To Make The Museum You Must Destroy It

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…