Without my realizing it, this exploration of the intimate mystery was the beginning of a therapeutic theater that ultimately led me to the creation of psychomagic. If I did not imagine this at the time, it was because I thought that what I was doing was a development of theatrical art. Before happenings began in the United States, I put on spectacles that could take place only once; I introduced perishable things like smoke, fruit, gelatin, the destruction of objects, baths of blood, explosions, burns, and so on. Once we performed in a place where two thousand chickens were clucking; another time we sawed through a double bass and two violins. I proceeded by searching for a place that someone would let me use, any sort of place, as long as it was not a theater: a painting academy, an asylum for the mentally ill, a hospital. Then I persuaded a group of people I knew, preferably not actors, to participate in a public presentation. Many people have an act in their soul that ordinary conditions do not allow them to carry out, but under favorable circumstances they rarely hesitate when offered the opportunity to express what sleeps within them. For me, an ephemeral had to be free to attend, like a party: when we staged them, we did not charge the guests for food or drinks. All the money I could save was invested in these presentations. I would ask the participant what he wanted to expose, then give him the means to do so. The painter Manuel Felguérez decided to slaughter a hen in front of the spectators and do an abstract painting on the spot using its guts, while at his side wearing a Nazi soldier’s uniform was his wife Lilia Carrillo, also a painter, who devoured a grilled chicken. A young actress who later became famous, Meche Carreño, wanted to dance naked to the sound of an African rhythm while a bearded man covered her body with shaving cream. Another woman wanted to appear as a classical dancer in a tutu without underwear and urinate while interpreting the death of a swan. An architecture student decided to appear with a mannequin and beat it violently, then pull several feet of linked sausages out from the crushed pubic area. One student came dressed as a university professor carrying a basket full of eggs and proceeded to smash one egg after another on his forehead while reciting algebraic formulas. Another, dressed as a cowboy, arrived with a large copper basin and several liters of milk. Lying in the container in a fetal position he recited an incestuous poem dedicated to his mother as he emptied the milk bottles, drinking the contents. A woman with long blond hair arrived walking on crutches and screaming at the top of her lungs, “My father is innocent, I am not!” At the same time she took pieces of raw meat from between her breasts and threw them at the audience. Then she sat down on a child’s chair and had her head shaved by a black barber. In front of her was a crib full of doll heads without eyes or hair. With her skull bare, she threw the heads at the audience, screaming, “It’s me!” A man dressed as a bridegroom pushed a bathtub full of blood onto the platform. A beautiful woman dressed as a bride followed him. He began to fondle her breasts, crotch, and legs, and finally, getting more and more excited, submerged her in the blood along with her ample white dress. He then rubbed her with a large octopus while she sang an aria from an opera. A woman with a great deal of red hair, pale skin, and a gold dress that clung close to her body appeared with a pair of shears in her hands. Several brown-skinned boys crept toward her, each one offering her a banana, which she sliced while laughing out loud.
Smashing a piano on Mexican television, in 1969.
Destruction and restoration of a piano.
All of these acts, these true delusions, were conceived and realized by persons considered normal in real life. The destructive energies that eat away at us from the inside when they are left stagnant can be released through channeled and transformative expression. Once the alchemy of the act is accomplished, the anguish is transmuted into euphoria.
The ephemeral panics were conducted without publicity, with the place and time given out at the last minute. On average about four hundred people would attend through this system of word of mouth. Thankfully, no articles about them were published in the newspapers. The government’s office of performances, headed by an infamous bureaucrat named Peredo, exerted an imbecilic form of censorship. In one theatrical work I was forced to hide a character’s belly button. In another, the actor Carlos Ancira wore a cape with two balls about the size of soccer balls hanging at the bottom; the troublesome civil servant considered them too suggestive of testicles and made us remove them. Thanks to the discrete and free nature of our ephemerals, we were able to express ourselves without any problem. The reaction was very different when I was invited to perform one on national television.
My work in the Teatro de Vanguardia had drawn the admiration of Juan López Moctezuma, a writer and journalist who was the host of a cultural television program. He had been given an hour of airtime without any commercials because an American TV series that attracted the majority of viewers was on at the same time on a different channel. Juan asked me to do whatever I wanted during those sixty minutes. I concentrated deeply, then knew precisely what ephemeral act I wanted to perform: what I had hated most, back in my dark days, was my sister’s piano. That instrument, smiling sarcastically with its black and white teeth, showed me that Raquel was my parents’ favorite child. Everything was for her, nothing for me. I decided to destroy a grand piano on camera. The explanation I gave to the public on this occasion was the following: “In Mexico, as in Spain, bullfighting is considered an art. The bullfighter uses a bull for performing his work of art. At the end of the fight, when he has expressed his creativity by means of the bull, he kills it. That is to say, he destroys his instrument. I want to do the same thing. I will put on a rock concert, then I will kill my piano.”
I found an old grand piano in the newspaper classifieds that was within my price range and had it sent directly to the studio where the cultural program was filmed. I also hired a group of young amateur rock musicians. When the broadcast began, after reciting my text I gave the order for the group to start playing, pulled a sledge hammer out of a suitcase and began to demolish the piano with great blows. I had to use all my energy, which was augmented by the rage that I had built up over so many years. Smashing a grand piano to pieces is not easy. I progressed slowly but incessantly in the demolition. The few spectators called their family and friends. The news spread like an uncontainable flood: a madman is smashing a grand piano with a hammer on channel 3! After half an hour, most Mexican viewers had switched from their favorite programs to see what this strange man was doing. The phone calls rose in quantity from one hundred to a thousand, two thousand, five thousand. Parents’ groups, the Lions Club, the minister of education, and many other notable entities protested. How dare this man destroy such a precious instrument before the eyes of so many poor children? (At that hour, the children were asleep.) Who had allowed this scandalous act of violence to be shown? (The American program being aired at the same time was a bloody war show.)
By the time I finished my work, lying amidst the rubble with a couple of pieces on top of me in the shape of a cross from which I extracted a few plaintive notes, the scandal had reached national proportions. The next day, all the newspapers mentioned the ephemeral. I had stripped Mexican art of its virginity in a brutal manner. I was admired for my audacity while also considered a cursed artist. Satisfied with the enormous notoriety I had achieved, I declared that on the next program Juan López Moctezuma would interview a cow to show that she knew more about architecture than university professors. The television station declared that this program would not take place, because “no cows are allowed in the studio.” I answered, “That is not true, many cows perform in the soap operas.” There was a fresh scandal in the press. The students of the School of Architecture offered me their department’s amphitheater in which to interview the cow. I arrived there, in front of an audience of two thousand students, along with my cow, which a veterinarian had previously injected with a tranquilizer. I presented the animal with its rear, which I compared to a Gothic cathedral, facing the public. The interview lasted two hours with the laughter growing and growing, until a group of burly employees arrived to tell me, and my bovine companion, to leave that honorable place and never return.