 |
|||||||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|||||
 |
|||||||||
 |
|||||||||
|
|||||||||
|
|
|
|
|
|||||
|
|||||||||
|
|||||||||
Like his recent deconstructionist videos, which appropriate and manipulate brief passages from Hollywood movies, Raphael Montañez 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 now-forgotten international movement that attempted to redress what it saw as the social detachment of the postwar avant-garde, 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 early 1960s, a series of archaeological finds -- in which he peeled away the outer layers of man-made objects such as mattresses, chairs, sofas, and pianos -- found their way into such major permanent collections as those of 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 Judson Church in New York (1968). 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 destruction" since Futurism and Dada to destruction as an artistic "practice" that made art of more "immediate relevance" to society. 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.
In order for destructivism to succeed, Ortiz required an art that was at once autonomous and contigent. Indeed, as Kristine Stiles notes, "Ortiz's art and life have always been involved in paradox." Thus, despite his critique of modern-cum-postmodern formalism, and his attempts to locate art as a fulcrum with which to change society, Ortiz nonetheless required a distinction between art and all other social relations. But by the early 1970s, Ortiz's acts of physical violence and animal sacrifice could no longer be contained within a purely symbolic art context, threatening to become just another manifestation of actual destruction. Thus, combining elements of psychoanalysis, physiology, philosophy, and maternal spiritualism, Ortiz developed an aesthetic theory of "Physio-Psycho-Alchemy," while he also turned away from the use of actual destruction in his art. In a mix of performance, therapy, meditation and ritual, Ortiz now addressed the body, inducing participants to become both art and artist through a process of "inner visioning" or "authenticating communion" of body, mind, and spirit. By 1982, having codified this aesthetic in his doctoral dissertation amid the problematic backdrop of New Age spiritualism, Ortiz again sought a space within which art -- both autonomous and contingent -- could transform social relations. Now, however, he turned to the virtual space of the computer, digital imaging systems, and video, taking up the deconstruction of the Hollywood text rather than the destruction of the Western object and the transcendence of the Western body.
By the end of the 1960s, however, Ortiz would be erased from the history of art, falling into the widening gap between an avant-garde refigured as postmodernist (and nonethnic) and an ethnic art defined in terms of cultural nationalism (and modernist aesthetics). If both sides started from different premises of the relationship between signifier and signified, both spoke about their work in political terms. For his part, Ortiz refused to conflate politics and art; for him, politics meant putting your body, and not art, on the front lines. And he did. In the early 1970s, for example, Ortiz was an active member of the Artist Worker's Coalition, taking part in street protests against the Museum of Modern Art. But art itself continued to offer an autonomous sphere of sorts, a space where Dada and ritual could come together in order to expose, exorcize, and expiate Western culture through the destruction of its most symbol-laden objects.
It is for this reason, among others, that Ortiz founded El Museo del Barrio in 1969 as the first Hispanic art museum in the United States. While many Latino artist-activists questioned the distinction between high art and popular culture, and placed emphasis on the development of community-based cultural centers, alternative spaces, and vernacular aesthetics, Ortiz pointed to the concurrent need to intervene within the institutional space of the art world itself. Still, in his own art, Ortiz challenges that space and its traditional definition of art in presenting the products of performance, ritual, and contemporary social activities as art objects. In opposition to postmodern performance, however, he continues to insist that his work be contained within an art context, rather than have it diffuse into reality. This is not because the art space acts as some sort of higher ground (although Ortiz is concerned with creating a space for the sacred), but because the imported social and spiritual rituals acquire an element of irony within the art context without necessarily becoming profane.
