Raphael Montañez Ortiz
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Raphael Montañez Ortiz (born in
Brooklyn, New York Brooklyn is a Boroughs of New York City, borough of New York City located at the westernmost end of Long Island in the New York (state), State of New York. Formerly an independent city, the borough is coextensive with Kings County, one of twelv ...
January 30, 1934) is an American
artist An artist is a person engaged in an activity related to creating art, practicing the arts, or demonstrating the work of art. The most common usage (in both everyday speech and academic discourse) refers to a practitioner in the visual arts o ...
,
educator A teacher, also called a schoolteacher or formally an educator, is a person who helps students to acquire knowledge, competence, or virtue, via the practice of teaching. ''Informally'' the role of teacher may be taken on by anyone (e.g. w ...
, and founder of El Museo del Barrio, in East Harlem, New York City.


Education

Montañez Ortiz graduated from Art and Design High School of New York City, and studied at
Pratt Institute Pratt Institute is a private university with its main campus in Brooklyn, New York. It has an additional campus in Manhattan and an extension campus in Utica, New York at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute. The institute was founded in 18 ...
, where he began as a student of architecture, but later decided instead to become a visual artist, and received his BFA and MFA in 1964. He completed a doctorate in Fine Arts and Fine Arts in Higher Education at Teachers College of Columbia University in 1982.


Artistic career

Montañez Ortiz's works are in the collection of the
Pompidou Centre The Centre Pompidou (), more fully the (), also known as the Pompidou Centre in English and colloquially as Beaubourg, is a building complex in Paris, France. It was designed in the style of high-tech architecture by the architectural team of ...
in
Paris Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, largest city of France. With an estimated population of 2,048,472 residents in January 2025 in an area of more than , Paris is the List of ci ...
and the Ludwig Museum in
Cologne, Germany Cologne ( ; ; ) is the largest city of the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia and the fourth-most populous city of Germany with nearly 1.1 million inhabitants in the city proper and over 3.1 million people in the Cologne Bonn urba ...
,
the Museum of Modern Art The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. MoMA's collection spans the late 19th century to the present, and includes over 200,000 works of arc ...
and the
Whitney Museum of American Art The Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as "The Whitney", is a Modern art, modern and Contemporary art, contemporary American art museum located in the Meatpacking District, Manhattan, Meatpacking District and West Village neighbor ...
, the Everson Museum in
Syracuse, New York Syracuse ( ) is a City (New York), city in and the county seat of Onondaga County, New York, United States. With a population of 148,620 and a Syracuse metropolitan area, metropolitan area of 662,057, it is the fifth-most populated city and 13 ...
, the Chrysler Museum of Art in Virginia, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington D.C. and the
Menil Collection The Menil Collection, located in Houston, Texas, refers either to a museum that houses the art collection of founders John de Menil and Dominique de Menil, or to the collection itself of paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings, photographs a ...
in
Houston, Texas Houston ( ) is the List of cities in Texas by population, most populous city in the U.S. state of Texas and in the Southern United States. Located in Southeast Texas near Galveston Bay and the Gulf of Mexico, it is the county seat, seat of ...
. Ritual, coincidence, duality, transcendence, humanism, performance, gesture, religion and history are some of the subjects that Ortiz has rendered through his works. From early in his career, his artistic practice has reflected an
avant-garde In the arts and literature, the term ''avant-garde'' ( meaning or ) identifies an experimental genre or work of art, and the artist who created it, which usually is aesthetically innovative, whilst initially being ideologically unacceptable ...
element. He worked on the margins of cultural production, creating art from non-art objects, such as domestic items, which he would unmake in a process of deconstruction. While he was interested in avant-garde movements such as
Dada Dada () or Dadaism was an anti-establishment art movement that developed in 1915 in the context of the Great War and the earlier anti-art movement. Early centers for dadaism included Zürich and Berlin. Within a few years, the movement had s ...
and
Fluxus Fluxus was an international, interdisciplinary community of artists, composers, designers, and poets during the 1960s and 1970s who engaged in experimental performance art, art performances which emphasized the artistic process over the finishe ...
, readings in psychology and anthropology influenced him most and acted as the link between his early ''Archaeological Finds'' series and his interest in the perceptions of the unconscious mind. Montañez Ortiz incorporated indigenous elements to the process of deconstruction, underscoring his awareness of indigenous cultural practice and its possibilities as a model for contemporary
aesthetics Aesthetics (also spelled esthetics) is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of beauty and taste (sociology), taste, which in a broad sense incorporates the philosophy of art.Slater, B. H.Aesthetics ''Internet Encyclopedia of Ph ...
. In the creation of his earliest film works from the late 1950s, he hacks a film into pieces while chanting. Placing the pieces into a medicine bag, he then arbitrarily removed each piece and spliced them together in a completely random fashion. In his film work from the early 1980s, the artist used an
Apple computer Apple Inc. is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, in Silicon Valley. It is best known for its consumer electronics, software, and services. Founded in 1976 as Apple Computer Co ...
hooked up to a laser disc player. He scratched the laser disc, creating a stammering image, and a disconnection between time and space. Montañez Ortiz has achieved the highest professorial rank at
Rutgers University Rutgers University ( ), officially Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, is a Public university, public land-grant research university consisting of three campuses in New Jersey. Chartered in 1766, Rutgers was originally called Queen's C ...
, where he has been on the faculty since 1972. He has been teaching at
Mason Gross School of the Arts Mason Gross School of the Arts ("Mason Gross" or "MGSA") is the arts conservatory at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Mason Gross offers undergraduate and graduate degrees in art, design, dance, filmmaking, music, and theater. Ma ...
since its inception.


