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Performance : Slave Pianos
The Fatal Score or The Spectacle of the Scaffold (The Way Up and the Way Down are One and the Same)
 Slave Pianos The Execution Protocol - A War of Currents / Piano Execution (2007) Courtesy Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney Photograph: Andrius Lipšys |
Performance event and concert with musicians, singers and actors including the Royal Australian Navy Band, virtuoso pianist Michael Kieran Harvey, and actor Richard Piper.
Slave Pianos present a surrealistic allegory of convict transportation in which a piano is absurdly found guilty of treachery and executed at the penal establishment of Cockatoo Island. They take as a starting point the arrival of the first piano to Sydney aboard the HMS Sirius, armed storeship and flagship of the First Fleet. The audience is invited to witness a recital by virtuoso pianist Michael Kieran Harvey.
The recital is destined, however, to be interrupted by the arrival of the Royal Australian Navy, led by actor Richard Piper, who arrest the piano for ‘crimes against humanities’, and transport it across the island to Building 142. On arrival, the unlucky piano is sentenced to ‘be hanged by the neck until dead’. A chamber music concert is given as the piano ascends the scaffold, and a wake held once the execution has been carried out. For the duration of the exhibition the gallows is the resting place for the now mechanically operated piano. The gallows, itself a meta-mechanical musical instrument incorporating an auto-lyre and archival auto-icon counterweight, is designed to operate in a continuous cycle of execution and redemption. Titled Penalogical Pianology: The Timbers of Justice, the installation looks at colonial and musical history, continuing the group’s exploration of avant-garde practice in art and music.
About Slave Pianos
Formed in 1998, Danius Kesminas, Rohan Drape, Neil Kelly and David Nelson live and work in Melbourne, Australia;
Michael Stevenson lives and works in Berlin, Germany.
Slave Pianos is comprised of artists Danius Kesminas and Michael Stevenson, musicians Neil Kelly and Rohan Drape, and inventor David Nelson. The group operates within a taxonomic methodology taking as its subject the historical avant-garde. In sympathy with the oeuvre of renowned American ethnomusicologist, archivist, artist and experimental filmmaker Harry Smith, whose life and 1952 anthology of historic American folk recordings were inspirational to future generations, Slave Pianos have swept the field of avantgarde art since 1998 to create an archive of music, sound and noise pieces by visual artists that have been transcribed into a format readable by a mechanical piano.
Event Information
Cockatoo Island
Sunday, 16 May | 3.00 pm
Bookings not required. Free event.
