The Neighborhood Museum has had their own internal struggles, on whether to focus on her Nuyorican roots or represent the Latin American diaspora more broadly. But āRaphael MontaƱez Ortiz: A Contextual Retrospectiveā shows that, at best, he can do both. The ambitious exhibition shines a spotlight on the museum’s founder, who continues to do radical and compelling work at the age of 88. With this show, MontaƱez Ortiz’s legacy must be cemented both for his art and for the museum he started.
As I walked through the exhibition, I thought of the recent protests: environmentalists in London sticking to artwork on continued extraction of fossil fuels, or last year 10-week campaignāStrike MoMA,ā which claimed to link the board members’ activities to war, the prison system, environmental degradation, patriarchal violence, and more.
The El Museo exhibit is in part a timely response to this ongoing turmoil in the world of art museums. But it’s also a reminder that all of this isn’t exactly new. In the glass case in front of him was a photo taken by Jan van Raay on May 2, 1970. documenting a protest outside the Museum of Modern Art. Signs emerging from the crowd read: “Black and Puerto Rican Art Must Be Here” and “Museum of Racism.”
Another, a May 6, 1970 news clipping from The New York Post, features a photo of an alarmed mother pulling a bassinet away from a tangle of New York University students, some of whom appear to be covered in blood. The headline, “On Campus: No Truce at All,” reveals the scene to be a guerrilla theatrical re-enactment of the Kent State massacre, days earlier, when four unarmed students protesting the Vietnam War were shot to death by the soldiers. Ohio National Guard.
MontaƱez Ortiz instigated that action and, with Joan MacIntosh and Richard Schechner of the Performance Group (forerunner of the Wooster Group), recruited the collaborating students. Attached to the press clipping were MontaƱez Ortiz’s typed instructions for his “Survival Manual for the Guerrilla Theater of Blood and Flesh” (1968), detailing how to obtain animal blood from butcher shops.
As the subtitle indicates, this is āA Contextual Retrospectiveā that places MontaƱez Ortiz, sculptor, performance artist, and film and video artist, inside history, among peers, both lesser-known names and boldface names as varied as Gordon Matta. -Clark, Ana Mendieta, Faith Ringgold and Herman Nitsch āand in his role as founder of El Museo del Barrio. The museum-wide exhibit on this little-known artist, who has taught art at Rutgers for more than 50 years, is divided into four sections: “Destruction,” “Decolonization and Guerrilla Tactics” (including the photo, cutout, and the manual), “Ethnoestheticsā and āPhysio-Psycho-Alchemyā.
The spectacle of destruction dominates the early period of the Brooklyn-born artist. For the 1957-58 experimental short “Golf,” he punctured an original film on the title theme, corrupting the sound and flooding the frame with white circles, as if the film were being attacked by golf balls.
In 1958’s āCowboys and ‘Indians,’ā āāMontaƱez Ortiz, who identifies as of Puerto Rican, Mexican, and Native American descent, employs similar Dadaist tactics to make more incisive political and personal work.
Using a tomahawk, he randomly cut a western film and then mixed the fragments together in a medicine bag before stitching the film back together, creating a shamanic remix, with pieces projected backwards and forwards, chaotically exposing the mixture of sentimentality and violence. which constitutes gender.
The destruction continues in a room filled with what the artist calls his āarchaeological findsā: burned or destroyed mattresses, sofas and chairs turned into wall-mounted sculptures. Dating from 1961 to 1965, they were made around the same time John Chamberlain was making his colorful wrecked car sculptures (and years before Chamberlain began carving functional sofas out of foam blocks with a knife). On the wall, in their brown and ashen tones, they anticipate Nari Ward’s found object sculptural installations.
MontaƱez Ortiz’s undoing process often emphasizes acting on a finished (or destroyed) object. The best performance documentation in the exhibition is a video recording of his “Piano Destruction Concert: Humpty Dumpty Had a Big Downfall,” recorded live at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1996. He is accompanied by his wife, Monique Ortiz-Arndt, in peasant dress, operatically singing the part of Humpty Dumpty atop a ladder. MontaƱez Ortiz provides the main musical accompaniment as he takes an ax against a piano, at one moment scraping the exposed inner strings with his blade and the next rhythmically slicing through the piano’s structure, creating a performance both dramatic and surprisingly musical. By dissecting a piano in the space of an American art museum, MontaƱez Ortiz appears to be stripping away the stifling, codified ideals of Western high culture.
Not everything is destruction. The exhibition’s curators, Rodrigo Moura and Julieta GonzĆ”lez, chose to display MontaƱez Ortiz’s work alongside a diverse range of other artists, creating accumulations and dialogues that magnify the importance of any particular object. Take, for example, two pyramidal sculptures covered in bright feathers, “Maya Zemi I” and “Maya Zemi II” (both 1975), which rest on a table-like plinth, surrounded by an eclectic yet energizing mix of works by other artists.
A zemi is a sculpture that contains a spirit, in the tradition of the TaĆnos, the indigenous people of Puerto Rico. A display case of pre-Columbian Taino artifacts, all different forms of axes, rests nearby. But so does a wonderful triptych, āBird Transformationā (1972), of photographs by the Cuban-born American artist Ana Mendieta; she has covered the body of a model with white feathers that is bathed in a changing light. A slide show, “Unstable Objects” (1968-69) by German artist Lothar Baumgarten, consisting of 80 images from the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, England, is played across the room. The slides are overprinted with texts by the artists themselves, who criticize the colonizing role of anthropologists and archaeologists. Notably, that museum it no longer exhibits human remains, such as its famous collection of Shuar shrunken heads (tsantsa).
The featured work in the show, “The Monument to the Sadistic Holocaust Destruction of Millions of Our Ancient Arawak-Taino-Latinx Ancestors…” (2019-20), is also one of the artist’s most recent. Like an enlarged Joseph Cornell box, the set transforms thrift store finds into a serious work of art ā reminiscent of a medieval Christian altarpiece. In the central scene, where the figure of Christ on the cross could be found, there is instead a set of skulls, skeleton hands and swords, all spattered with blood. (A closer look reveals these materials to be toys or perhaps Halloween decorations.) A stuffed cheetah stalks the top of the central frame, and the altarpiece wings on either side are inset with reproductions of early printed books illustrating scenes of Spaniards torturing. the native population they encountered. (A late 17th-century edition of BartolomĆ© de Las Casas’s “An Account of the First Voyages and Discoveries Made by the Spanish in America,” the source of some of these images, is under glass nearby.)
Here are some rougher works that detract from the whole, particularly digital vinyl prints from the late 1990s and early 1990s. āWitch Huntā (2007) looks more like a student poster than reports on the history of witch trials in colonial America than a work of art. But the hypnotically flawed video that works in this final room is worth watching.
As I left the museum, I thought about how recent and past museum protests are also proclamations of faith in their power, that their cultural role is worth questioning. MoMA or Whitney activists may be demanding āDecolonize this Place,ā but Raphael MontaƱez Ortiz, despite his focus on destruction, has helped build a decolonized space for more than half a century. It’s not perfect, but, in its retrospect, El Museo del Barrio rivals those museums with art that is formidable and challenging, while also retaining a space for beauty and wonder.
Raphael MontaƱez Ortiz: a contextual retrospective
Until September 11. El Museo del Barrio, 1230 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan. 212-831-7272, elmuseo.org.