El Museo del Barrio

During the late 1960s in
East Harlem East Harlem, also known as Spanish Harlem, or , is a neighborhood of Upper Manhattan in New York City, north of the Upper East Side and bounded by 96th Street to the south, Fifth Avenue to the west, and the East and Harlem Rivers to the eas ...
and
Central Harlem Harlem is a neighborhood in Upper Manhattan, New York City. It is bounded roughly by the Hudson River on the west; the Harlem River and 155th Street (Manhattan), 155th Street on the north; Fifth Avenue on the east; and 110th Street (Manhattan ...
, a group of
African-American African Americans, also known as Black Americans and formerly also called Afro-Americans, are an American racial and ethnic group that consists of Americans who have total or partial ancestry from any of the Black racial groups of Africa. ...
and Puerto Rican parents, educators and community activists urged the district that they provide their children an education that addressed their diverse and cultural heritages. Due to these demands, William W. Frey, the superintendent of school district 4, appointed artist/educator Rafael Montañez Ortíz to create materials for schools in
East East is one of the four cardinal directions or points of the compass. It is the opposite direction from west and is the direction from which the Sun rises on the Earth. Etymology As in other languages, the word is formed from the fact that ea ...
and Central
Harlem Harlem is a neighborhood in Upper Manhattan, New York City. It is bounded roughly by the Hudson River on the west; the Harlem River and 155th Street on the north; Fifth Avenue on the east; and Central Park North on the south. The greater ...
that would highlight Puerto Rican art, history, folklore and culture. However, he quickly steered the program towards the creation of a community museum that he named El Museo del Barrio: "The Museo del Barrio is its title: a neighborhood museum of Puerto Rican culture. . ." The word
barrio ''Barrio'' () is a Spanish language, Spanish word that means "Quarter (urban subdivision), quarter" or "neighborhood". In the modern Spanish language, it is generally defined as each area of a city delimited by functional (e.g. residential, comm ...
," meaning neighborhood in Spanish, was what
Puerto Ricans Puerto Ricans (), most commonly known as Puerto Rico#Etymology, Boricuas, but also occasionally referred to as '':es:Anexo:Gentilicios de Puerto Rico#Lista general, Borinqueños'', '':es:Anexo:Gentilicios de Puerto Rico#Lista general, Borincan ...
called
East Harlem East Harlem, also known as Spanish Harlem, or , is a neighborhood of Upper Manhattan in New York City, north of the Upper East Side and bounded by 96th Street to the south, Fifth Avenue to the west, and the East and Harlem Rivers to the eas ...
. In its founding documents, Montañez Ortiz stated that "The cultural disenfranchisement I experience as a Puerto Rican has prompted me to seek a practical alternative to the orthodox museum, which fails to meet my needs for an authentic ethnic experience. To afford me and others the opportunity to establish living connections with our own culture, I founded El Museo del Barrio." He served as director of the institution from when it was founded, June 1969, to Spring 1971.


