The indoors established the dialogue and the community. It established the individuality, the memory and the authority. Outside of the entrance laid out the borderless, the cosmic, the dangerous and the seasonal. From then on there was space and a time for laying down the

Art Installation by Angel Orensanz – The Self and Space

foundations of society, of dialogue, of social order, of exchange, memory and of leisure. The caves are the oldest surviving records of human communication and memory; and the paradigm of the earliest forms of community and social order. From Altamira to Lascaux the human experience has moved by leaps and bounds towards more and more sophisticated forms of separation from the surrounding brutality and chaos and moved into propitious expanses propitious to dialogue and group communications. In another step forward, the cave propitiated selfinspection and introspection. It propitiated as well the beginnings of writing and painting and other levels of communication.

Art Installation by Angel Orensanz The Self and Space

Angel Orensanz has done different installations about this subject matter that seduces mankind since it’s origins. The communication with the self, with our inner most trough the surrounding spaces we created or spaces Mother Nature provides for us. 13

LANGUAGE, MIND AND MEMORY. By Al Orensanz

Artwork by Angel Orensanz 16

Mind appears as a conscientious dynamic lab that endlessly reports, recreates, rememorizes, reconstructs, edits, connects and suppresses. It works as an atelier of reproduction, storage and facilitation. Language is a mechanism that fixes, establishes, generates and closes arguments originated by the mind of the speaker and of the receiver. The act between mind and language always mediates a span of time that can be seconds, hours or even days. Memory is a repository of the experiences and of the language. Memory mediates between mind and language. Mind, memory and language are a common mechanism to all human beings that coordinate senses through their basic operations and mechanisms. Language varies from group to group and from individual to individual. Mind seems to work the same way everywhere whereas language changes from region to region and from epoch to epoch. The trouble is that the mind does not want to stay alone and constantly looks for and needs language incessantly, from birth to death, day to night. Language and mind operate independently, although not separately but cooperatively. Language shapes the mind of the speaker and consequently, of the community discourse. The characteristics of German language operating on the

German mind, as all other languages, create a special universe of signs and codes. All those constructions modulate the texture of the thought and the range of feelings of the speakers. The most appropriate scenario would be to live in a foreign country; to speak a foreign language, to live in a street and a neighborhood, that refer to historical coordinates that make you an outsider. Houses and monuments allude to an inexorably alien past and an alien context. We are always surrounded by a history of which we only picked up small shards and a few names, disconnecting ones from the others, which helps us move from one reality to another reality. Language and memory regulate the present experience and accommodate it to the mind. It is the role of the mind to establish the necessary bridges between the present environment and other contexts. Most of those environments are stronger than the ones that our mind originally adopts. They are created by other minds without the participation of our own mind that are adapted and reinforced by life experiences of various generations and geographies. The mind is the engine that converts the surrounding context into our reality. Without mind, there would not be any real world outside; and without language, there would not be any record of human experience. The mind and the language are forced to move outwards through music, writing, the visual arts and the technologies. 17

Music and singing are man-made products; as they are all generated by the human mind and the human organs, and end up being perceived as objective realities interacting with us. Each of these elements stimulates the other, which it has done that forever and will continue to do so. The exterior elements force the chain of the processes and facilitate the generation of new social realities. The reality is shown constructed and finished for the visitor; and is shaped up to fulfill multiple roles. Reality provides all the pieces and entanglements of the discourse. That process takes advantage of the fact that the mind tends to perceive things as being operational and completely developed in themselves. Conversely, mind is stimulated by language. Language, whether spoken or written, is a constant challenge to the mind in the sense that establishes a competition of formulations and transmissions. The formulation maintains the language in a double process of expansion and fixation; continuing with the circular imagery of the hermeneutics we see that language, mind and memory rotate in a circular process like concentric circles; or like an endless orbit that surrounds everything that we recollect, verbalize or formalize. Language objectifies the work of the mind and the memory; it operates ideally through the vocabulary and the alphabet. It makes objective, visually and intentionally, the processes of the mind. The mind grabs every opportunity to resist the passage of time. The power of the mind is limitless which finds itself snared by the endless fluidity and its omnivorous capacity of absorbing and understanding everything. When we talk about language we must contemplate the language of the speaker, the language of the listener and the language of the community within which the transmission takes place. Language has become so prevalent and universal that we can hardly imagine any remembrance of memory that is not transmitted through language. Even language has enriched itself with the process of production and reproduction to the point that we have to the point of calling languages “live” or “dead” in regards to their involvement in the processes of social transformation in our midst. The universal spread of the language through the languages has made the process of expansion the first 18

