On Edge: Performance at the End of the Twentieth Century

An Artist Retreats from Rage

• • • An Artist Retreats from Rage R eadjust the knobs on the twentieth century, and you can re-tune history so the avant-gardists were headed toward "multiculturalism " all along. Rafael Montanez Ortiz sees the re-emergence of animism and ceremony and shamanism all down the great chain of isms. At least, that's his reading of Dada rituals, Duchampian found objects, and Cageian "chance operations." They may be highlights from the Western avant-garde, says Ortiz, but native cultures were using them thousands of years ago. Our art, their religion-or everyday life. Ortiz has organized "Art and the Invisible Reality," an ambitious series of performances and panels convening next week at Franklin Furnace and at Rutgers University, where he teaches. The object is to bring native culture practitioners together with contemporary artists who, if not overtly "spiritual," use art to change their lives. Back in the sixties, when he was known as Ralph Ortiz, he never used words like shamanism to describe his performances-in which he chopped up pianos or killed chickens and mice. Destruction Art was a bohemian companion to Minimalism and Conceptualism: all of them aimed at paring down if not eliminating the object. For Ortiz, it was something more. In 1962, he wrote an angry manifesto about transcendence through sacrifice, about destruction rituals connecting him to "deep unconscious life." Poor and Puerto Rican (Ortiz would later found EI Museo del Barrio), he was an outsider struggling with "all the contradictions of my childhood, growing up in a patriarchal structure , within a racist society." The destruction events were cathartic. In The Life and Death of Henny Penny (1967), Ortiz crawled out from beneath the voluminous dress of a woman collaborator, "newborn" and holding a live chicken. Snarling out "Daddy" over and over, he An Artist Retreats from Rage 181 strung the chicken up by its feet, and swung it out over the audience. He stood ready with shears, and as it swung back, he snipped its head off. He then beat a flamenco guitar with the chicken carcass till he'd smashed it. In one other event that year, he destroyed both a chicken and a piano. During subsequent rituals, audience members intervened to rescue the chickens he intended to sacrifice-an act Ortiz accepted. "You have to understand my whole experience," he explains. "I grew up summers on farms and I used to help with catching the chickens and slaughtering. As an adolescent I worked in a chicken slaughterhouse . For me, this is no awesome thing." Nor was destruction uncommon in the art of the sixties. By the end of the decade, all such work was politically charged, half-lit with daily doses of Vietnam war footage. In one Ortiz performance, mice with number tags were drafted into a "war zone" full of mousetraps. Again, some spectators ran rescue missions. The killing had to do with facing reality, Ortiz says. He wanted to sensitize people. As for the shattered pianos, Ortiz describes their demise in retrospect as a "giving back to nature-releasing the spirits that were bound up in this logical rational construct called 'piano.'" Last spring, he recreated a Piano-Destruct "concert" at the Alternative Museum. The ruined upright then sat in the corner as an installation piecestrings propped against splintered keyboard. Musical instruments seem to have a life, because they play, and so they seem to have a death. It was a sad thing to see. Ortiz did a piece called Self-Destruction at the 1966 Destruction in Art Symposium, in London. As critic Kristine Stiles described it: "Ortiz ripped his suit to reveal himself dressed in diapers. Whining, screaming , cajoling, and desperately calling, 'Mamma, Ma Ma Ma Ma' and 'Pappa, Pa Pa,' he banged a rubber duck and drank enormous quantities of milk from bottles until he vomited on the stage, bringing his psychic Oedipal drama to an end." While many in the audience were disgusted, Ortiz's piece wasn't unique in cultivating taboo material. At the same symposium, Yoko Ono did Cut Piece, sitting passively while audience members snipped her clothes off with a scissors. And Austrian artist Hermann Nitsch disemboweled the carcass of a lamb, scattered innards and gore around the room, and projected a film of male genitals onto the dead animal. Symposium organizers eventually went on trial at the Old Bailey for that one. 182 REGENERATE ART In the sixties and seventies, as artists...