The Destruction in Art Symposium

In
London London is the Capital city, capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of both England and the United Kingdom, with a population of in . London metropolitan area, Its wider metropolitan area is the largest in Wester ...
, 1966, a group of artists like
Yoko Ono Yoko Ono (, usually spelled in katakana as ; born February 18, 1933) is a Japanese multimedia artist, singer, songwriter, and peace activist. Her work also encompasses performance art and filmmaking. Ono grew up in Tokyo and moved to New York ...
,
Wolf Vostell Wolf Vostell (14 October 1932 – 3 April 1998) was a German painter and sculptor, considered one of the early adopters of video art and installation art and pioneer of Happenings and Fluxus. Techniques such as blurring and Dé-coll/age are ...
, Peter Weibel and
Al Hansen Alfred Earl "Al" Hansen (5 October 1927 – 20 June 1995) was an American artist. He was a member of Fluxus, a movement that originated on an artists' collective around George Maciunas. He was the father of Andy Warhol protégé Bibbe Ha ...
came together to participate in the first
Destruction in Art Symposium The Destruction in Art Symposium (a.k.a. DIAS) was a gathering of a diverse group of international artists, poets, and scientists to London from 9–12 September, 1966. Included in this number were representatives of Fluxus and other counter-cult ...
(''DIAS'') led by
Gustav Metzger Gustav Metzger (10 April 1926, Nuremberg – 1 March 2017, London) was a statelessness, stateless artist and political activist who developed the concept of Auto-Destructive Art and the Art Strike. Together with John Sharkey, he initiated the ...
. According to the event's press release, the principal objective of DIAS was “to focus attention on the element of destruction in Happenings and other art forms, and to relate this destruction in society. Events were scheduled to occur throughout London. During the course of the symposium, Montañez Ortiz performed a series of seven public destruction events, including his piano destruction concerts, which were filmed by both
American Broadcasting Company The American Broadcasting Company (ABC) is an American Commercial broadcasting, commercial broadcast Television broadcaster, television and radio Radio network, network that serves as the flagship property of the Disney Entertainment division ...
and the
BBC The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is a British public service broadcaster headquartered at Broadcasting House in London, England. Originally established in 1922 as the British Broadcasting Company, it evolved into its current sta ...
. Two years later,
New York City New York, often called New York City (NYC), is the most populous city in the United States, located at the southern tip of New York State on one of the world's largest natural harbors. The city comprises five boroughs, each coextensive w ...
hosted the second Destruction in Art Symposium at
Judson Church The Judson Memorial Church is located on Washington Square South between Thompson Street and Sullivan Street, near Gould Plaza, opposite Washington Square Park, in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of the New York City borough of Manhattan ...
in
Greenwich Village Greenwich Village, or simply the Village, is a neighborhood on the west side of Lower Manhattan in New York City, bounded by 14th Street (Manhattan), 14th Street to the north, Broadway (Manhattan), Broadway to the east, Houston Street to the s ...
. The artists who gathered around this art movement and its development were opposed to the senseless destruction of human life and landscapes engendered by the Vietnam war.
Kristine Stiles Kristine Stiles (born Kristine Elaine Dolan in Denver, Colorado, 1947) is the France Family Distinguished Professor of Art, Art History and Visual Studies at Duke University. She is an art historian, curator, and artist specializing in global cont ...
, Professor of Art History at
Duke University Duke University is a Private university, private research university in Durham, North Carolina, United States. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present-day city of Trinity, North Carolina, Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1 ...
, described the destruction art movement as follows: "Destruction art bears witness to the tenuous conditionality of survival; it is the visual discourse of the survivor. It is the only attempt in the visual arts to grapple seriously with the technology and psycho-dynamics of actual and virtual extinction, one of the few cultural practices to redress the general absence of discussion about destruction in society." This interest in the discussion about destruction in society is crucial to understanding the anger and violence implied by some of the artist's works. Destroying functional objects such as beds, sofas, and chairs or appropriating objects that refer to the human body, such as shoes, was the way in which Montañez Ortiz expressed the fragility of human life and his frustration with its senseless destruction. He burned, cut, ripped, gouged, and generally wreaked havoc on domestic objects to bring attention to humanity's vulnerability. He continued to use destruction in his works and performances until around 1970.


