The Aleph Mag

By Rebecca Liao

As soon as the first model at the Cour Carrée du Louvre stepped out of her elevator in a sheer skirt, bellboy cap, and fetish boots, the fashion world was paralyzed between feverishly sharing their impressions with everyone else watching the show and catching every moment of the spectacle unfolding. Handcuffs, tightly corseted jackets, curvaceous jodhpurs, lace-up boots, bottomless outfits, Naomi Campbell, and Kate Fucking Moss smoking a post-coital cigarette. Despite the early start, everyone in the room had been sufficiently awakened from their stupor and cheered out of their minds for Le American Marc Jacobs, racing onto the runway and backstage while writing preliminary notes for all manner of fawning, naughty praise in their handhelds for a very successful fall Louis Vuitton collection. Until Jacobs paralyzed them again with this post-show gem: “At Vuitton, it always starts with the bags, I kept thinking about this inexplicable passion and obsession women have for bags, and how the bag became a fetishized object.” Somewhere, Bernard Arnault ruefully thought, “What did I do that my children would turn against me?”

Fortunately, Jacobs ended with this line, “I wanted to celebrate the love and desire that’s part of that fetish,” adding an assuaging glamour to his mockery of the Vuitton customer and decades-long marketing campaign. The fashion season is long, with several collections and product launches between the two pillar collections of fall and spring: the chase for trends is not amenable to narrative arcs. But it is impossible to ignore the connection between Fall 2010 and Fall 2011 for Louis Vuitton. Fall 2010 was a celebration of femininity, opening with Laetitia Casta and closing with Elle MacPherson, deliberately casting curvier models, sporting low-cut corseted dresses showing off the décolletage, bouffant ponytails, and tall pumps with oversized bows and retro block heels, some covered with Swarovski crystals, all parading by a romantic Parisian fountain with the soundtrack to “And God Created Woman,” the film that launched Brigitte Bardot’s career in the states, in the background. Jacobs signed with the Speedy, a bag that normally retails for around $700, redone in luxe fabrics and precious metals to up the price tag to five figures.

Spend long enough with this love and desire, though, and any amount of self-awareness will trigger the realization that it is just unnatural for an unnecessary object to have such power. Even more disconcerting is the subsequent thought that even if the human desire to not be controlled and manipulated resists such power, the bag is just so damn beautiful. If either side won with any consistency, fashion would become an incredibly boring Amtrak of consumerism, ambling along without variation. There are consequences to living this way.

This:

The Speedy (Image: Style.com)

becomes this:

The Lockit (Image: Style.com)

Jacobs replaced the Speedy with the Lockit as the heart of the fall collection in 2011. Accessorized with fur and gilded handcuffs, the subversion comes mostly from “The Night Porter” staging. Point taken, but not every fetishized object is so lucky as to become even more glamorous in a sadomasochistic relationship.

For example, the piano has seen hard times in 2011, continuing to pay for the most unerasable of sins: its existence. Worse, it gleefully affirms that existence at every turn. Like Julio Cortázar’s axolotl, its identity is so unwaveringly strong that it will engulf that of the people who come into contact with it, while remaining itself generally unaffected. To change how a piano is perceived initially feels like a giant victory, but a tainted one when one realizes that that can only mean it was inexplicably considered an enemy. Still, the victories that have come were as abrupt as they are lasting. There is John Cage’s prepared piano–a grand piano with bolts, screws, short strips of felt-covered plastic and other objects placed in between the strings to create a much larger array of percussive sound.

Before:

Pristine Piano Interior

After:

Image: What's my beef with Blackboard?

The sounds emitted are tailored to a modern sensibility: not that the piano needs updating, but to claim a part of it as unique for a place and time is a win-win for all parties. That’s especially true for Raphael Montanez Ortiz’s destroyed pianos.

Ortiz has done more than 80 of these performances.

These performances are not junkyard affairs; they are accompanied by ritualistic singing and dancing. The violence is meant to be a spiritual catharsis. I guess that’s one way to solve one’s problems.

Importantly, Ortiz recognizes that smashing sans technique does not make it out of a neighborhood performance space, and so the performers begin by very carefully taking apart the piano, using the ax to almost gently nudge the parts this way and that. It isn’t until the piano has already been largely deconstructed that the honest smashing begins, as though Ortiz is trying to be as respectful and merciful as possible by coaxing the piano to open up to its own destruction. It is this handy feature of calculated demolition that has a lineage in these works of art:

Gordon Matta-Clark, Day's End, 1975 (Image: NY Times)

Viktor & Rolf, Spring 2010 (Image: Dazed and Confused)

Stop, Repair, Prepare (Image: Jason Mandella/Courtesy of Museum of Modern Art)

First shown at the Hans der Kunst in Munich in 2008, “Stop, Repair, Prepare: Variations on ‘Ode to Joy’ for a Prepared Piano,” by the artist team Allora & Calzadilla, debuted in New York at the Gladstone Gallery in Chelsea in January 2009. Early December last year, it hit the big leagues with a roughly month-long stint at the Museum of Modern Art. In the second floor atrium, at the top of every hour, one of five pianists would, in a mildly erotic move, climb inside the hole, configure his or her fingers on the keys from the reverse position, and play the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth symphony.

