I arrived home from dinner this evening to an email from Marty. “Tonight at 8pm, they’re messing– or YOU’RE messingwith a piano, playing or kicking or draggin’ down to theriverside…interactive performance thang,” the email said, among other things. I got the message at 7:40, but since I’d just walked in the door, I was already all set to walk right back out — so I did.
I didn’t know what to expect. I know very little about The Mantis Collective, the gallery holding the event, and, as Marty pointed out, they seem to do very little publicity. The one opening I had previously attended there was unimpressive, both in terms of the artwork and the organization, but I have heard great things about other exhibits they have done, and I’m all for any kind of art in Harrisburg.
Due to traffic on I-83 I didn’t get to gallery until ten minutes after 8. When I arrived the piano was situated in the middle of the small room that is The Mantis Collective with an assortment of tools placed just inside the door. The piano had been beaten a bit but was largely intact at this point. I was relieved to see Rusty Baker, director of the Susquehanna Art Museum, as a familiar face is always nice when you don’t know anything about an event.
As the crowd watched from the sidewalk outside the gallery individuals from the audience would walk in the door, select their tools, and proceed to interact with the piano. Rusty hit the back of it over and over with an axe and a sledge hammer, creating a deep resonant sound that vibrated through my body, a rich and discordant noise. One girl picked a flower from a planter down the street, ran her hands over the body of the piano as she circled it, then gently placed the white blossom on the splintered top. Someone asked, “Can we do a duet?” and two men walked in, one with the axe, the other with the sledge hammer, and they alternated slamming their tools on what was left of the keys in a strange and destructive rhythm. I used the prying end of a hammer to strum the now exposed strings of the piano, then silenced it with my hands before using the same tool to carefully remove even more of the keys. It was interesting to see how people approached it — most used brute force and the biggest tools they could find. Very few people acted with any appearance of deliberateness or purpose, instead looking very much like they were simply acting out their aggressions on the instrument.
I wasn’t sure whether or not the folks from Mantis would be okay with me taking pictures of the destruction so I didn’t pull out my camera until Marty arrived shortly after 8:30. After I spoke to him for a few minutes I handed it to him. He’d only taken a couple of pictures, though, when they announced it was over, at an apparently significant 8:44. We took a few mroe pictures of the wreckage and the building and I heard one of the gallery employees say, “Oh good, someone has a still camera.” I wish I’d pulled it out sooner.
I’ve posted the pictures I did get here, and Mantis is planning to send DVDs to everyone who participated, so it has been documented.
The thing I keep coming back to is that I don’t know if I consider tonight’s destruction to be art. Could we pretend we were making some great statement as we walked up to that piano? Sure, but I don’t think anyone with a sledge hammer in their hands was thinking about splintering the wood as a symbol of the silencing of creative voices or the destruction of traditional values or any of that. Was it cool? Certainly, because it’s always fun to smash things that are supposed to be sacred. Somehow it almost feels like this could have been art if the piano weren’t already ruined, which I heard one of the Mantis folks say it was. If the gallery, or some eccentric billionaire, commissioned a master piano maker to create the perfect instrument, had the best pianist in the world perform one song on it, then unleashed the crowds with their axes and sledge hammers and saws, then I would more easily be able to see it as art. As it is, I like seeing stuff like this being done because it does push some people’s boundaries, but whether or not it’s art depends on one’s definition of art — as, I suppose, is the case for many things. I don’t have a highly developed definition of art or Art, but what I keep coming back to is that it just doesn’t matter. I had fun tonight, as, I think, did everyone else. And that’s all that does matter.