Performances and Piano Deconstructions

Since his 1966 ''Burst Your Paper Bags'' audience participation concert held in London's
Conway Hall Conway Hall in Red Lion Square, London, is the headquarters of the Conway Hall Ethical Society. It is a Grade II listed building. History The building was commissioned by the South Place Ethical Society, which had previously been accommodated ...
, Montañez Ortiz has continued to organize performances in which audiences actively participate both physically and psychologically. In 1979, after nearly four years of study with psychics, yoga masters and naturopathic healers, Montañez Ortiz invented an inner performance process he named Physio-Psycho-Alchemy. He described these performances as “inner visioning,” inspired largely by dream imagery, symbols and processes. He noted: “The dream is a transformative process during which distortions, displacement and condensations occur. Its most essential aspect is its sense of reality.” These ''Physio-Psycho-Alchemy'' events encouraged participants to lie quietly in various positions as Montañez Ortiz gave instructions to begin the inner visioning process. For Montañez Ortiz, the body, as it was used in these performances, was the site of a meaningful connection between the mind, body and spirit. During this period, Ortiz also continued to create avant-garde video work. In his film work from the early 1980s, Montañez Ortiz used an
Apple An apple is a round, edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus'' spp.). Fruit trees of the orchard or domestic apple (''Malus domestica''), the most widely grown in the genus, are agriculture, cultivated worldwide. The tree originated ...
computer hooked up to a laser disc player. He scratched the laser disc, creating a stammering image and a disconnection between time and space. While Montañez Ortiz was no longer actively creating destructive art, he was still asked to perform piano destructions throughout Europe and the United States in the 1980s and 1990s and was sometimes even asked to do private commissions. In 1988, Ortiz was honored with a retrospective exhibition at El Museo del Barrio, ''Rafael Montañez Ortiz: Years of the Warrior, Years of the Psyche, 1960-1988''. During the exhibition, he performed a dual piano destruction, ''Homage: Duet to ichardHuelsenbeck'', which called for active audience participation in the destruction of the second piano. This homage performance underscored the mutual admiration that both men had for one another's work. In 1963,
Richard Huelsenbeck Carl Wilhelm Richard Hülsenbeck (aka Charles R. Hulbeck) (23 April 189220 April 1974) was a German writer, poet, and psychoanalyst born in Frankenau, Hessen-Nassau who was associated with the formation of the Dada movement. Life and work Afte ...
had written: “Ralph Ortiz... is fascinated by things that are not or are not yet... when Ortiz wants to show us a mattress, he does not show a mattress but an object that is torn up by indefinable forces as they worked in time. What really plays an important role is the artist’s thought of the man behind the mattress who has to fight his way through the jungle of his existence.” Montañez Ortiz's most recent projects continue to focus on participatory artworks, many evoking new ways to combat the inhumanity of the world. His ''Virtual Presence Video Interactive Installation'' instructions encourage participants to give a fellow human being a virtual hug via digital technology. Montañez Ortiz's lifelong fascination for technology and avant-garde aesthetics led to his most recent body of two-dimensional works, which he refers to as digital paintings. These works were created entirely on a computer and are printed on vinyl. He adapts industrial materials and high technology to his concept of painting, creating images that are based on pre-Hispanic designs, Renaissance imagery, historical documents, and diagrams. Influenced by texts about the radical origins of Christianity, the history of human existence and evolution, the various names for God, secret societies, and the history of the relationship among world religions, Montañez Ortiz has created a number of large-scale vinyl works that combine form, image, text and symbols. Perhaps his longest running series of performance works, the piano destruction events now total well over 80 performances in museums and galleries around the world, including New York,
