The “destruction artist” Raphael Montañez Ortiz, known as Ralph to Kurt, is a senior Professor at Rutgers University after a long and distinguished career, but in the early sixties was notorious for his performance art. From taking a sledge hammer to a piano to splattering blood across a stage and onto the audience, he challenged accepted norms about what constitutes art and pushed its appreciation into previously taboo territory. In this essay from 1966 found in Kurt’s archives, Ralph writes about art, its emergence and its relationship to dreams and the unconscious, as well as the role of repression in acts of violence.
