A tall, dark man guts a mattress with his bare hands. The mattress is laid flat on a black-and-white checkerboard linoleum floor in a row house. This is London, September 1966, amid the “Destruction in Art Symposium,” organized by Gustav Metzger. Over the course of the event’s weeks-long programming, the New York–born artist Raphael Montañez Ortiz, then known as Ralph Ortiz, tore into armchairs, pianos, and a mattress; led audiences in paper bag concerts; and performed Self-Destruction at the Mercury Theatre, a performance that inspired primal-scream therapy. Ortiz’s various destructions in public spaces, arts venues, and a family home fascinated the London press. The Daily Mirror summed up these destructions in photographic terms: “This, in case there is any doubt in your mind, is a picture of an artist at work.”
In the 1960s, images of Ortiz at work were widely circulated—an artist with an ax about to perform a Piano Destruction Concert, preparing to sacrifice a chicken, towering in the dark of a destroyed room at New York’s Judson Church, or performing in protest with the Art Workers’ Coalition on the streets outside of the Museum of Modern Art. Ortiz was not alone in this reliance on photography.
In fact, the photograph would effectively become a surrogate object for performance- and process-based art that was ephemeral, that resisted becoming a commodity, or that expanded the notion of an artwork beyond the traditional boundaries of a unique and stable object.
In the 1960s and ’70s, for artists whose work engaged their experiences growing up Mexican American, Puerto Rican, or Cuban American in the United
