Raphael Montañez Ortiz: Una retrospectiva contextual
Raphael Montañez Ortiz: Una retrospectiva contextual
Aesthetic Material Available
15 OCT 2022 - 02 ABR 2023
Curated by: Julieta González y Rodrigo Moura
Curated by: Julieta González y Rodrigo Moura
→ Rooms 3 and 4
¡HOY!
Radical gestures are at the core of Raphael Montañez Ortiz’s (New York, 1934) life and work. Radical gestures that propose destruction in art as an antidote to the hegemonic narrative of Eurocentrism, capitalism, and progress. Radical gestures that seek out the healing potential in art and the return to ancestral and Indigenous forms of knowledge.
This exhibition presents sixty-five years of the artist’s trajectory, including his radical gesture of founding El Museo del Barrio in 1969, the institution in charge of organizing Raphael Montañez Ortiz: A Contextual Retrospective. The artist’s formative years working in New York and his activism for the Puerto Rican community offer a starting point for the exhibition’s narrative, preceding his eventual relocation to New Jersey where he expanded his philosophical thinking, became a mentoring professor to new generations at Rutgers University, and continued to experiment with new media.
In his PhD thesis defended in 1982, Montañez Ortiz elaborated on the notion of “authenticating art” as the conceptual framework for his production. This singular concept takes on a range of interconnected meanings in his practice and includes the healing potential of imagination, the communion between physiological and psychological processes, and a multiethnic approach that, in the artist’s particular case, deals with his personal history and diverse background.
Taking the cue from anthropologist Edward Sapir’s 1924 essay “Culture, Genuine and Spurious,” Montañez Ortiz uses the term “authenticating” as one that is characteristic of ancestral cultures, whereas the “spurious” resides in the alienation brought about by modern industrialization and consumer culture. In this sense, his thinking and artistic practice can be read as a dialectic between the authenticating and the spurious, which in turn organizes the thematic sections in the exhibition and informs the contextual relations between Montañez Ortiz and his peers, working not only in New York, but in other parts of the world as well.
Today, we witness a post-Cartesian turn in fields such as art, philosophy, and anthropology. This new moment encourages us to reembrace magical thinking, animism, and a symbiotic relation to nature in order to counteract the potentially lethal effects of unfettered “progress,” its concomitant destruction of our environment, and the convivial relation between humans and other species. In this context, a revision of Raphael Montañez Ortiz’s work is more relevant and necessary than ever.
* This exhibition was organized by El Museo del Barrio, Nueva York
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ARCHAELOGICAL FINDS
The Archaeological Finds are among Montañez Ortiz’s most important bodies of work and are central to his aesthetics. Executed between 1961 and 1965, they are the direct result of his physical interaction destroying objects during performative actions. These works push the notion of a finished, autonomous art object, towards a more porous definition of temporality. This idea is implied in the term “archaeological,” that both allude to the excavatory actions to which the objects have been subjected to, as well as the idea of ruins that they evoke. The mattresses, sofas, and chairs presented here also reference domestic contexts and the human body. By destroying them, the artist believes to be releasing the spirits of objects—and, by extension, their users—from their actual physical matter. In a recent interview, Montañez Ortiz related this ritualistic and mystical reading of his practice to his experience playing among the streets and empty lots of New York’s Lower East Side, where he was also exposed to different religious cultures, from Judaic-Christian traditions in the neighborhood’s temples and churches, to the Caribbean syncretic traditions in his own household: “We’d climb over the fences, jump up and down on the couches, tear them apart, throw rocks at the windows, see how many windows we could break with the idea that with every window you broke, you released an angel. So, there’s always this mystical background for me.
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DESTRUCTION AND FILM
In 1957, Montañez Ortiz chopped a 16 mm film of a Hollywood Western movie into pieces using a tomahawk, a type of axe native to several Indigenous groups of North America. He then placed the fragments into a medicine bag, randomly selecting and recomposing them together, backwards and upside down, while chanting a “Native American war cry.” The resulting work, Cowboy and “Indian” Film is shown in this projection, together with two other films from the late 1950s, News Reel and Golf, in which the artist intervened found footage using radical gestures to deconstruct and challenge our perception of moving images in society. Besides these films, the exhibition presents pieces where he expands on the manipulation of space and time, experimenting with the grid, repetition of elements, found objects, and combustion. While these formal explorations belong to larger art historical narratives, including Dada’s cut-up techniques, assemblage aesthetics, and Abstract Expressionism’s debates around the pictorial plane, they also relate destruction to broader historical and political contexts. Further along on this same wall, works by other artists promote a dialogue between Montañez Ortiz and destructive practices in different parts of the world.