All of the above - artwork by Angel Orensanz 19

and foremost task of the brain to the point that we cannot learn unless we understand a specific language. About fifty years ago, Peter Breger and Thomas Luckmann did a synthesis of the basics on gnoseology, sociology and psychology that brought to the cultivated masses the heavy duty of the last hundred years of specialization and isolation. â&#x20AC;&#x153;The Social Construction of Societyâ&#x20AC;? is a small book that helped one or two generations understand all the achievements, intellectual and structures of sociology, psychology, hermeneutics, gnoseology and linguistics. Two or three generations have introduced us to the crests of the human sciences and the sociology of knowledge. It is a century of search and publication to spread knowledge and dissemination. Even the media has risen up their level of search. Language, and therefore knowledge, passes from group to group and from one continent to another. Language, like experience, is always multiple and multidimensional. Starting with the mental language, we have to account for the visual languages that always have accompanied the diversified languages. No matter how far we go into the origins of humankind we always find mind, knowledge and language in synchrony and interaction. It could well be that past of the oral language goes immensely deeper and deeper in time past and future. Ortiz Oses not only has been using a foreign language, but creating a language of his own while creating a vocabulary and syntax of his own. His vocabulary uses old Castilian roots and Germanic structural idiomatic roots. What happens with knowledge and awareness is that our brain lives and processes from inside out; and the environment returns the answer to our brain instantly from outside in. The share of a specific piece of knowledge is manufactured by our brain. But the manufactured materials are fresh from our brain or from different reservoirs accumulated over the years and the centuries. The immense majority of pieces of knowledge that are created, stimulated and fully developed follow regular, if not universal, patterns; therefore they are accessible by brains from all origins. Conscience and knowledge never stop working, even during sleep, exhaustion or duress. In many ways 20

Artwork by Angel Orensanz during those extreme circumstances, irregular situations like intoxication, inebriation, exhaustion and deep sleep, activate alternative levels of consciousness and unexpected scenarios and colorations of our awareness. In many instances, such as dream experiences, induced somnolence and artificially enhanced cognition we gain access to extraordinary clarity, clairvoyance and brain fluidity. Memory, brain vision and thought chains, and parallel experiences might get activated to our own astonished recognition. Language, mind and memory can work in synchrony in front of our surprised self. And that happens not in extraordinary situations activated by external activations. Most often it is the vibrations of the language, visual stimulation or sensual attraction what sets the circuitry in unstoppable motion and vibration.

Angel Orensanz Museum welcome you to come and visit our spectacular

sculpture exhibitions

ANGEL ORENSANZ FOUNDATION

172 Norfolk Street, New York NY 10002

T 212 529 7194

www.orensanz.org

What is Art? Louder Questions, and more Colorfully By Zoe V. Speas

What is art? Sit down in a theatre. The lights come up. Actors appear, and somewhere in the first twenty minutes of Act One, the playwright has his chance to hook the audience into investing in his story. His play is about art. College students stretch the boundaries of their medium. A blank canvas is sold for $200,000. A new generation challenges the autonomy of its predecessor. The conflict in each plotline quickly escalates to a fever pitch, but why? Art is fundamentally dramatic. With each brushstroke or manipulation of form, an artist presents a daring hypothesis to the world, designed to create questions where there were previously none. The work disturbs the otherwise quiet waters of our collective consciousness. It infects our dreams, challenges our beliefs, and forces us to grow. And like all growing pains, the aftershocks of drama in art are not always pleasant. After all, why should a hardworking audience member come to the theatre on a Friday night and pay a hundred bucks to have his foundations shaken by the words of a man he’s never met? Our audience member worked his nine-to-five at a job that barely covers his mortgage and his family and now playwright John Logan speaks

