September 11, 2011

#9

NEWSLETTERANGEL ORENSANZ FOUNDATION

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Hot from the ArchivesRafael Amargo, Pure Flamenco

At Orensanz Foundation 9/11 Anniversary Tribute 3,000 Pebbles in Memoriam

Derek BentleyDouglas Rushkoff and Angel Orensanz Watch TV together and Build their Own Narratives

Al OrensanzSeptember 11: The arrival of the 21st Century.

Culture in the LES Allen Ginsberg’s “Kaddish” atThe 4th Street Theatre

Derek BentleyDouglas Rushkoff and Angel Orensanz Watch TV Together and Build their Own Narratives

If anything, the whole last year has been the year of the rebellion of nature. Well, actually, the past two years. The last twenty months have been disconcerting, frightening, capricious and apocalyptic. Never in the papers – and I mean newspapers such as The NYT, The Guardian, Sueddeutsche Zeitung and The WSJ – have informed, analyzed, speculated and involved experts and special reporters to inform about how the weather was like in the past twenty months. Or in simpler terms, people have never talked so much about the weather and the gyrations of nature like in the past couple of years.

The reason behind this fact is that the lives of

hundreds of millions of people all over the globe have been alarmed with endless catastrophes, colossal disruptions and massive annihilations. First, it was the Gulf of Mexico, and then came the fires in Russia, the deluges of Pakistan and Afghanistan, the continental devastation of Fukushima in Northern Japan, the starvations in Somalia and just recently, the oceanic panic of hurricane Irene at the very gates of Manhattan.

As far as I am concerned, I only know of two people who not only stoically survived those external convulsions, but also stood up to peel off our perception of them and their phenomenological impact on us. These two individuals are, namely, Angel Orensanz and Douglass Rushkoff.

Sculptor Angel Orensanz dragged his tarpaulins, fabrics and cords out from his studio in Norfolk St. into a small community park across the street to reproduce and recreate the experience of the Gulf of Mexico’s deserted and condemned beaches; the drowning catastrophes of the disemboweled rivers in Afghanistan, the fires of Russia, and the radioactive desertification of Fukushima. He is on his way to NY now to replicate the fears of Irene.

Orensanz met with the author, teacher, documentarian and winner of the first Neil Postman award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity, Douglas Rushkoff in New York, to compare their perceptions and strategies in dealing with a revolted environment that pushes its guardian of the last one hundred thousand millennia into a despairing corner of fear and confusion. Douglas Rushkoff teaches media studies at NYU and the New School University, wrote ten best-selling books and three award winning Frontline documentaries. His new book, Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age, is out now.

During their conversation, the work of Orensanz

was made patent and accessible through video and pictures. The hermeneutics of Rushkoff flowed consistently and persuasively. Their main points of view can be summed up as follows.

Initially, the traditional art reacted to the natural catastrophe through metaphoric oral synecdoche and synonymy. In other words, the artist employed a narrative of the eyewitness through a painterly and sculptural reconstruction, based on similar linguistic codes. What Rushkoff and Orensanz found was that now we have both the catastrophe being recorded electronically and digitally edited – even instantly – and brought to the viewer as it happens in real time. This happened with Hurricane Katrina (Louisiana) and now Irene and in Fukushima, in Russia, etc. Both the regular viewer and the artist are assaulted with a view that appears as something direct, unfiltered, and experiential.

Rushkoff insists that the digital image is as totally ‘built’, ‘constructed’ and ‘evocative’ as it was an old poem, symphony or romantic painting. He stated, “Angel Orensanz’s constructions and installations are poetic realism… They are metaphorical simulations of those experiences. At once you are given the full immersive, sensorial, and emotional connection to something that you know happened but you never connected to because you were not there. (…) You acknowledge that you are not really there. You acknowledge that this is art, that this is metaphor and by doing these two things at once I think the hope is that the person coming to the exhibit can sort of undo the damage of having watched a human catastrophe from afar, with having watched it with the bumbling

desensitizing effect of major media”.

