Text by Curator Tali Ben-Nun
Sculptural clusters are on the floor, converging, disassembling, and turning in multiple directions, with no specific center. Some seem like fragments of a dream, an anecdote, a fable, or a riddle. Others look like scenes after an accident or disaster, paved with artifacts that need to be pieced together and deciphered. Together, they make up a wild world of clay sculptures, full of mise-en-scenes and tiny stories – surreal, grotesque, or threatening; a puzzle of ancient myths, archetypal representations, and fragments of thoughts.
Orr Herz's sculpture language is free of eloquence, and in the spirit of Dada, nonsense, and the absurd, it lets go of the rules and plummets outside of the order. Associative, impulsive, colorful, and flowing energetically, like a raw, unformed, perhaps childlike, stream of speech devoid of boundaries. Herz's world is populated by hybrid sculptures combining abstract and figurative geometric and organic shapes, dissolving motifs and references from fairy tales, legends, crafts, kitsch, and animation into themselves.
But the cheerful and naïve colors are deceptive. The sculptures are fraught with provocations that threaten to turn the playful space into a minefield. Many possess a 'trigger' capable of wreaking havoc and turning any sculpture into an accident, a whole thing that has been run over. A pair of giraffes peer out of a car tire; a car reveals its rear in the form of an enormous nose, a gaping mouth, and a long tongue; a tank's chain is a mouth, baring teeth; a truck's cabin discharges a lumpy substance; a turtle lies on its back, with a knife lodged in its stomach; a puffy crinoline skirt adorned with fish scales transforms into a pistol that is a nest of wasps - mechanical animals and animated machines. The sculptures, stuck standing on the floor as if frozen and trapped in some act, face to face, moving against the traffic's direction, sometimes glued together like in a traffic jam, fronts to backs, trying to move forward. The low installation, a sculptural event at road level, also creates movement difficulties for the visitors, demanding attention and vigilance. The gaze is drawn to the floor and pulls the body down in a repeated transition between standing upright and squatting. Visitors are forced to make their way as giants in a garden or as reptiles crawling on their underbellies along and across a low horizon.
Like a negative inversion, a different, formless substance hovers over the sculptural space. A single picture lives between the sculpted, heavy clay creatures that have sunk to the floor and the hall's ceiling, grabbing both planes at once.
Photos: Daniel Hanoch
A two person show with Tamar Hirschfeld, my partner, at Minshar Gallery, Tel aviv. This body of work - that includes paintings, sculptures, sound and video - was created in response to the mute dynamics of ordinary family life that we now share, and the primal-mythological, and creepy imagery that emerges constantly.
Photos: Eyal Agivayev
Compressor Cycle is exhibited at the American Jewish University, Bel Air. Excerpt from the press release:
In late 2018, the wooden Sculpture Holocaust by artist Charles Schlein, moved from the Familian Campus of American Jewish University in Bel Air, to Orr Herz’s studio in South L.A. It is a condensed sculpture, 34 inches high, which requires the viewer to circle around it: one side depicts a bearded face, eyes wide shut, and the other shows a clenched fist and a monstrous cat. For Herz, the gesture of the eyes that cannot engage with the viewer - the gaze we are denied - charts a possible journey of inward looking, of dwelling in a state of distraction.
In a world that prioritizes multi-tasking over singular focus, Herz’s work creates a space outlined by a desire to pull away from the endless stream of tasks, obligations, and pre- determined routes. With its distinct viewing angles, Holocaust is unwittingly possessed by the same forces of multi-tasking, of problematic work ethics, of overachieving, encompassing and performing three-in-one.
The undetermined gaze holds the potential to detach from informed looking and engage in a formalist exploration of matter. In recent years, Herz has been invested in articulating a visual language that removes objects from their functionality and positions them as elements of visual speech. To paraphrase Heidegger’s understanding of the space formed by the work of art, Herz separates objects from their emergence as “equipment,” dividing from their usefulness and availability, or readability, revealing elements of their essence.1 Ready- made materials are joined by glazed, vibrant ceramics, drawings, prints, and words, to coalesce and shape a glance into an alternate experience of the everyday: expanding moments that break from the highway of existence into a sustained state of amused, self-aware being. Herz is seeking unexpected triggers for his growing lexicon of visual gestures and idioms; in Holocaust he found an unexpected ground, or basis, for his work.
In the space of The Project Room, Holocaust is greeted by soft winds, blowing from fans suspended in metal contraptions. They are trapped, locked into an endless state of hovering. One fan faces down upon a soccer ball. Another is pointed directly at the shut eyes of the sculpture. As David Muenzer has observed, while the drawings Herz creates using the software Illustrator shape a virtual vectored space devoid of alterations, his sculptural installations perpetuate traces of changes made to the objects.2 The cables, switches, extension chords, all become part of the corporeal, three-dimensional drawing that is the space, which traverses lines with the curves and twists of mechanical machinery. In this way, the connections between the objects in the space reflect their shared dwelling, their being together. For Herz, such opportunities for creating conversations between familiar objects are immediately subverted by a double trajectory: a detachment from day-to-day functionality that is simultaneously maintained in the form of their function.
