To Make The Museum You Must Destroy It

Raphael Montañez Ortiz and El Museo Del Barrio

The concert begins with a piano. The piano might be black or brown or, in one instance, green. It’s never situated on a stage, rather in the middle of the room where the audience can see the instrument from all sides. The performance begins. A man in a suit approaches, raises his arms as if he is about to play then brings an axe down onto the piano’s ivory keys.

You can find recordings of the various iterations of Raphael Montañez Ortiz’s piano destruction concerts on Youtube, sometimes filmed in an official capacity by museums other times by perplexed onlookers through their camera phones. The act of watching these performances doesn’t get any less jarring with each viewing; that cacophonous clang of ivory sending ripping reverberations through the piano’s splintering wood and shredded metal strings. In El Museo Del Barrio’s exhibition, Raphael Montañez Ortiz: A Contextual Retrospective, we see not only documentation of Oritz’s destructive showmanship in the moment but its ruinous aftermath: dismembered skeletal frames and leftover fragments of wood mounted on the floor and walls of the museum’s galleries. 

Photo via Mousse Magazine

Raphael Ortiz built his career on destruction. He made his early films (also presented here) by chopping up romantic scenes from Hollywood movies and repurposing footage from old Westerns. Ortiz would dismantle other furniture like couches, mattresses, and chairs, too, and reassemble them into sculptures as part of his Archeological Finds series. In the 1970s, he led guerilla performances that terrorized downtown residents. A New York Post clipping elicited a few chuckles from fellow visitors: “At NYU a frightened mother flees with her baby from a ‘guerrilla theater’ reenactment of the Kent State Massacre, complete with students drenched in slaughterhouse blood.” He led meditative rituals in the form of explosive in-gallery performances. One at Cornell College was punctuated by Ortiz repeatedly yelling “peace” as participants wrestled with each other and another resulted in his collaborators drenched in blood collected from slaughterhouses. 

Part of the Destructivist movement of the 1960s, Ortiz involved himself in shock-inducing happenings alongside artists like Yoko Ono in the Destruction in Art Symposium of 1966. While some artists produced these violent, divisive works for controversy’s sake, Ortiz took an interest in the revolutionary potential of these acts. The ’60s and ‘70s saw more and more Latin-American artists (American-born and not) reacting to socioeconomic and political violences at home and abroad: U.S.-backed violence across Central and South America, the Vietnam War and anti-war protests, the violent policing of Black and Brown communities who were responding to systemic racism and institutional failures through ongoing civil rights movements and direct action led by organizations like the Young Lords and the Black Panthers.