Douglass Rushkoff will be the brains, designer and moderator of Contact, a major national summit about the future of the Internet and communications that will take place at the Angel Orensanz Foundation this coming October 20, 2011. For more information check here

To see the video of Douglas Rushkoff in conversation with Al Orensanz about Angel Orensanz’s installation series The Abyss of the Gulf, The Radioactive Fires of Russia and Floods of Afghanistan and Pakistan, click here.

Derek Bentley

Hot From the ArchivesRafael Amargo, Pure Flamenco

PROGRAMSeptember 13, 2011 | 7:30PM

Episode #500 of “Arts from the Orensanz”, a weekly TV program of contemporary arts and culture produced at the Angel Orensanz Foundation, presents the live performance of Spanish flamenco dancer and choreographer Rafael Amargo.

Amargo inherited the purest flamenco style from his maestros and has cleverly assimilated other types of dance throughout the years, like the lessons he learned while attending the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance in New York in 1996. Amargo’s choreography overflows with both concepts perfectly matched on the stage: tradition and modernity; often closer to contemporary dance, his performance never loses the reference point of the essence of flamenco.

Awarded with four “Max Awards” (the top honor on the Spanish art scene), two awards for “Best Dancer and Best Dancing Show,” Amargo is eclectic both as a dancer and as a choreographer. His multi-award-winning, multimedia flamenco theatre production, Poeta en Nueva York, based on poetry by Federico Garcia Lorca, had its New York premiere at New York City Center. It has also been hailed as “Best Show of the Decade” by the readers of one of the leading newspaper in Spain, El Pais. He has also received the Positano Leonide Massine Award, the highest dance distinction in Italy, granted to the most outstanding dancers of the world.

Rafael Amargo has been selected to choreograph the West End production of Zorro that opened in the Garrick Theatre in London. In the generally favorable reviews the flamenco-based score and choreography were especially praised. The French production ran at the Folies Bergère in Paris and it is scheduled to make the US debut in early 2012,directed by David

Tinney. “It is probably safe to say that Rafael Amargo is in a class by himself” - wrote Jennifer Dunning in the The New York Times.

Amargo’s extraordinary performance at the Angel

Orensanz Foundation, accompanied by dancers and musicians of his company, was the highlight of the “Women Together” awards celebration on April 4, 2006.

The awards are presented annually and serve to highlight the work of exceptional individuals across the world who symbolize the core values of Women Together, a non-profit organization that was created in 1996 and is supported by HM Queen Sofia of Spain as Honorary President. The Organization has special consultative status with the UN Economic and Social Council and is associated with the UN’s Millennium Development Goals for poverty eradication.

Another collaborator was Fashion for Development, an organization that over the past ten years has promoted activities that link a variety of traditional fashion market actors to local designers in developing countries with the goal of including them in formerly inaccessible channels of commerce. The project is vital support to these women’s work in supplying native materials to the international textile industry.

The hosting of this event was part of the global cultural policy of the Angel Orensanz Foundation, a member of the World Council of the Peoples for the United Nations, dedicated to facilitating partnerships across sectors internationally that promote awareness and implementation of the United Nations’ goals.

Arts From the Orensanz is a program of contemporary art and cultural events produced at the Angel Orensanz Foundation. The program also features newly edited videos based on the Foundation’s rich archival collection of work created by Angel Orensanz.

Rafael Amargo at Angel Orensanz Foundation in 2006 © Vallinas

At Orensanz Foundation11/9 Anniversary Tribute: 3,000 Pebbles in Memoriam

The Angel Orensanz Foundation joins the city of New York for the commemorative events in the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. We will host a tribute to remember and commemorate the tragic events that took place at the World Trade Center. For this tribute we are summoning up 3,000 people to visit us and get involved in 3,000 Pebbles In Memoriam.We earnestly invite you to come to this 160-year old building in the heart of Lower Manhattan and to participate in a simple, poetic act aimed at mourning the death of 3,000 people ten years ago now. Another 3,000 pebbles will be waiting at the entrance for visitors to come, pick them up, and place them indoors, on the floor of the Foundation. By progressively piling them up, a symbolic, geometric pattern will be shaped. A silent, evocative and reflexive gesture with roots in many religious traditions that is aimed at bringing people together.

