The 1968 DIAS ritual shifted from killing chickens to attacking trees

Evidence

That ritual, which Ortiz perceived as a racial allegory, was forestalled when two writers, John Wilcock and Michael Kirby, dramatically freed the doomed fowl, tossing them over the fence in the direction of the Gold Bug, a Mafia-run gay and lesbian disco in the basement of the Edgar Allan Poe house on West Third Street. Ortiz accepted this development philosophically. As reported by Grace Glueck, he and Hendricks pivoted to attack the churchyard’s two trees, sawing off branches and pouring blood in the stumps. “I wasn’t feeling it anymore,” Ortiz told Glueck, “I’m glad the chickens were released—it was like someone making a call to the police before a murder had a chance to be committed.” — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1200

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the ADDENDUM article ‘On Sacrifice: The Real Kind, with Corpses’ — Ortiz’s staged ritual sacrifice that turns out to have been forestalled echoes how ritual killing in performance had to navigate real moral boundaries.
• SEED: Angle: the moment a performance-art ritual’s real violence gets stopped by audience intervention shows the inner limit of the ‘transgressive art’ ethos — a useful test case on how far avant-garde provocation was willing to actually go.