The Angel Project

Reviewed by Ben Spatz

The Angel Project: The Lincoln Center Festival, July 7 - 27

Ticketing at www.lincolncenter.org or call (212) 721-6500

The Angel Project. Photo: The Lincoln Center.

 

Deborah Warner's Angel Project consists of nine sites centered around midtown Manhattan. Audience members move through the project at their own pace, interacting neither with each other nor with the performers except to exchange a certain silent and expressionless kind of glance. There is no obvious plot, but there is a kind of graceful progression: from absence to presence, from fishing for angels to the traces that angels leave behind, from feathers to birds to people with wings. In addition, there is plenty of allegory - most of it Christian - and plenty to think about.

That angels these days are so often depicted as lonely is further evidence that God is dead. Having lost their sole companion, contemporary angels are suspended permanently in a state of waiting and watching. That is why no matter how beautiful they may be, our modern angels are almost always lonely. Angels are the incarnation of watching, and as watchers they are always only partially there. They can look but they cannot touch, and in this way they mirror our own anonymous lives in a city as vast as New York.

If angels refer largely to absence, then the nature of this piece is a perfect metaphor for its content. The form of the solitary walkthrough installation tends towards absence in any case. Unlike art objects, installations very often refer to imaginary or absent people, frequently resembling theatrical sets minus the actors. Warner's rooms invoke questions: Where is the child who read these books? Where is the person who circled these names? Where are the wings that dropped these flowers? Where are the angels who built this chapel? Even the sites that include live performers evoke this sense of absence. Most of the angels we meet are blindfolded, sleeping, or turned away. They are partly there, partly taken away, and the rare occasions when one of them looks at us only increase this sense of separation.

Because the sites have this quality of absence or partial presence, the feeling of being in an installation extends itself beyond what Warner has orchestrated. Traveling between sites one looks at the world differently. The world becomes an installation piece and every stranger is an angel. Those men fixing the escalator there - are they angels too? One site offers a one-way mirror onto 42nd street.

In a certain sense, you don't really need to see The Angel Project to be part of it - you just have to know that it exists. It is enough to know that somewhere in Manhattan there are angels. Somewhere there is a room full of feathers and a room full of Bibles. You don't have to encounter these places directly to feel their effects. After all, what is important about angels is not seeing them but looking for them. At the same time, the nature of The Angel Project prevents it from being private the way a play can be private. Angels cannot be owned or locked away, they can only be hidden, and the nine sites of Warner's project may be secret but they are also fundamentally open to the public. In fact it would be impossible to ensure that only ticket-buyers attend the sites without destroying the essentially open nature of the walkthrough experience. The truth is that anyone can visit these places if they know where to find them, and anyone who has been there can lead the way.

There is a room at the center of Manhattan - maybe the center of the world - where the floor is made of salt, and you can look out through the big bay windows and see civilization at the height of decadence. This room is a chapel, and like all chapels it is open to the public - we just don't know it yet. Maybe one day there will be a hundred people in that room at once, people from all walks of life, people who do not even know that this is supposed to be art. These people will leave no trace, and no one will ever know for sure how many of us there were. An installation like this must be thought of as part of the city, like a public park or library through which countless strangers pass every day, anonymous and invisible as angels. [Spatz]

 

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