Attendees will also have the opportunity to contemplate a multidisciplinary installation inspired by the consistent inventiveness of sculptor Angel Orensanz. He created a performance and audiovisual piece in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks to reflect its magnitude and the subsequent emotions that were prompted.

We encourage all of you to come and join us on Sunday in this symbolic tribute to honor the dead and the missing and gather around communal, insightful thoughts.

The Angel Orensanz Foundation will be open on Sunday, September 11 from 3:00 pm to 9:00 pm.

Culture In the LESAllen Ginsberg’s “Kaddish”At The 4th Street Theater

The 4th Street Theatre presents Kaddish (or The Key in the Window) created and performed by Donnie Mather and directed by Kim Weild. Allen Ginsberg’s poem (“Kaddish for Naomi Ginsberg 1894-1956”) is intended to come to life with a multimedia memory play. This production marks the 50th anniversary of the poem’s publicatio andwill be on view from September 29 to October 9.

There has been a lot of buzzing talking lately on the seminal poet, born Irwin Allen Ginsberg (Newark, 1927 – 1997). While this was due mainly to the premiere last year of Howl, the film starring an accomplished James Franco as the poet entangled in an obscenity trial in San Francisco after the publication of the poem Howl, the sheer magnitude of his persona defies classification, and his life and achievements beyond the poetry field are worth remembering.

No one doubts today that Allen Ginsberg was a truly pioneering poet and founder of the Beat movement. He was admired, enjoyed celebrity and had prescient insights that have influenced generations of poets and writers to come. As a poet, he is best remembered for two of his masterpieces: the above-mentioned Howl (1956) and Kaddish (1957), a harrowing, heartbreaking ode to his mother Naomi Ginsberg, composed on the occasion of her death after endless years of mental illness torment.

Yet Ginsberg was also an avid world traveler and spiritual seeker. He also tried his luck as photographer, songwriter and teacher. If you add to this that he dabbled as well in politics and

passionately championed human and civil rights, the result is an indefinable person, an integral artist that has perpetuated himself in the collective memory through the decades, and has thus become a capital, highly recognizable symbolic figure for America and the rest of world alike.

But still, there is something about his personality, laborious energy and writing practice that categorizes him as a distinguished, truly American poet, in the succession line of the great voices of the country, namely R. W. Emerson, H.D. Thoreau and his much admired Walt Whitman. In Ginsberg’s case, however, the poet is no longer an isolated individual or a commentator idealizing and romanticizing about human condition from a remote, secluded position. During his childhood and teenager years, Allen Ginsberg was influencially determined by the II World Ward and the subsequent Cold War context that markedly shaped American society. It is no surprise then that as a cultural and literary icon he remained deeply involved with the zeitgeist of his time, delving often into political issues from a wry, incisive perspective. Later on he would use his achieved fame as a springboard to speak out on controversial claims.

While in New York, where he had initially entered Columbia University aiming to become a labor lawyer, he met in 1943 the first of his lifelong Beat friends: Lucien Carr, who soon introduced him to David Kammerer and William Burroughs. One year after, he encountered Jack Kerouac, who acted as his mentor and was named the spokesperson of the so-called Beat Generation, though reluctantly on his

Allen Ginsberg (right) with (from left) fellow Beat poets Larry Rivers, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso (back to camera) and David Amram, New York, late 1950s © The Guardian

Allen Ginsberg at his rooftop © Allen Ginsberg Estate

side. The intensely charged relationships between Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, and Kerouac were famously captured by the latter in the novel On the Road; probably the best, blatant example of what defined the Beat Generation and its writers. The incessant seek for experiences and self-definition that could give a meaning to an otherwise bleak, staid and stale society, lead a tireless Ginsberg to kick off and guide the counter-cultural revolutions that shaped – and shook – America in the 1960’s decade.