It is precisely his peculiar sense of irony, which is more situational than stated (there is no knowing wink here), which critics often miss in Ortiz's work. Indeed, his work troubles and falls between the very categories he engages: modernism and postmodernism, avant-garde and mainstream, racial minority and dominant culture. Until recently, for example, it would have been unheard of to suggest that American avant-garde film and the so-called ethnic cinemas had anything significant to do with each other, despite concurrent histories and a shared oppositional stance toward Hollywood. The very structure and culture of the media arts militated against even posing such a question, let alone including someone like Ortiz in either experimental or ethnic programs. The selection of Ortiz's videos for the 39th Robert Flaherty Seminar and the 1995 Whitney Biennial, however, brings these issues into sharper focus, provoking scholars of the avant-garde and ethnic cinemas to rethink contemporary film and video history.
Ortiz's recycled films, produced between 1956 and 1958, provide a significant challenge to the history of avant-garde film, especially insofar as Ortiz worked from radically different premises about visionary culture. At the time, Ortiz had dropped out of the Pratt Institute and was exploring the Yaqui ancestry of his grandfather through Peyote rituals. Ortiz decided to use ritual sacrifice to "redeem the indigenous wound" perpetrated by the West. Using a tomahawk, Ortiz hacked at 16mm prints of films, placed the fragments in a medicine bag, then shook the bag while issuing a war chant. When the evil had been released, Ortiz randomly pulled out pieces and spliced them together, irrespective of their orientation. Two films that survive on video are "Cow-boy" and "Indian" Film (1958), which recycles Anthony Mann's Winchester '73 (1950), and Newsreel (1958), from a Castle Films newsreel featuring the Pope's blessing of a crowd, the Nuremburg trials, and an atomic bomb explosion in the Pacific. In these films, the audiovisual integrity and continuity of shots is destroyed, replaced by a random sequence of image and sound fragments that confound genre expectations. On occasion this produces ironic montage, as when the Pope blesses a mushroom cloud in Newsreel, but such associations are random by-products of a more encompassing destructivist aesthetic. Unlike Bruce Conner, whose A Movie (also 1958) serves as a touchstone for recycled cinema, Ortiz sought a more thoroughgoing destruction/redemption of the original text than was available through irony and parody, whose critique requires a coherent, stable source. This is perhaps no more evident than in their respective use of sound: Conner juxtaposes reedited shots with complete sound tracks or songs that establish stable parameters for irony; Ortiz fractures both sound and image.
In Golf (1958), Ortiz used a hole punch to make random holes in an instructional golf film. On one level, the film is an elaborate pun on what Ortiz saw as a symbol of the upper middle class, but it also signals more theoretical concerns about space: "Golf was the result of my attempt to make space in the frame, space that was non-film space, that would take over the film space. With each random hole punch, I chanted, 'Emptiness is fullness.'"
Ortiz did not work in the media arts again until the 1980s, when he turned to the computer as a way to explore the theoretical concerns about space first articulated in Golf. Since 1982 Ortiz has written several manifestos on computer art and his computer laser videos, and since 1985 he has produced over sixty works. As with his earlier recycled films, there is a performative aspect to the construction of these videos. But rather than use film as a material object to be transformed through destruction, Ortiz engages in a digital deconstruction of Hollywood films in a real-time editing process. Ortiz works with one- to ten-second passages of Hollywood films on laser disk that he manipulates through a computer program and joy sticks that allow him to advance and reverse at different speeds, as slow as one frame at a time, while watching on a monitor. A wave-form generator further modifies the sound during this process, creating a driving background rhythm while also fracturing words into phonemes, sometimes producing new words. Ortiz works through a passage repeatedly for as long as six months until he is satisfied with a performance that he then transfers to video. The finished pieces range in length from three to thirteen minutes. In an ongoing dance series, he has used this technique to explore the rhythmic undertones in social interactions, often fights among men. Ortiz describes the overall effect as a "holographic" space within the Hollywood text, yet outside the familiar perceptual mode and linear structure of mass media.
