Burning pianos, or cellos. »
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 