July 29, 2011

#6

NEWSLETTERANGEL ORENSANZ FOUNDATION

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Profiles Penny Arcade

Derek BentleyRotting Airports and Busy Mountain Treks

Angel OrensanzEl Museo Del Traje Dresses upin Vibrant Colors

At Angel Orensanz Foundation“Lower East Side on the Screen”

El Museo Del Traje Dresses up in Vibrant ColorsSculptor Angel Orensanz floods with color streams the pine woods of the museum

Madrid National Museo del Traje is unveiling at its location at the City University of Madrid, a major Orensanz’s exhibition. It’s beautiful gardens, meadows and fresh prairie, enjoy the splendor provided by the nearby groundwater plus the freshness of the heavy rain fall of last winter. The sleek trees receive these days the visit of a unique guest, sculptor Angel Orensanz. This exhibition is meant to establish a dialogue between the Museum and a mayor contemporary artist.

During his long term career, Orensanz has presented large sculpture contractions In Holland Park in London; Red Square in Moscow and Central Park in New York City. Angel Orensanz designs and executes his sculptural plans in his studio, a synagogue, a replica of the Sistine Chapel, built in 1849. “We, the artists, since the Renaissance, are just amateurs.” This fascination for great art has fashioned his personality of rebelliousness and originality according to the art critics. To Madrid, Orensanz has brought in, not a powerful construction as customary to him but another one of weak evanescent that flies between the branches of the pine trees and that tries to “serve an homage to nature’s creative silence that sketches its immense potentiality and his anarchic passivity.”

The installation consists of a display of circles colored in vivid tones spheres painted by drawing filled of tense marking that insinuate hands questions and looks. Each element connects with another nearby and with all of them. In a chromatic progression they dialogue with the water of the fountain of a hundred of spouts in a strange geometry. The installation in its totality prompts nature to a dialogue that frees it of its own self conscious gravity.

From his infancy when Orensanz discover thousands of different colors in the prodigious sleepiness in the nests of the dreadful eagles that cross the skies of the Pyrenees, this Aragones sculptor learned to domesticate his own chromatic scale, projected over the green of the prairies the rocks and the falls. No far from the Museo del Traje, Orensanz came to install around 1978 a mysterious installation in the open air in front of the government office of the Complutense University. That silenced alignment of totems, filled of colors and cut off by opening trough which the wind was whistling as a fare warning about the future of his art a permanent and passionate dialogue that yield respect in front of the trees and the rocks to the mysterious power of water and the frightened whimsicality of the wind. He was for runner of learn art with a Spanish flavor. His work has sprout out in all four corner of the world, be it san Petersburg, Beijing or Sidney. Orensanz was reserving for Madrid this exhibition preamble, of a trajectory accompany by the changes developed in our times, a testimony to those looking for new art that moves against the noise the banality and uncertainty.

Paradigma. An exhibition open Until October 30. Museo del Traje. Avenida Juan de Herrera, s / n. Madrid, Spain. From 9.00 to 19.00.

Paradigm. Through October 30. Museo del Traje. Avenida Juan de Herrera, s / n. Madrid, Spain. From 9.00 to 19.00.

Article by Rafael Fraguas - EL PAIS- Madrid - 27/07/2011Read the full article in El PAIS.com

Angel Orensanz at Museo del Traje Gardens © Luis Sevillano - El Pais.com

© Museo del Traje

ProfilesPenny Arcade

The influential performer, writer, director and actress Penny Arcade is the living example of an artist fully committed to her work. The passing of decades means no exhaustion for her, but instead a state of wisdom slowly acquired over years of work and struggle.

Born Susana Carmen Ventura to an immigrant Italian family in the small town of New Britain (Connecticut), she changed her name to Penny Arcade at 17, when she debuted with the legendary director John Vaccaro’s explosive Playhouse of The Ridiculous. Two years later she became a teenage superstar for Andy Warhol’s Factor and soon afterwards played a role in the Morrisey & Warhol film Women in Revolt.

After a much-needed one year break in Europe, with a stimulating and artistically inspiring visit to Amsterdam, she came back to New York and was put to work in the creation of a wide range of shows, both as an actress and as the author of more than ten performance pieces.

It was during the prolific 1980’s and 90’s, while being a regular of the downtown counterculture art scene, when Penny cemented what now is a long, legendary and acclaimed career. Working and collaborating side by side with some staples of the American experimental theatre, she developed her own emotionally and intellectually charged style. She used to run a nightly show, House of Candles.

Penny Arcade photographed © Jasmine Hirst

Featuring wild, hyperbolic performance roles and with a penchant for social satiric dissections in her written work, she has sometimes been pigeonholed as the provocative, bad girl who champions queer, political and pro-sex performances. “I am not anti- academic. No one loves scholarship, real scholarship more than I do”, states Arcade. And that might be blatantly true, since The MIT Press published the first book by and on her, Bad Reputation (2009).

