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Angel Orensanz at the Orensanz Foundation - New York
Art in America, Feb, 2003 by Calvin Reid
Spanish artist Angel Orensanz is probably best known as the fellow who purchased an extraordinary, formerly abandoned synagogue on Norfolk Street on Manhattan's Lower East Side in the 1980s and, along with his brother Al, transformed it into a neighborhood architectural monument and all-purpose arts and community center.
A respected artist for more than 40 years, Orensanz has produced a body of work ranging from large abstract sculptures with humanist overtones to a series of conceptual installations and performances that whimsically address social and geopolitical conflict. The latter works invoke his own brand of pacifism and an idiosyncratic vision of a multicultural, interdependent world community.
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This exhibition focused primarily on photographs and videos that document a series of quirky public performances; beginning in 2001, they were conducted in Venice, Florence, Tokyo, New York City, Berlin, Madrid, Paris and elsewhere. The performances offer a personal response to the specter of war and suffering. They are laden with a subtext of Jewish diasporic history, but these acts most vividly embody the artist's engaging sense of transnational fellowship and spiritual introspection.
Orensanz constructed a large, man-size transparent plastic sphere that he rolled through the streets of these legendary cities--sometimes pushing it along from behind, sometimes walking inside the giant globe and moving it forward. He loaded it on a gondola and traveled the canals of Venice; at other times the sphere was parked in historic locales such as Piazza San Marco or at the Brandenburg Gate. While the sphere is on view, Orensanz and the people he encounters paint and mark up its surface. In the videos, John Coltrane accompanies Orensanz's peregrinations on the soundtrack; the portable globe is like a giant existential snowball that grows metaphorically larger as it picks up layers of historic and symbolic grit and grime.
In his catalogue essay, Thomas McEvilley, who curated this exhibition, provides a brisk and lucid examination of Orensanz's work and the history of the Norfolk Street synagogue. McEvilley links the work's conceptual underpinnings to Orensanz's Sephardic ancestry and his family's wanderings. He points to the significance of the sphere in classical Greek philosophy and to the mythic theme of the Wandering Jew.
Orensanz is out to metaphorically link his personal and ancestral wanderings to the great international venues of human civilization. Hanging in the venerable Norfolk Street building, his work evoked yet another revolution--it reconnected the historic transit between the old world and the new embodied in New York's Lower East Side. In these videos and photographs, Orensanz offers himself as a kind of shambling comical figure, a delightful modern Sisyphus relentlessly pushing a scarred and sagging globe through the miseries and triumphs of human history.
COPYRIGHT 2003 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group
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