![]() This rediscovered piano thought to be destroyed during the seminal Destruction In Art Symposium (DIAS) in 1966. ![]() One of a number of ‘concerts’ performed by Raphael Montañez Ortiz, using domestic furniture in the Islington home of Jay and Fran Landesman, leading cultural figures in 1960s London. No 4 - Raphael Montañez Ortiz, Duncan Terrace Piano Destruction Concert (1966) Part of the series, Piano Transplants, where each piano depend upon fire, water and earth for their transformations. No 3 - Annea Lockwood, Piano Burning (1968) A shining example is La Monte Young’s Piano Piece for David Tudor #1, 1960, where the performer is invited to feed the piano with hay and water, and ends when the piano decides whether or not to eat. The humour employed by Fluxus artists was of a playful nature, decidedly more light-hearted than the farces and dark satires of Dada or Futurist theatre. No 2 - La Monte Young, Piano Piece for David Tudor #1 (1960)Ībsurd scenarios and impossible predicaments often featured in Fluxus Events. In demolishing a traditional instrument Hansen demonstrates the Fluxus belief in ‘real’ sound. The colossal sound of wood smashing to pieces on a hard concrete pavement with the last jolts of the strings, hammers, ivory keys and brass pedals, became a composition. Al Hansen famously pushed a piano off a five story bombed out building, during his time with the army of occupation in Frankfurt, Germany, which was then to be repeated as an Event in 1959 entitled Yoko Ono’s Piano Drop. The material value of an instrument or object is unimportant within Fluxus, as it is the experience of music and art that is valuable, not the artwork or instrument itself. No 1 - Al Hansen, Yoko Ono’s Piano Drop (1959) Please contribute your favourite piano destruction moments! As you can guess, lots of Fluxus examples here. I’d like to take this opportunity to share my top five works, in which pianos are abused/destroyed. From there, we could see that this turns the piano into an obvious point of attack for artists whose work centres around democratising art. We started with talking about the piano as the symbol of all things bourgeois, as exemplified in Laurel and Hardy’s The Music Box. ![]() I’ve been having a chat with on Twitter about the use of pianos in sound art (using this term very loosely here - I hate debating the term though, so I think that’s OK). ![]()
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