Whether academic or not, Penny’s accomplished career has certainly been devoted to raise awareness on political and timely issues such as censorship, feminism, counterculture, eroticism or urbanization matters. True to her motto, “art is transformative, it should be if wants to be called art”, Penny acknowledges the responsibility an artist has towards the audience and thus, prefers to call herself “the anti-diva” rather than focus on being famous. This doesn’t mean she doesn’t want to be remembered; however, her provocative and politically charged gestures on stage are not aimed at getting the fame for the sake of it. As Quentin Crisp, the well-known British writer and actor told her during one of the many long conversations shared by the two friends, “Miss Arcade, people like you and I have to work hard at being accepted”. And he was probably right, as the two close friends always had to strive to be braver and work harder.

While Penny rightly claims that she has never been featured in a mainstream publication, and that “I’ve always been treated like trash”, professional success and artistic achievements have far outweighed the difficult obstacles. In 1990 she created her most famous work, the show BITCH!DYKE!FAGHAG!WHORE!, an

indisputable freedom of expression hit that toured the world twice. Bad Reputation (1999) and New York Values (2002) both premiered in New York at Performance Space 122 to wide acclaim, the latter being performed later on all around the world. New York Values is a harsh portrait of death of the Bohemia and the gentrification of the bygone rebellious, idealistic values. Following this interest in the city’s urban issues, with a special concern for real estate interests affecting the boroughs, Penny Arcade has since 1999 been working on The Lower East Side Biography Project, founded in cooperation with one of her long-time collaborators, Steve Zehentner. The project effectively combines oral history from the 1950’s to the present, including various downtown performance shows and a documentary series (Queer Realities and Cultural Amnesia). The first installment is an hour-long conversation with Al Orensanz, followed by interviews to the likes of Quentin Crisp, the film star and poet Taylor Mead, Warhol superstar Holly Woodlawn or the punk rock legend Jayne County, to name a few.

Courageous, outspoken, feminist and voluptuous, Arcade has never been frightened or hesitant to tackle any artistic endeavour, nor has she been discouraged by the indifference of a certain part of the art world; adamant on her attacks to the alarming level of stupidity we are reaching in the current societies, she tirelessly continues working, investigating and performing, also in the company of her husband Chris Rael and his indo-pop band The Church of Betty, which we proudly hosted at the Angel Orensanz Foundation in 2000.

pennyarcade.tv

Koolhaas Cronocaos Exhibition last Spring at the New Museum. image © designboom

Penny Arcade photographed © Jasmine Hirst

Derek BentleyRotting Airports and Busy Mountain Treks

Fast trains and airports have been dotting the European continent throughout, moving people from everywhere to everywhere for almost 200 years. The 19th century industrial revolution enhanced every major city with majestic train stations in every country. A century ago the air plane brought the countries closer together. And just recently even large rural inner regions, have been opening high tech airports right and left. Every ski resort, every Unesco world marvel, every industrial fair hub reclaims its own airport. But progress has a limit. Spain, for example, has a couple of dozen gleaming, high tech and spectacularly designed airports open and ready to go but it seems that no flight will ever take place for the time being; at least for international, passenger flights.

But then, other teams of consumers are surfacing and coming to the rescue. Those are the dedicated medievalists, the faithful, the tourists of the occult and the esoteric, the lovers of the untraded countryside and the seekers of self identity and deep cultural exploration. They are all requesting a seat at the table of the national conversation and, somehow, testing alternative solutions for the current economic local and national crisis. What if the solution to some economic national crisis hides, partially, in the remote past and its stone remains?.

There are at least two major new plans in Spain under various degrees of development: One in the border of Portugal and Spain; the other is in the heart of rural, and unredeemed regions between Burgos and Soria in Central Castile. People in the academia and in the preservation enclaves are pointing to the past, to the remote past such as the 10th and 12th centuries, as a compensation for the present malaise. Do not cry for the closing of airports and cancellation of fast trains and fast trains stations. Look at the recuperation of a myriad of medieval churches that mark flashing cultural points of a thousand years ago. This happened, in some way, already in the 1920’s in the Catalan Pyrenees. There is a splendid exhibition on view, right now, at the National Museum of Art of Catalonia in Barcelona.

Long before that, in the 1960’s and 70’s in the Aragonese Pyrenees (El Serrablo), the Amigos de Serrablo salvaged and brought to international prominence a couple of dozen of churches from the 9th to the 12th centuries, the Mozarabic churches of Spanish Pyrenees that flourished under the Monastery of Cluny in France within the Muslim region of Huesca. That regional development was one of the first in Europe and grew up in coherence and strength by the creation of the Museo Angel Orensanz y Artes de

Las Huelgas Monastery in Burgos, Spain. image © J. C. Castro - Flickr.com

Lleida Airport, Spain. image © Artec - Flickr.com

Serrablo. It was conceived and developed in the late 1970’s by sculptor Angel Orensanz, the Association Amigos de Serrablo, under the leadership of Julio Gavin and Rv. Antonio Duran and the City Council of Sabinanigo. Sabinanigo, an industrial and service enclave, is the capital of the region of El Serrablo. It opened in 1979 and has been since then a focus of cultural fervor and identification for a region.