While this work shares some aspects of the modernist poem, demanding that we give attention to the obscure(d) references, Ortiz often situates such reading strategies within nonlinear structures. In fact, many of his videos follow a circular scheme, beginning and ending at the same point in a single passage. Given the micromovement back and forth as Ortiz works through the passage, the resulting video plays somewhat like a herky-jerky once through on a film loop. This can produce both surprise and afterthought in the viewer given the deceptive forward movement of the images. In Beach Umbrella (1985), for example, the eponymous cartoon birds of Disney's Three Caballeros (1945) dive-bomb Brazilian women lying on a beach (in live action), chasing them back to their original position. The frenetic humping movement of one woman -- shown lying face down at the start and finish of the video -- combined with the ominous war plane rhythm throughout, exposes the underlying, intertwined sexual and colonial discourses in Disney's otherwise sanguine paean to the Good Neighbor Policy.
In The Kiss (1985), Ortiz explores a cliché of classical Hollywood narrative, the first kiss that signals the movement toward marriage and narrative closure. The source is Body and Soul (1947), a classic boxing film in which the troubled protagonist falls in love with and marries a painter. The kiss scene takes place at the front door of her apartment, where she both initiates and terminates the kiss, closing the door on the boxer. Ortiz's video extends the kiss to six minutes, producing what Scott MacDonald calls a "spasm" that transforms the repressed gesture of the kiss into a "virtual act of intercourse." Reading the video against the censorship codes and postwar sexual ideology that inform the film, MacDonald identifies The Kiss as an allegory of the painter's sexual liberation and of Ortiz's own personal transformation from "slum kid" (like the boxer) to artist (like the painter).
But The Kiss does not work only at the level of characterization, but, rather, questions the very structure of the narrative within which the characters operate. To argue that The Kiss liberates the female character's sexuality nonetheless maintains the original narrative, drawing attention to a sexuality that has in fact been expressed, albeit in a muted, coded, repressed, or otherwise acceptable form. But unless the narrative context has been challenged, the so-called liberated sexuality remains the same as the implied one, only more manifest. As a metacommentary on Hollywood conventions and censorship, however, The Kiss is less concerned with the details per se (for example, is the character repressed?), and more concerned with how the cinema structures such issues as sexuality according to an economy of liberation/ repression. The fact that Ortiz makes the scene circular elides the very narrative material that the conventional kiss is supposed to structure and regulate. The kiss becomes an end in itself. It continues to serve as the mediation point between public and private, male and female, but it leads nowhere else! This can be taken two ways. One, it reveals and foregrounds a cliché scene as a pivotal and informing moment in the narrative. This allows one to re-read the original film in the same manner as Roland Barthes's S/Z, in which he fractures and re-reads a novella by Emile Zola. In both cases, what one gets are divigations on semiotic fragments, rather than a systematic interpretation. Two, in its circular construction The Kiss isolates that moment from the narrative and expands it into a new concept of cinema. This bears some affinities to the structural film, but it is most congruent with feminist criticism that argues that Hollywood cinema is about heterosexual couple formation. In The Kiss you get the quintessence of couple formation, a sort of pure Hollywood cinema, but also a perversion of the old formula: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy finds girl. Ortiz subverts this linear progression by focusing on the first step, boy meets girl, and playing it off its own mirror image. Thus, Ortiz does not liberate sexuality as much as he frames it within a circular fragment, privileging repetition and nonlinearity rather than enlightenment and progress.
Similar to the paradox of his destructed art works, there is a question about Ortiz's anti-Enlightment position and the fact that its articulation depends upon modernist aesthetics and postmodern technologies. In his emphasis on Ortiz's critique of Hollywood, MacDonald conflates the situation of the various electronic media with that of women and racial minorities, mapping the latter's political struggles onto an Oedipal scenario in which "killing the Father" (Hollywood) and "marrying the Mother" (complex social realities) requires a rejection of linear, seamless narrative cinema and embraces new imaging technologies. While this comparison represents a rare and unique rapprochement with racial minorities within avant-garde historiography, it works only at an allegorical level and only so long as the electronic media are contrasted with the film industry in a zero-sum relationship, such that the dominance of motion pictures must be at the expense of other media, and vice versa. Given the consolidation of the mass media, I doubt if the latter will ever be true. They are all commercial enterprises. What has happened, though, is that video and other electronic media have become easily available as consumer goods. Nevertheless, the distribution and broadcast networks for the electronic media are no more open to women and racial minorities than are those for motion pictures.
