Burning pianos, or cellos.

southtwelfth:

The link above is to an article in the Utne Reader, but the venerable Star-Tribune also reports “an upright piano was set ablaze at Carleton College in a ‘performance art’ show under the nighttime sky in Northfield.” 

(Excellent use of air quotes, incidentally — that’s some great “arts reporting”! It will be “shame” to lose the Strib when it finally goes “bankrupt.”)

Anyway, I link to this because it reminded me of a very touching outdoor performance I once saw out on frozen Medicine Lake, on a Wednesday night a few years ago. An artist — I don’t recall who it was — had assembled a group of people out on the lake, and undertook a performance I am hazy on the details of, other than that it involved a cello, and the cello was apparently to be burned at the completion of the performance.

People stood around politely as the work played out, until the last moment, when a woman ran out of the crowd, I believe shouting something, grabbed up the cello and ran across the lake back to her car, where she peeled off in the manner of a 1970s cop show. And the performance was over.

It took a few minutes for the crowd to work out that the woman’s intervention at the end was not a part of the performance as planned. Apparently, from what I heard, the interloper was a cellist who couldn’t bear to see the instrument destroyed, so intervened.

It became, in the end, a sort of unplanned collaboration between two artists with very different ideas about what art (or artists) might be capable of doing. I have to this day never seen an artist’s performance so brazenly disrupted by another artist on ideological or aesthetic grounds.

(via mediation, MNSpeak, and Utne)

Word on the street is that there’s a documentary film in early production stages that features this very burning piano ‘performance.’ More details soon, perhaps?