The Amigos de Serrablo restaured 20 churches, “mozarabic romanesque”. They helped Angel Orensanz establish his museo and the falsh point of the recovered culture of the Serrablo region, in a imposing masterpiece of Pyrenaic architecture. The benefits for the entire region have been extraordinary, stabilizing and giving perspective to a large conglomerate of hotels, factories, restaurants, hotels, road services and ski services to the Winter station even when small industry has gone through crisis.

Now, in 2011, is the development of four autonomous regions in Central and Northern Spain the ones in which that appear in extreme need of income and activities. It is precisely in these areas where the gleaming airports and superfast trains have mostly failed and come to a screeching stop. Think that the Camino de Santiago brings to Galicia and Spain over ten million people with huge financial and cultural benefits.

Now, besides Galicia three regions of Northern

Spain: Castilla y Leon, Extremadura, y Castilla La Mancha are gathering top talent, documentation y masses of volunteers to develop hundreds of churches from the 10th to the 13th centuries, mostly ruined; and returning them the masses of the country and the world, for much less than the cost of a small redundant airport.

St. Eulalia Church in Burgos, Spain. image © Rabiespierre - Flickr.com

Museo Angel Orensanz y Artes del Serrablo , Spain. image © Rabiespierre - Flickr.com

At Angel Orensanz Foundation“Lower East Side on the Screen”

The Angel Orensanz Foundation and The Film-Makers’ Cooperative

PRESENTS THE FILM SERIES:

LOWER EAST SIDE ON THE SCREENEvolving Urban Identity

We are pleased to present this collaborative cinematic project, conceived and curated by two nonprofit organizations. The LES On the Screen – Evolving Urban Identity screening series will take place at the Angel Orensanz Foundation, kicking off in September 13 and taking place once a month through November, 2011.

The Film-Makers’ Cooperative, created in 1961, is the largest archive and distributor of independent and avant-garde films in the world. Curators in charge MM Serra and Anne Hanavan, from The Film-Maker’s Coop, together with the Angel Orensanz Foundation’s team, have put together an audacious, noteworthy film program with titles culled from the extensive Film-Makers’ Coop archive collection.

Lower East Side On The Screen - Evolving

Urban Identity intends to showcase independent, underground films spanning the decades from the 1970’s to the 1990’s that touch upon the subject of the urban fabric of the Lower East Side and the Downtown counter-culture scene.

A vast-reaching neighborhood –its area expanding from the so-called East Village to Chinatown and Bowery— the LES urban configuration and specific identity has experienced a continual evolution and re-shaping up to the current days.

The feature length, short and documentary films that will play at the series aim at reflecting the neighborhood’s history and development, so that it doesn’t become only a faint echo in the collective unconscious. Cinematographic material is thus empowered the ability to shed light on the past and provide the present with a sense of memory, further highlighting the link between urban configuration, the city’s residents and the related cultural manifestations and expressions that have emerged during the decades.

We are thrilled to host and work on this Series program, offering our public the opportunity to rediscover filmmakers and artist that hail from different generations, usually associated with the past cultural golden age of Downtown New York. Together and through audiovisual storytelling, we will explore and reconsider unconventional ways of looking at the city, its buildings and people’s lives.

We will proudly kick off the series screening Philip Hartman’s No Picnic (1985). A grainy 16mm, black-and-white documentary in the purest 1980’s indie cinema style, No Picnic was originally filmed in 1985, but not released until 1987, the year it was honored at Sundance Festival.

Screenshot from No Picnic by Philip Hartman (1987). image © - Flickr.com

The film delves into the dramatic change undergone by the East Village, which has been going on for a long time. It will give viewers a snapshot of the different lifestyles and the beginning of gentrification in the neighborhood during the mid 1980’s. Intelligently shot on location in the streets, it shows the gutted buildings and decrepit clubs that shaped the East Village at that time, when the punk rock scene had reached a legendary summit that was about to fade away.

No Picnic is the story of a failed musician, Macabee Cohen (played by David Brisbin) who earns his living restocking the supplies in the neighborhood’s cigarettes machines and jukeboxes, while on a quest to find his dream woman. Gentrification is distressingly and increasingly apparent all around this would be hero. An intriguing character with a mix of hipster and nerd, he stoically carries on with a non-stopping, ironic interior monologue.

The documentary has a time capsule cast featuring Luis Guzman, Richard Hell, and then-unknown Steve Buscemi. It also boasts a notable soundtrack including the likes of The Raunch Hands, Lenny Kaye, Charles Mingus and Fela Kuti, among others.

Up-coming Screening Dates:

September 13, 2011October 3, 2011November 7, 2011

7PM. Angel Orensanz Foundation172 Norfolk Street, New York, NY 10002.

The LOWER EAST SIDE ON THE SCREEN-Evolving Urban Identity

Film Series is made possible, in part, with public funds from the New

York State Council on the Arts, and the New York Department of Cultural

Affairs.

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