In any case, I doubt if Ortiz continues to work within the old opposition of film industry versus avant-garde film. First, television has arisen as the more powerful source of mass media in U.S. culture. Second, Ortiz's appropriation of retail laser disks is itself a sign of that continued shift and an anticipation of an interactive, spectator-driven media. On the one hand, Ortiz provides a technological apparatus and language with which to deconstruct the mass media. At one extreme, however, this makes him little more than a critical or ironic consumer, even as he offers a sophisticated analysis of the new and impending reconfiguration of the mass media. It is, after all, a reconfiguration within corporate capitalism, one in which (community, minority, not-for-profit, artistic) access is the great unknown being promised and fought over. On the other hand, he works within modernist aesthetics, enacting a shift in textual source and form, but not in the underlying classical archetypes.
Indeed, as Stiles noted earlier, "Ortiz's art and life have always been involved in paradox." To be sure, he is not alone; all distinctions fall apart at some point. But his lifelong attempt to produce art that is both autonomous and contingent, sacred and profane, finds special resonance in the current postmodern moment, especially insofar as that moment bears the paradox of certain modernist features. As I have argued elsewhere, if video is the postmodern medium par excellence for the "pure and random play of signifiers," access to both television and the museum continues to be guarded by a modernist gatekeeper, according to whom access is a simple matter of "freedom of expression" within the economic-minded parameters of "popularity" (television) and "quality" (museum). This suggests, then, how Ortiz's sacred contingencies may offer a strategic anachronism.
In 1993, Ortiz participated in an exhibition of site-specific installation at Cornell University that became the target of racist acts of vandalism, provoking Latino students to make a spontaneous four-day take-over of the administration building in the absence of any response on the part of the president. Ortiz, who was on campus to perform a book trial on the politics of feminism, cancelled the event and relocated to the administration building, where he placed Cornell itself on trial, setting up a video camera to record student testimony. By momentarily situating the nascent take-over within the performance of a trial, Ortiz created a sacred space for students to vent their personal anger, to create a political community out of diverse ethnic and racial groups, and to formulate a legal critique of the university. Cornell was declared guilty, and the students set about the uphill task of a coordinated political action. The next day, edited portions of the tape were added to Ortiz's installation in the lobby of the university art museum, providing some of the only news not filtered through or framed by the university news service. The museum, however, confiscated the tapes in order to offer them to the university as a way to identify and implicate students involved in the take-over. True to his paradox, Ortiz faxed a letter to the museum director, Frank Robinson, informing him that the tapes were not a document of events but, rather, represented his artistic production, and that the purchase value of these autonomous art objects was ten thousand dollars each. The tapes were returned to the installation for all to see.
This article was originally published in the 1996 festival program of Cine Estudiantil: Chicano/Latino & Native American Student Film & Video Festival. Reprinted with permission from the College Art Association's Art Journal, Fall '95.
Chon A. Noriega, Professor in the UCLA Department of Film and Television.
For more information regarding these articles and/or to submit an article yourself,
please contact Ethan van Thillo at sdlff@sdlatinofilm.com
San Diego Latino Film Festival,
c/o Media Arts Center San Diego,
2039 29th Street,
San Diego, CA 92104
TEL: 619.230.1938, FAX: 619.234.9722,
sdlff@sdlatinofilm.com, www.sdlatinofilm.com
Home || Advertise || Arte Latino || Awards || Call for Entries || Cine Cubano! || |
||