A performance "Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most — Concert Destruction Ritual" assisted by Monique Arndt-Ortiz will take place on the day of the opening at 6.15 pm. A reception for the artist will follow the performance until 8 pm.

Raphael Montañez Ortiz is well known for his destruction perfromances and their imposing residual sculptures. First performed in the late 1950s, the artist staged theatrical rituals in which he destroyed furniture, musical instruments, and other objects. Ortiz began this practice in private ceremonies, displaying the artifacts as sculptures that had affinities with the darkly existentialist, abstract expressionist assemblage of the period. Alfred Barr, acting on the advice of the Dadaist Richard Huelsenbeck (who was a practicing psychotherapist in New York after World War II), purchased a piece for the Museum of Modern Art from the artist's first exhibition. By the mid-1960s Ortiz was staging more transgressive, elaborate and theatrical performances. (His use of chickens was particularly notorious.) The artist was a central figure in DIAS (Destruction In Art Symposium) in England beside Gustav Metzger, Herman Nitsch and Wolf Vostell. Ortiz's London performances inspired Primal Therapy's originator Arthur Janov, who dedicated his first book to the artist. Ortiz's subsequent performances at New York's Judson Church are legendary. So entertaining, disturbing and bizarrely comic were these that Ortiz was asked — twice — to perform them on the Johnny Carson Show.

In 1982 Ortiz completed a doctorate at Columbia University submitting a thesis on Physio-Psycho-Alchemy: Towards an Authenticating Art. This work was a pioneering mixture of New Age ritual, identity politics and cultural deconstruction in which the artist began to document communal performances. Ortiz was instrumental in organizing art workers' protests featuring extraordinary guerilla theatrics at the Museum of Modern Art in the early 1970s. He was also, in the late 1960s, a founder and the first director of the Museo del Barrio (which is currently undertaking its first comprehensive exhibition of performance art). The Museo mounted a full-scale retrospective of Ortiz's work, Years of the Warrior, Years of the Psyche, in 1988. Raphael Ortiz has been a professor of art at Rutgers University for nearly 30 years.

Raphael Ortiz has extended his performance and sculpture with work in film and video. These pieces convey a pan-cultural sense of ritualized violence and stifled catharsis that has put Ortiz at the vanguard of contemporary multi-media artists. Beginning in the 1980s he produced intensely worked computer-laser-video deconstructions of commercial films, taking pieces of cinema shown in rapid iteration and allowing the action to drift slowly forward in time. These were computer-generated versions of his early cut-up and reassembled films made in the late 1950s. Although little known in New York, Ortiz's videos have been highly influential in Europe, the artist being cited as an inspiration to numerous younger video artists such as Jilian Wearing. Ortiz's videos are also well-known among historians and served as a starting point for Chon Noriega's 1997 exhibition of the artist's early destruction pieces at the Whitney Museum.

The current exhibition begins with a new destruction performance, Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most, beginning at 6.15 pm on Saturday October 16, the day of the opening. The title comes from the cabaret standard composed by Frances Landesman, an American expatriate whose piano Ortiz destroyed in his 1966 DIAS performance at London's Duncan Terrace. Also included in this exhibition are recent large-scale digital paintings made from computer-manipulated images taken from Judeo-Christian, Mayan and other Native American sources. As a preamble, the exhibition begins with a sampling of several important historical pieces from the earliest 1960s.