Artist

Raphael Montañez Ortiz

Raphael Montanez Ortiz is engaged by his complex Hispanic heritage and his formal experimentation with various forms of technology. In 1958, Ortiz was buying super-8 films (old movies, cartoons and newsreels) and re-editing the footage. Unlike his avant-garde contemporaries, Ortiz has placed ritual at the centre of his collage process. Ortiz used a tomahawk to chop up the ciine-artifacts of his ancestor's oppressors--Westerns and newsreels. The film fragments were then placed into a medicine bag, rattle and randomly re-edited into works such as Cowboy and Indian Film. More recently Ortiz has turned to laser discs to chop up and reconstruct film artifacts from classic cinema that encapsulate Euro-American readings of Western history. Ortiz has made dozens of these "digital/laser/videos" many of which were featured in the 1995 Whitney Biennal.

Artist Code: 487

Videography

Ghost in the Machine

1996, 42:17 minutes, colour/B&W, English

Rag Time & The Critic

1995, 25:00 minutes, colour/B&W, English

Behind It All

1995, 30:00 minutes, colour/B&W, English

You Can't Make An Omelette Without Breaking Some Eggs

1994, 54:00 minutes, colour, English

Excerpt: "Outside the Frame" & Performance and the Object

1994, 10:00 minutes, colour, English

Dance Number Twenty-two

1993, 07:19 minutes, colour, English

The Briefcase

1992, 12:55 minutes, colour/B&W, English

Selected Works: Raphael Montañez Ortiz

1992, 112:55 minutes, colour/B&W

Dance Number Nine ...They Bombed the Speak...

1991, 05:49 minutes, colour/B&W, English

Decade Show Performance

1990, 22:45 minutes, colour, English