Rumor has it that when he missed his admired William Carlos Williams’ conference at the Guggenheim Museum in 1950, he felt so distressed that decided to write him a letter and that would prove to change his life. Be that as it may, what is certain is that Allen’s broad range of interests and his unrestrained life style impelled him to start a long trip, accompanied by his partner Peter Orlovsky. After Latin America, their first stop was Morocco, back then a famous retreat destination for poets, writers and bohemians alike –mostly homosexuals –. While there, they helped their friend W. Burroughs to edit his novel Naked Lunch, a book also brought to the cinema screen as an outlandish film directed by David Cronenberg.

They went on travelling around Europe – Spain,

Italy and finally France, remaining in Paris for a longer period of time. The French intellectual community of the late 50’s and early 60’s was a thriving one. However harsh and hopeless the recovery during the postwar years had been, the artists, writers, musicians and architects conformed a rich, inspiring landscape. It was in the legendary French capital where Ginsberg had the opportunity to hobnob with Duchamp, Man Ray, B. Peret, T. Tzara or the controversial but brilliant L. F. Céline.

It was in a French café in 1957 where he started to write the poem Kaddish - For Naomi Ginsberg (1894 – 1956). The term kaddish refers to the mourner’s prayer or blessing in Judaism. While the traditional kaddish contains no references to death, Ginsberg’s grieving poem is full of them, which gives to the work a helpless, existentialist and even nihilist tone. This is understandable, given the circumstances that triggered the writing of Kaddish. Ginsberg’s mother, Naomi, had died one year before from a schizophrenia collapse; she had suffered from mental illnesses and disorders throughout all her life. The writer, witness for many years of these painful disorders – she even had a lobotomy done – attempts ably to give expression to all the memories and battles of his family, while attaining to capture the universal, desperate certainty of our unavoidable fate: death. He masterfully does it through a stream-of-conscious technique and a rhythm that resembles a litany.

Less publicized was his admirable generosity. Ginsberg’s friends and acquaintances always recall what a very kind soul he was, with an impressive sensibility.

Yet if you are still unsure and wondering whether Allen Ginsberg’s quite baffling poems are too big a challenge for you, don’t hesitate more and give it a try attending the play based on Kaddish at the neighboring 4th Street Theater.

Marta Arenal

Al OrensanzSeptember 11: The Arrival of the 21st Century

They say that it is the wars and not the calendar days what marks the beginning of a new century. Napoleon welcomed the 19th century and WW2 brought the 20th. I vividly remember that we all celebrated the arrival of the New Year (2,001) under the Gothic, Sistine Chapel inspired ceilings, of the Orensanz Foundation with curiosity and expectation. The 20th century was over and we were entering a new century, the 21st. Just like that, overnight. Historians though tend to be more solemn. Sociologists always keep their cool, but semiologists like simultaneous readings and look for cracks in all narratives. Through the early part of 2000 I kept talking to my neighbors at Ratner’s on Delancey St. and Earth Matters on Ludlow Street that the change of century needed blood and smoke. I even ventured a modest joke: “Hegel and Karl Marx said that the past come to us first a comedy and then as tragedy”. “What do you mean?. By the way, I have heard a lot about Marx but not about the other guy guy”.

The year 2,000 thousand went by busy like always. At the Angel Orensanz Foundation we had at the middle of September ABC TV filming part of a series of installments presented from several signature venues of the entire country for a planned night show of relaxed conversations on art and music.