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PIANO DESTRUCTION
Performance has been at the center of Montañez Ortiz’s artistic project since his Archaeological Finds series, as documented in the original images of these works. Beginning with his prominent participation in the 1966 Destruction in Art Symposium (DIAS), an interdisciplinary gathering led by artist Gustav Metzger in London, Montañez Ortiz’s public performances grew in importance. His Chair Dis-Assemblage and Piano Destruction Concert are from this pivotal moment: through these pieces, his work becomes more and more intertwined with his own image, which also led to a growing mass media presence through television broadcast appearances. Since then, the artist has conducted hundreds of performances in the United States, Europe, and Latin America, on the stage and in exhibition spaces, and taking on various personas, from entertainer to shaman. Montañez Ortiz performs these actions like rituals, and with his destructive gestures often aimed at the piano, explores the instrument’s sonic potential and strong association with Western ideals of high culture. In earlier works, animal sacrifice was also integral to the performances, reflecting the artist’s interest in animism.
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DECOLONIZATION/GUERRILLA TACTICS
Montañez Ortiz’s self-perception of his mixed identity—born in New York of Puerto Rican, Mexican, and Native-American heritage—is at the foundation of his decolonial agenda, particularly considering Puerto Rico’s colonial relation with the U.S. For him, Latinos had been “cut off from their authentic artistic roots, disenfranchised by class and racial bigotry.” “Authenticating art,” a term he coined, would thus “unshackle their minds from patriarchal Eurocentrism” and become a means of emancipation from the colonial condition. These imperatives guided the original concept of El Museo del Barrio, an institution that Montañez Ortiz founded in 1969 in New York for the city’s Puertorrican population. This was an artistic, pedagogical, and community endeavor sustained by a conception of culture that affirmed difference as a cultural resource. This section of the exhibition highlights this foundational gesture, as well as Montañez Ortiz’s involvement in the Art Workers’ Coalition, Judson Publications, and the Guerrilla Art Action Group, alongside material from other organizations in the New York Puerto Rican diasporic community, including the Taller Boricua and the Young Lords. Like the work of many of his peers at the time, Montañez Ortiz’s practice was informed by decolonial struggles such as the anti-Vietnam War movement and solidarity with the then-called Third World, leading to the engagement with “guerrilla tactics'' in his performative works.
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ETHNOAESTHETICS: UNSETTLED OBJECTS
In his PhD thesis, Montañez Ortiz defines the notion of Ethnoaesthetics as a strategy of resistance to the “spurious” or inauthentic nature of Western consumer culture. This concept is also understood as a decolonial strategy, a return to art’s “complex of prehistoric and historic root cultures” and to nature, which in ancient cultures was considered as an ally and an essential element of cohesion in the community. Following the colonial order and the genocide of native populations in the Americas, art made by Indigenous peoples was consigned to the ethnographic museum, where it was otherized and considered minor, worthy of study only as a manifestation of so-called “primitive cultures.” By challenging these notions and approaching the philosophical framework of these cultures—that is, the integration of art and myth—Montañez Ortiz’s work in this section refers to his own ethnic background (Mexican and Puerto Rican). These are in dialogue with the practice other artists presented here who equally contribute to the destabilization of Western art historical narratives. Also on display, holdings from El Museo del Barrio’s Taíno collection point to the museum’s core mission of connecting the Caribbean diaspora with its cultural background, something outlined in Montañez Ortiz’s early vision for the institution.
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Physio-Pyscho-Alchemy is one of Montanez Ortiz’s main contributions to contemporary art. This concept runs through several decades of his pro- duction, and in the 1980s resulted in performative works that relied on shamanic healing. Meditation, breathing, rituals, and the dream (psychoanalysis), as well as what Montañez Ortiz described as Ethnoaesthetics, constitute the underpinnings of this approach to art making. Documentation of several of these performative and participatory works span a vast chronology and occupy a wall in this gallery. Also on display is an example of the artist’s more recent large-scale assemblages, where he deconstructs model houses purchased online. Denoting a psychoanalytic inflection and a particular interest in domestic contexts, this work refers to his early Archaeological Finds. Works by artists María Teresa Hincapié and Laura Anderson Barbata address these notions from different perspectives—from a cathartic unleashing of the power of domestic objects, to the recuperation of ancestral myths through a collective process as a form of healing for a Yanomami community that has been imperiled by the extractive exploitation of their ancestral lands.
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VIDEO-TRANCE
The ideas that informed the conceptualization of Physio-Psycho-Alchemy run throughout Montañez Ortiz’s production, starting in the late 1950s when he subjected footage from films to a sacrificial ritual, splicing the random fragments to create other films born of that cathartic experience. Renewal by ritual destruction would become a recurrent field of experimentation for him, resulting in sculptural, installation, and performative works. In the 1980s he took his early experiences with film to the domain of laser-disc video technology, working with the idea of scratching as a virtual gesture enabled by an electronic joystick. The ritual of chopping, chanting, and dancing to “release the evil” from the found film footage in his early work was translated in his later videos to a manipulation of sound and image that could potentially provoke a trance-like state in the viewer. “You are constantly re-experiencing it, but not from the same perspective. It’s as if you are constantly shifting around. It shifts around time and space in a way that is constantly revealing something new, with a sound structure that is deceiving,” as stated by the artist.