Alfred Molina in ‘Red’; Golden Theatre, NYC. 2010 23

to him “in grand statements and capital letters about Art and Immortality”, according to Ben Brantley in his March 2010 New York Times Review of Logan’s Red. When art and the individuals who create it are portrayed under the bright lights of the theatre, a special kind of illusion develops. One art form (theatre) uses another (fine art) to bring audience members inside a selective inner circle of society. The artist becomes a romantic and often tragic figure of both overwhelming ingenuity and hubris.

John Logan accomplishes this duality in his treatment of artist Mark Rothko in his two-character play, Red, which made its Broadway debut in March 2010 at the Golden Theatre. In this dramatic work, Logan explores the deeply personal, triangular relationship between a young studio assistant, artist Mark Rothko and his exploration of color as inspired by Henri Matisse’s 1911 painting, The Red Studio (MoMA, Painting and Sculpture I, Gallery 6, Floor 5). Rothko becomes infatuated with the use of red, as evidenced in his work, No. 21, currently on display in Gallery 921 of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Of Matisse’s use of the color, Rothko said: “When you looked at that painting, you became that color, you became totally saturated by it.” As a playwright, John Logan translates this infatuation to the stage, confining Rothko to the artificial reality of a theatrical production. By doing so, he elevates the artist from simply human to the celestial realm of fictionalization. Within these confines, the near-mythical personalities of artists are brought within the reach of every person in the house. Suddenly, an intimate congregation of hundreds is able touch the empyreal. The “art world” and the “real world” of mortgages and MetroCards merge into a single frame of reference. As superheroes of modern times, artists and their magic exist in a realm that society has isolated into something “other.” Audience members and they who flock to museums throughout the world are in awe of them. They envy them, perhaps, but are decidedly happy not to be them. To observe the “artist’s struggle” on stage confirms a stereotype perpetuated by a culture that endorses the very art it insulates with stage sets, perfect matting, and museum tags.

But audiences have a chance to make their own waves,

simply by coming forward to the crowded theatres every night. By exploring the origins of art on stage through the experiences of fictionalized characters, the audience and the society it represents put forward questions and hypotheses of their own.

Mark Rothko, ‘No. 21′; Metropolitan Museum of Art 24

What is art? Who are the people that create it? What makes them different from me?

If art is fundamentally dramatic, then it is without question steeped in mystery. Dealing with the unknown and the

In a city of 8.2 million people, loneliness is a surprisingly potent weapon of self-destruction universal opens windows into life and reality that give a glimpse of clarity only to blur and fade as the extent to which we know nothing is revealed. It’s a revelation that can be incredibly lonely, and in a city of 8.2 million people, loneliness is a surprisingly potent weapon of selfdestruction. It is important, then, to find the comfort and joy of knowing nothing. Which, exists, by the way, if you know how to look for it, and in fact becomes part of a unifying bond linking those 8.2 million together. We leave the theatre or the museum baffled by the hypotheses proffered by artists and playwrights. Now, imagine how they must feel in their creative process. They introduce the questions, not the solutions. They’re asking without getting an answer. Curiosity drives them, like the scientist, to use their media as a mode of communication to reach the world. They’re not the select few who have otherworldly contact with the unknown. Artists are essentially those of us who ask louder questions, and more colorfully.

We all know nothing. Art and science make that “nothing” a little less than it was we knew yesterday. But they don’t take us all the way. What would be the point of living and working together if we knew it all? No questions to ask, no problems to solve, no mysteries to reveal—makes for a pretty boring existence and an even more banal theatregoing experience, to be certain. Art and theatre join forces because of the intense drama shared by both forms. Their proponents ask loud questions, beautiful questions and we marvel at them in the lush darkness of a theatre, not because these are questions beyond our realm of knowledge and understanding. We marvel because these questions define everything that makes us human.

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