The project 'A Collection of Angels' was realized in New York in 1980 and
found its conceptual coherence exclusively in the imagination of the
participants and in the concluding book publication. It is a prime example of
the relinquishment of the expression of the individually imprinted state in
favor of a reference to cultural context: the communications-network of people
constituted by aesthetic marking and not summarized in the aesthetic coding of
an existential state:
Temmel stamped angels' wings on the backs of 71 participants - Japanese,
English, Swiss, Icelanders, Puertoricans... who did not know each other. A
person's back is a part of the body that is never directly visible to the
person himself. With the knowledge of being a part of an art project, these
marked persons evolved, as the project progressed, into a globally linked
human network, a human sculpture.