ANGLES AND ANGELS

From the catalog of the Planes exhibit. New York, NY 1996.
Written by Raimund Abraham

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“The birth of the imagination is like waking from a nightmare.”
William Carlos Williams, Kora in Hell

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There is no beginning and no end to the imagination.
No creatures, plants, objects were yet named in the Garden of Eden.
No surveyor’s eye had measured its distance with lines, points, planes.
No map had been drawn, no exits marked, only the angular interstice
of angel wings revealed the lone existence of space and time.

Ran Oron is a dreamer.

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Born in the darkness of unknown abodes between dream and dawn, he is longing for a new Garden of Eden in paradise lost.

Longing for space before planes became walls, lines made into edges, points into punctures. Suspended in the space-less space of night flight, where stars converge with their inner light, piercing the core of his eyes, where weightless bodies are drowning in the sea of sightlessness.

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Ran Oron is a dreamer.

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He dreams of a garden where the fragile properties of geometry are protected from their own provisions, where wings of vulnerable lightness become armors of their own desire, where flight occurs within the hinging of planes without matter, where walls are not yet born. With paradise lost and long before the surveyor’s odyssey began, two antagonists threw their dice for the origins of dwelling: the cave or the tent.

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The protective fate of the cave denied the discovery of the secrets of geometry, the eyes buried by the weight of their bodies, the outer skin of their dwelling never to be seen, victims of the comforting darkness of an inner silence, while the explorers of open space risked their survival for the infinite, for the unknown horizons,protected only by their weapons and the fragile skin of their tents, folding with the mutations of unpredictable journeys, driven by the desire of piercing eyes. Before the temple was carved in stone, the holiest of the holy was folded with its tent, a house of the spirits protected by the power of faith.

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Ran Oron is a dreamer.

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He dreams of a world before and after the construct of walls, where walls still carry the spirit of folding of an ever-changing space to provide the temporal interstice of dwelling in a simultaneous fusion of body and mind.

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Walls, according to Villem Flusser, form the frontiers between the political and the private. They divide the word into two realms: the big outer one where history happens, and the small inner one where the concrete experience of life is centered. But they divide in a curious way: they create the private realm by dividing. Were it not for the walls, everything would be political (which means totalitarian in a very obnoxious sense of the word). Through this curiously dividing character, the walls pose a typically human choice (typically human, because it allows for no decision): either to leave the walls in order to conquer the world outside, or to stay within the walls in order to find oneself. The walls show clearly: to conquer the world outside means to lose oneself, and to find oneself means to lose the world. This is because walls are compact and allow for no osmosis.

Walls either break the wind or crumble under the power of its force, while the skin of the tent embraces the wind’s might, torn from it anchors, transformed into sails to carry the boat of the dreamer to unknown landscapes.