In addition to the occasional missed notes and key changes, which frankly could not be helped by even the most virtuosic players in this position, only frustrating thumps sound when notes in the middle two octaves, the excised portion of the Bechstein baby grand, are depressed. Trouble is, these two octaves contain the most recognizable parts of the movement. A few minutes into the performance, the players would begin to move the piano while playing, some in a more elaborate choreography than others, but the physicality is evident all the same. By the time the movement is finished, the player and piano would have traveled throughout the entire atrium.

“Stop, Repair, Prepare” ticks off all the sensors of artistic reception–it is visceral, emotional, entertaining, technically disciplined, and intellectual, all on many levels at once. But we are still curious: what is it supposed to mean–that is, what did Allora & Calzadilla intend for it to mean? PR for the team emphasizes its socio-political import, namely its ignominious history as one of Hitler’s favorite pieces (it was actually performed on Hitler’s birthday in 1942 at the Haus der Kunst: a Bechtstein was in attendance then as well), the national anthem of Rhodesia, an apartheid state, and one of the few pieces of Western music played during the Cultural Revolution in China. Oddly enough, this emphasis on the work’s latent powerlessness recalls another, less successful, dressing down: Susan McClary famously wrote in the January 1987 issue of the “Minnesota Composers’ Forum Newsletter” that, “The point of recapitulation in the first movement of the Ninth is one of the most horrifying moments in music, as the carefully prepared cadence is frustrated, damming up energy which finally explodes in the throttling, murderous rage of a rapist incapable of attaining release.” The metaphor may have been unfortunate, but its general sentiment that Beethoven’s Ninth hides an exploitable and exploitative spot beneath its majestic celebration of the human spirit finds itself validated.

Where does the piano fit into all of this? In the big picture, it may have been an innocent bystander. The Ode to Joy is rarely performed on the piano, and certainly never in those concerts that become a part of the symphony’s heritage and identity. But would a hindered orchestra à la Haydn have been a more effective medium? Probably not–an orchestra is a body of musicians; a piano and its player make one musical instrument. By choosing a piano, Allora & Calzadilla left little doubt about what was being subverted. There is nothing glamorous about a mangled melody. The piano is brought down with the ship only in its role as an enabler. Whereas a show of impotence emasculates the music, it is instead used by the piano to attack from a defensive position. The visible burden of being pushed around, the hole with its key missing octaves, the difficulty of matching the right minute finger movements while hunched over and viewing the keyboard upside down set the stage for bravura performances.

Which is exactly what each of the five players aimed for and achieved at the MoMA. A picture of “Stop, Repair, Prepare” is absurd, a viewing of it is thought provoking and moving, and a five minute reflection outside the door combines all the above into a Cagean moment. We will never look at a piano in the same way again.

That was the happy story.

Then there was that episode in which a boy from South Florida wanted to get into a great college. At a New Year’s Eve party, he set on fire an old grand piano that his father, J. Mark Harrington, production designer for USA Network’s “Burn Notice,” had rescued from a shoot. Turns out this sort of activity provokes quite a reaction. So Nick Harrington, along with his father and brother, moved the piano by boat to a sandbar in Biscayne Bay and lit it on fire again. Pictures were taken this time.

Image: Nicholas Harrington/Courtesy of The Miami Herald

Image: Nicholas Harrington/Courtesy of AP

Given that Nick was facing felony charges and a $5000 dollar fine for dumping the piano around the time the media caught wind of his identity, it’s understandable that he did not give any money quotes about what his work meant. He did, however, throw out buzz words like “artsy” and “surreal”. The poor piano really just had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Its problem is that the more readily people understand an object’s gravitas, the more readily they can discern its potential for absurdity. Few things are more serious than a beautiful, high-brow object with heritage and the love and devotion that have made it so, other than, of course, a belief in its unassailability so strong that the only deconstruction deemed worthwhile is that done in extremis following a relatively trouble-free decision process.

Bernard Arnault need not fear, however. The bags will still do well. Their pristine nature may be sullied, but they become even more esteemed because they were game. They allowed a moral victory—both sides of the viewing glass get the last laugh, and that is mutuality at its best.