By 8 AM of September 11 everybody in our space was ready for day. Paper cups in hand, the light designers, the sound engineers, the hair dressers, the audience. The first take was a walk through the central aisle of our space in which Angel Orensanz was softly leading his signature sphere down the aisle like flying over the clouds. I came to the top of the building to check the view from the top that

look to Downtown Manhattan. It was a crisp Fall morning. “Wait a minute!. What’s that coming out of the WWTC? Smoke?”. Angel was possessed by an instant shock of emotion and consternation. There was a fire several floors up of the WTC”. By then, all the beepers of the ABC TV crew were bleeping with alarm messages “A plane just smashed on the twin towers”. The producer’s office demanded that everybody run with cameras and trucks to the WTC. Angel Orensanz left alone his big sphere in the center aisle. A security guard from ABC Television closed the doors. Traffic was stopped below Houston. Federal Police appeared everywhere. Masses of workers were walking silently from downtown to the Williamsburg Bridge and towards Midtown. By now smoke and fire were coming from the two main towers. Traffic in the Island was stopped and hundreds of ambulances were racing towards the WTC. Later in afternoon Angel Orensanz walked down through The Bowery to Canal Street and was stopped from going any further. The air was acrid, a big smoke cloud coverer the skies. Nobody was allowed beyond. Three days followed of total consternation under a cloud that covered Downtown Manhattan for over two months. ABC TV did take a few more days to come. A permanent security guard kept the doors of the front under control day and night. Three days into this cataclysm a young fellow rung the bell. There was a young fellow asking to rent the space for a reception. “I am an architect”; he said. “Actually I am the architect of the new big tower that they are building two blocks away on Rivington St.”. “What that will be?”,“A 400 bedroom hotel”. Angel Orensanz almost cried. Somebody was building a big construction right in the neighborhood?.

Angel Orensanz performing at WTC site in 2002

In the ensuing months, Angel Orensanz visited Ground Zero several times and worked a concept based on the experience of September 11 to bring to the upcoming Venice Art Bienale. It was a big installation to fill the Palazzo Malipiero on the Gran Canale. It was titled “Burning Universe”. A universal feeling of sadness was prevalent throughout the City while a growing, heartfelt sense of dismay with the a US led invasion of Irak was noticeable all over, even in a city were where timelessness is thoroughly implemented.

A group of German and Italian artists met in a cafe off San Marco square and drafted an antiwar manifesto in several languages . We have assembled in Venice to celebrate the Carnivale de Venezia in which I had been granted a large performance for the end of the parade of the Carnivale. Different writers and artist read the antiwar manifesto in six languages from a corner of Piazza della Segnoria.

Angel’s participation consisted in parading the transparent sphere through the narrow streets of the center of Venice and into the Piazza della Segnoria. It was the same transparent sphere that he had paraded through his studio at Norfolk St. the morning of the attacks of the WTC. Later in the year his exhibition “Earth: Death/Rebirth” opened at the Alexander Pushkin Museum in the Arbat of Moscow and the Rumiantzev Palace in St. Petersburg where he was requested fervently to parade the sphere of “Burning Universe”. But the fascination with his Burning Universe sphere spread further and further. He was requested from Tokyo to bring it there in August for a solemn walk in the esplanade of the Senso-ji (temple) of Central Tokyo to commemorate the end of Second World War. This world tour end up in Berlin where a large group of friend artists asked me to bring the sphere walk to the Brandenburg Gate.

Its last trip was precisely a solemn descent into the cavities of the two towers in New York. That is what usually is known the Foot prints of the WTC.

Just two years ago, a major urban/industrial development was erected in Zaragoza, Spain. It is called WTC Zaragoza and Angel Orensanz was required to contribute with a big sphere that remind us of the one at the WTC Square in Lower Manhattan.

Now, it is ten years after those tragic events . We are in the same building. It seems that we have inhabited it for 160 years, since its erection in 1849. We “saw” the Civil War, and the two World wars and many other ups and downs of the life of our City and the world.

We can see from the top of our building, through the

two round windows from which I saw the collapsing towers the slow growth and rebirth of towers and mega buildings of Ground Zero.

Ten years after, this September 11, we are inviting

3,000 people, everybody, to come to Norfolk St., to mourn the dead by picking up a white pebble standing in the steps of the building. We invite you to come inside the building, place your white pebble in the altar and write a message in a huge sphere, a reminder of the sphere that used to decorated the WTC Plaza.

On the floor you will be able to see a documentary, about the moving of the spehere around the WTC, walking it down the pit into the footprints of the fallen towers and in some of those locations mentioned above.

Al Orensanz

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