Sacred Contingencies

Abstract

ike his recent deconstructionist videos, which appropriate and manipulate brief passages from Hollywood movies, Raphael Montafiez Ortiz's career produces a revealing stutter within the historiography of the American avant-garde. Beginning in the late 1950s, Ortiz emerged as one of the central figures in destructivism, a nowforgotten international movement that attempted to redress 36 what it saw as the social detachment of the postwar avantgarde, especially other precursors to performance art (action, Fluxus, happenings). For his part Ortiz worked in all genres, producing recycled films as well as destroyed works in painting, sculpture, installation, and performance. In the 1960s a series of archaeological finds-in which he peeled away the outer layers of such man-made objects as mattresses, chairs, sofas, and pianos (fig. 1)-found their way into such major permanent collections as New York's Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art. Ortiz's various activities and manifestos coalesced in his highly visible role in the Destruction in Art Symposium in London (1966) and at the Judson Church in New York (1968).1 The symposia brought together an international group of avant-garde artists working with new art forms generally associated with the happenings and Fluxus. For the organizers, however, these artists marked a shift from the idea of since Futurism and Dada to destruction as an artistic practice and made art more of an immediate relevance to society.2 Ortiz, in particular, gave theoretical coherence to the movement, shifting the domain of destruction from society to art, where its function would become symbolic rather than real. Art, then, remained an autonomous sphere that could displace the threat of nuclear war or racial violence through symbolic destruction that transformed the object, the artist, and society. For Ortiz destruction did not become art; rather, art constituted an arena within which destruction was itself transformed into a sacrificial process that released both the man-made object and the human subject from the logical form and self of Western culture.3