Los Angeles Los Angeles, often referred to by its initials L.A., is the List of municipalities in California, most populous city in the U.S. state of California, and the commercial, Financial District, Los Angeles, financial, and Culture of Los Angeles, ...
,
Cleveland Cleveland is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio and the county seat of Cuyahoga County. Located along the southern shore of Lake Erie, it is situated across the Canada–U.S. maritime border and approximately west of the Ohio-Pennsylvania st ...
,
San Francisco San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is a commercial, Financial District, San Francisco, financial, and Culture of San Francisco, cultural center of Northern California. With a population of 827,526 residents as of ...
,
Austria Austria, formally the Republic of Austria, is a landlocked country in Central Europe, lying in the Eastern Alps. It is a federation of nine Federal states of Austria, states, of which the capital Vienna is the List of largest cities in Aust ...
,
Canada Canada is a country in North America. Its Provinces and territories of Canada, ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, making it the world's List of coun ...
,
Germany Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It lies between the Baltic Sea and the North Sea to the north and the Alps to the south. Its sixteen States of Germany, constituent states have a total popu ...
, and
Italy Italy, officially the Italian Republic, is a country in Southern Europe, Southern and Western Europe, Western Europe. It consists of Italian Peninsula, a peninsula that extends into the Mediterranean Sea, with the Alps on its northern land b ...
. No longer merely destroyed pianos, his piano sculptures are in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the
Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA) is a contemporary art museum with two locations in greater Los Angeles, California. The main branch is located on Grand Avenue in Downtown Los Angeles, near the Walt Disney Concert Hall. MOCA's ori ...
. Throughout his career, Montañez Ortiz assessed the symbolic meaning of his actions as a destruction artist and his engaged political position. He noted: "There are today throughout the world a handful of artists working in a way, which is truly unique in art history. Theirs is an art which separates the makers from the unmakers, the assemblers from the disassemblers, the constructors from the destructors. These artists are destroyers, materialists, and sensualists dealing with process directly. These artists are destructivists and do not pretend to play at God’s happy game of creation; on the contrary, theirs is a response to the pervading will to kill. It is not the trauma of birth which concerns the destructivist. He understands that there is no need for magic in living. It is one’s sense of death which needs the life-giving nourishment of transcendental ritual." Montañez Ortiz wrote this in his influential ''Destructivist Manifesto'' in 1962. It was only the beginning of a series of writings in which he would illuminate and develop his ideas about creating an art that was simultaneously avant-garde and politically, historically, and socially engaged. His warning against aggressive destructive urges is particularly relevant for our times, evoking war, genocide, exploitation and other consequences of human actions. Rather than evoking hopelessness and dread, however, Montañez Ortiz directs our attention to the link between the history of art, human development, ritual and inner relationships of the mind, body and spirit. Recalling historic practices of indigenous peoples, he offers his modern rituals as events through which to experience connections with the authentic self and others.


