ARTICLES

Representing Tragedy: Orensanz’s Titanic

by Ordoitz Galilea

The Titanic that never arrived to New York
Courtesy ARTSCAPE MAGAZINE

Angel Orensanz works with symbols. His artwork is always open to personal interpretation, always enabling reflection in the observer and allowing multiple meanings. But instead of presenting, as is usually the case in the current arts scene, an oeuvre clear of all symbolism, seeking multiple interpretations through indefinition, Orensanz chooses to incorporate a vast range of symbols in his art pieces, which very often focus in remembering a historically relevant event or figure. His works, frequently produced in the spur of the moment using materials which are discovered in situ, are the embodiment of spontaneity in contemporary art.

His last work, The Titanic that never reached New York, is clear proof of these traits. Based on one of the largest tragedies of the last one hundred years, an incident of immense impact in the collective mind of modern western society, Orensanz commemorates de imminence of the centennial of the famous sinking with a display of flowers and other objects, shaped in the form of a colossal face that stares solemnly at the beholder. The artist completes the piece setting precise parts of the arrangement ablaze. The symbols intertwine in many different levels of meaning, to form a setting in which each observer chooses a specific place. This symbolic depth allows me, in this analysis of The Titanic that Never Reached New York, to explore the symbols built by art, and their repercussion in the collective memory of society.

Concerning symbolism, there is no happening in the entire span of contemporary history as intense as the sinking of Titanic. Built in Belfast, the RMS Titanic was considered right since her origin a symbol of human progress. The biggest and most luxurious passenger ship of her time, her name was chosen to evoke concepts of strength, power and superiority. Her initial voyage, bound for New York City, was publicized with pride by the press all around the world, and her opulence and grandeur left everyone openmouthed. Some people even made the then very long, uncomfortable and above all expensive passage from America to England just to have the honor of making the return journey on board of the Titanic. She was the pride of Britain, and a clear symbol of the indisputable superiority of humankind over the world.

This symbolism turns out to be even more ill-fated due to her tragic sinking in front of the coasts of Newfoundland in the early hours of the morning between April 14th and 15th, 1912. Only four days into her maiden voyage, the collision of an iceberg opened a water leak in the hull, which led to the sinking of the ship in less than two hours and caused the death of 1,517 of the 2,223 people on board. Since that day almost 100 year ago, the Titanic has sustained a considerable amount of interest and notoriety in different parts of modern society. Scholarly studies, news coverage and films (both documentary and fiction), appearing periodically over the last century, made available to the public many aspects of the sinking: from the stories of the survivors to the investigations on the causes of the disaster, these accounts have exalted the ‘Myth of the Titanic’.

The driving force behind his practice seems to be the notion of Territory, developed at the start of the 1970s with Space Media, free-expression territories offered to readers of the press, such as the leading French newspaper, Le Monde, to television viewers and to radio listeners, leading to the artistic M2 in 1977, parcels of land on the French-Swiss border put up for sale by a property company with the help of various media such as Le Monde. He pursued this in 1980 by creating the M2 Territory in Anserville, a Paris suburb, and a self-proclaimed territory independent of France, he subsequently moved to the Internet in 1996 with the Networks Territory, then on to Second Life in 2008 with the Experimental Center of the Territory––an interactive tool of reflection and response to the dysfunctions in our society.

The Titanic that never arrived to New York
Courtesy ARTSCAPE MAGAZINE

But, was the Titanic disaster worthy of its social endurance? As the scholar and author Richard Howells states in his book, the Myth of the Titanic, the disaster was “…an event whose mythical significance has eclipsed its historical importance.” Even though at the time it was the one of the deadliest peace-time maritime disasters in history, the sinking of the Titanic should have been outshined by other equally terrible, deadly or formidable happenings: The famines in Ireland (1845-1852) and Russia (1932-1933), the Great Chicago Fire (1871) or the World War I (1914-1918) are all disasters which are contemporary, and which caused a bigger death toll and more economic loses, than the sinking of the Titanic. The Titanic is, however, the one who has survived in the collective memory of the western world as the epitome of all the great disasters in history. Only months before the sinking, two earthquakes that took place in Valparaiso, Chile and San Francisco, California, jointly resulted in the death of 23,000 people, five times more than the Titanic disaster. But the Titanic is the one that made history.

How to explain, then, such a big imprint in the collective mind? The answer lays not in the incident as such, but in its symbolic ramifications. For many of the passengers who came onboard for her maiden voyage, the Titanic was a symbol for immigration. The long journey that led many millions of people to America, in search for a better life for them and their families, got embodied in the shape of this gigantic, splendid ship which travelled from Southampton and Cherbourg all the way to New York, from the Old Continent to the heart of the New World. The Titanic represented, for many of their contemporaries and for other future generations, the dream of America.

Consequently, her sinking not only had a huge repercussion in the media, but also outlined a terrible reality: the myth of America, which resulted in a social process unprecedented in the history of humankind, never existed. The dreams of millions of people sank with that ship, and the experience of the immigrant lost the innocence, the faith in a better world, that have had before. That is the main motive of the relevance of the myth of the Titanic, of its survival in our minds and our culture as embodiment of disaster. The sinking of the Titanic did not last in our minds by itself, but because of its symbolic connotations.

The Titanic that never arrived to New York
Courtesy ARTSCAPE MAGAZINE

Art is one of the most useful tools for the perpetuation of myths. By capturing an event, they make it perennial to the pass of time and, given the chance, they shape the way people remember it even after a long period of time. The coming generations, when trying to understand a past event, only have the few images that have endured the passage of time. And most of these images are works of art of some kind. Take any event that happened before you were born, and you will realize that the only way to observe that event is through any artistic depiction that has survived. We tend to think that these depictions are objective approximations to the subject, true accounts of the event represented. But the truth is that no work of art is objective. No book tells the exact truth, no painting shows thing as they were, no film is a faithful and accurate depiction of its time. In some cases, the images or points of view presented in art do not only endure, but thrive and grow bigger, changing historic fact for myth.

Representing past events, both pleasant and tragic, has always been one of the main objectives of artistic creation. Not only as a mean to express the artist’s own feelings on the subject, but also as a direct reminder of events and situations of the past. Examples of this appear all over the history of art, from Neolithic cave-paintings to the Guernica.

Of course, every artwork shows a specific point of view in the subject it represents, generally (but not always) expressing the artist’s opinion concerning that subject. But, behind the ideological stance the artist is making, there always is an event or situation, something that the artist wants to capture. That is the true base of art.
The Titanic that never reached New York is, in this aspect, a very interesting artistic dissection of those feeling of disillusionment and doom. The many layers of symbolism and representation tackle the fatal events of that night in a wide range of different details and aspects. As it has already been argued in this work, the symbolism is so rich that every observer finds a different detail that makes the bridge between the thing represented and the ting that represents it, grow stronger.

As a personal interpretation of this fine work, that does not deny any other possible interpretation that others can make, I think the flower disposition in the floor resembles the image of all these souls that disappeared beneath the cold waves of the North Atlantic Ocean, all of them forming a solemn, gigantic, titanic face, which looks like the spirit of that failed migration to a better world.

The Titanic that never arrived to New York
Courtesy ARTSCAPE MAGAZINE