What Is This

An associative view of the days, nights and characters that enclosed the life of Arthur Janov, which defines in the conclusion "It's never too late to have a happy childhood". Arthur Janov (1924-2017) was a classic instance of being the right charismatic therapist at the right time - the zeitgeist. Dr. Janov first heard about the embryo to the primal scream through one of his patients when he performed conventional psycho dynamic therapy. It was an absurd theatre performance by Raphael Montañez Ortiz called "Mommy, Daddy" presented in London, 1966. The birth of Primal therapy happened when Arthur Janov's book, "The Primal Scream" was published early 1970.

The concept of ritual-theater has been important since the early sixties in its production. It consists of the staging of violence through real acts that appeal to equally real and live emotions with an audience, that is, the action and the reaction that it provokes in the public happen simultaneously. This art of destruction represented by Raphael Montañez Ortiz is the theatricalization of a daily destruction, which we live in day to day.

In his film work from the early 1980s, the artist used an Apple computer hooked up to a laser disc player. He scratched the laser disc, creating a stammering image, and a disconnection between time and space.

In the mesmerizing Beach Umbrella, 1985, a shapely woman in a white bathing suit tears across the sand at a panicked clip, pursued by the Technicolor trio of the Three Caballeros. When the woman at last collapses, the cartoon characters descend, seething in a manic swarm over her body, a scene somewhere between a feeding frenzy and a gangbang. Once satisfied, the trio zoom off, allowing the woman time to stand before they begin the chase anew.

One of Ortiz’s final computer-laser-videos, marking a significant point in his career as an interdisciplinary artist and pioneer of the Destructivism movement.—Yesenia Perez

One of Ortiz’s final computer-laser-videos, marking a significant point in his career as an interdisciplinary artist and pioneer of the Destructivism movement.—Yesenia Perez

A remix film combining elements of found footage and structural filmmaking by combining Humphrey Bogart's quote from Casablanca with found footage of explosions, emphasized by repetition.

Raphael Montañez Ortiz tells a story about an elderly Jewish couple that didn't watch television or listen to the radio. Instead they used to talk lovingly to each other for every day of their long marriage. And in a sense there was a glow around them. When the couple were young their daughter died from polio. And so this energy or glow, in a kabbalistic sense, was their guardian angel, their daughter. Therefore...

1996 / U-Matic / color-b&w / sound / 1S / 12' 00

Raphael Montañez Ortíz takes a scene from the film Phantom Lady and manipulates and distorts it using digital video software to create a destructionist experience.

Raphael Montañez Ortíz distorts the famous line from Gregory Peck's performance in the 1956 adaptation of Moby Dick using digital equipment to create a destructionist viewing experience.

Raphael Montañez Ortíz cycles through two clips: footage of a rocket launch and a clip of a Wile E. Coyote cartoon and manipulates and distorts the two clips to create a destructionist viewing experience.

Starting in 1985, Montañez Ortiz begins a series of what he calls “digital/laser/videos”; he makes a large number of these “arresting, provocative and suggestive” works

The same year that Bruce Conner completed his famed A Movie, Montañez Ortiz destroyed a 16mm print of a banal Western, Winchester '73, with a tomahawk. He then placed the scraps of film in a medicine bag "to release the evil," intoned a ritual chant he had learned from his Yaqui grandfather, and spliced together the exorcised fragments in a random order.

Raphael Montañez Ortíz manipulates and distorts a scene from the classic film Freaks using digital editing techniques to give the scene a destructive quality.

"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. (Raphael Montañez Ortiz)