References


Further reading

* 1. Kristine Stiles, Ph.D. “Rafael Montañez Ortiz,” Rafael Montañez Ortiz: Years of the Warrior, Years of the Psyche, 1960-1988, New York: El Museo del Barrio, 1988: 30. * 2. “Destruction in Art Symposium,” Art & The 60s: This was Tomorrow, Tate Britain, 1/2/07; www.tate.org * 3. Kristine Stiles, Ph.D., “Selected Comments on Destruction Art,” Book for Unstable Media (V2_Publishing, Hertogenbosch, Netherlands: V2-Organization, 1992) * 4. Kristine Stiles, p. 14. * 5. Richard Huelsenbeck, unpublished text, signed and dated 1963. Archives of Raphael Montañez Ortiz. * 6. “Destructivism: A Manifesto by Rafael Montañez Ortiz,” 1962, unpublished, reprinted in Rafael Montañez Ortiz: Years of the Warrior, Years of the Psyche, 1960-1988, New York: El Museo del Barrio, 1988: 52.


Bibliography

* Dossier focused on Raphael Montañez Ortiz by Chon Noriega, César Ustarroz and Jesse Lerner (César Ustarroz, ed.), in ''Found Footage Magazine'', issue#6, 2020. ISSN 2462-2885. * Kristine Stiles, ''Rafael Montañez Ortiz: Years of the Warrior, Years of the Psyche, 1960-1988.'' New York: El Museo del Barrio, 1988. * Rocío Aranda-Alvarado, Chon Noriega, and Yasmin Ramirez, ''Unmaking: The Work of Raphael Montañez Ortiz'' (Jersey City: Jersey City Museum), 2006. http://centropr.hunter.cuny.edu/sites/default/files/Interview%20with%20Ortiz.pdf * Thomas Dreher, "Raphael Montanez Ortiz: Destruktionskunst in selbstinstituierender Gesellschaft", ''neue bildende kunst'' (Februar-März 1998): 56-63 (in German). URL: http://dreher.netzliteratur.net/2_Performance_Ortiz_Text.html . * Scott MacDonald, "Media Destructionism: The Digital/Laser/Videos of Raphael Montañez Oritz" in Chon Noriega and Ana Lopez, eds., ''The Ethnic Eye: Latino Media Arts'' (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996): 183-207. * Scott MacDonald, "Raphael Montañez Ortiz," ''A Critica Cinema 3: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers'' (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). * Raphael Montañez Ortiz, ''Towards and Authenticating Art,'' Doctoral Thesis, Columbia University, 1982. * Raphael Montañez Ortiz, "Culture and the People," ''Art in America'' (May–June 1971): 27. * ''Rafael Montañez Ortiz, Years of the Warrior, Years of the Psyche, 1960-1988'' (New York: El Museo del Barrio, 1988). * Robert C. Morgan, "The Destructivism of Raphael Montañez Ortiz," ''Review Art'' (January 15, 1997): 31-32. * Chon Noriega and Matthew Yokobosky, Raphael Montañez Ortiz: Early Destruction, 1957-1967 xhibition brochure(New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1996). * Chon Noriega, "Sacred Contingencies: The Digital Reconstructions of Raphael Montañez Ortiz, video artist" ''Art Journal'' (December 1995); listed on Find Articles website at http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0425/is_n4_v54/ai_17838389. * Jacinto Quirarte, ''Mexican American Artists'' (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1973: 99-101. * Gunnar Schmidt: ''Klavierzerstörungen in Kunst und Popkultur.'' Reimer Verlag, Berlin 2012. .


External links


El Museo
Official Site {{DEFAULTSORT:Montanez Ortiz, Raphael American performance artists Living people 1934 births Museum founders Musicians from Brooklyn Artists from New York City Pratt Institute alumni Teachers College, Columbia University alumni Hispanic and Latino American artists