Looking for Some Action in Performance Art

Raphael Montanez Ortiz destroyed a piano the other day. It was a ritual slaughter. He hovered around the instrument--an ancient, decaying upright probably no longer loved by anyone--as if taking measure of his foe and the small audience that was gathered in a gallery of the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Geffen Contemporary. He chanted a bit and then lifted his ax and began swinging.

As a performance, or at least as much of it as I could witness since it began a half-hour late and other events beckoned, it was surprisingly uneventful. Ortiz didn’t seem to have much interest in the unique potential for sonic resonance that taking an ax to a piano could produce. He didn’t seem to care much for the piano one way or another. He struck, at times, in bland, regular rhythms.

Nor is there much shock value left in such activity these days. The fact is, Ortiz has been destroying pianos for more than 30 years now, and Saturday afternoon he had the full institutional support of MOCA, as part of its exhibition “Out of Actions.” Indeed, the feeling was not of destruction at all but of the making of an object that could be exhibited.

Ortiz’s “destruction,” a statement about the shamanistic quality of performance and an attempt to remove it from its European center, had little in common with a concert I once attended in which a piano was set aflame. That was a living experience of amazing sounds that could have been released from the instrument no other way. The charred remains at the end were of no interest and were simply disposed of.

The difference between the two events is the difference between actual performance and the results of performance that comprise an exhibition like “Out of Actions,” a stunning celebration of all the energy that got released when artists in the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s started breaking out of the frame and took to the stage. It was a time when music, theater, sculpture, painting, dance and ritual could all be one. The Geffen is now the graveyard of all that experimentation and energy, and one goes to “Out of Actions” to conjure up the past, to be with ghosts. The performances documented are the “now,” Kristine Stiles explains in her brilliant and provocative essay in the show’s catalog, and the results on exhibition are the “after now.”

But is it too soon to simply file away this art as “after now”? Can it still aspire to the transience of theater and music, or is its proper state object and concept? Thanks to the efforts of the Cortical Foundation--a small, private institute in Malibu--a festival has been organized to address the “now,” with many of the artists represented in “Out of Actions.” Called “Beyond the Pink,” with films and performances held in various locations around town this week and next, it began Monday night with a program of “action documentation” videos by Hermann Nitsch at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. Nitsch has been called the “Bruckner of the Happening,” and photos of the extraordinary “actions” he mounts can little convey the sensation of experiencing such epic work.

Even the two-hour video presentation on five screens of an “action” given in Naples two years ago can hardly equal being there. It was a pageant of performers swathed in the entrails of butchered hogs, with men and women tied to crosses and borne through the streets. Musicians played a mad, cacophonous symphony. All this might sound simply awful, and it is in its way. But there is also a magnificence to its sheer scale, something equally apparent in Nitsch’s four-hour near-monotone but richly textured “Island Symphony,” which the Cortical Foundation has just issued on CD.

Performances Tuesday and Wednesday nights at the Barnsdall Art Park also gave evidence of one of performance art’s most intriguing sides--exploring the byways of musical performance. Sometimes it’s nothing more than self-consciousness, as in John White setting up a bit of a kitchen as art and reading facetious reviews of himself in “BRIEF/CASE.”

Sometimes it is fracturing music, as when Delores Stevens, a fine pianist, played Mozartean gestures in startlingly unexpected fashion in Dick Higgins’ piano pieces. And sometimes it is simply playing with our expectations, as with a performance of Yves Klein’s “Symphony Monotone,” in which ensembles play a single pitch for about half an hour, showing us that there might be music in all the places where we imagine there is none.

But now, with such experiences, one can return to MOCA and more readily hear what all those dead objects might still be singing.

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* The “Beyond the Pink” festival continues tonight, Saturday and next week at various locations. For tickets: (818) 789-TIXX. For program and venue information: https://www.cortical.org