Allora & Calzadilla: Stop, Repair, Prepare: Variations on Ode to Joy for a Prepared Piano

Half man, half object: it’s a piano with a hole in the middle, carved just behind the keyboard, where a musician appears. For one hour he has to play upside down and backward. Then he/ she goes out and leave the seat to another colleague. Six hours, six different musicians.
For their debut at the Gladstone Gallery in Chelsea, New York, Jennifer Allora (USA, 1974) e Guillermo Calzadilla (CUBA, 1971) will present “Stop, Repair, Prepare: Variations on Ode to Joy for a Prepared Piano”, which was originally exhibited at Haus der Kunst, Munich in 2008. Blending sculpture and performance, Allora & Calzadilla have carved a hole in the center of an early 20th-century Bechstein piano, creating a void through which the performer stands to play the Fourth Movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Commonly known as the “Ode to Joy,” this famous final chorus has long been invoked as a musical representation of human fraternity and universal brotherhood in contexts as ideologically disparate as the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Ian Smith’s White Supremacist Rhodesia, and the Third Reich among many others. Today it is the official anthem of the European Union. Expanding the notions of both a prepared-piano and a player piano, the performer must reach over the keyboard and resituate his/her fingering of the keys both upside down and backwards while at times physically mobilizing the instrument to trace a path through the gallery.

This structurally incomplete version of the ode (the hole in the piano renders two full octaves inoperative) creates variations on the corporeal as well as sonic dimension of the player/instrument dynamic, the signature melody being played, and its pre-established connotations. With Stop, Repair, Prepare, Allora & Calzadilla explore the fluid and organic relationships inherent in music, exposing the varied dynamics between composition and meaning, instrument and performance, while tracking the political and artistic sentiments involved in music’s history. Throughout the exhibition, there will be hourly performances on Tuesday through Saturday by the following pianists: Amir Khosrowpour, Kathy Tagg, Mia Elezovic, Sheryl Lee, Sun Jun, Terezija Cukrov, Walter Aparicio.

Strongly keeping alive the austerity of such a primadonna of the orchestra, Allora & Calzadilla pursuive also in this piece in investigatine on the poetry of the objects with irony and smart glance, saying that the joke has something serious to tell us.

Collaborating since 1995, Allora & Calzadilla approach visual art as a set of experiments addresing issues like nationality, borders and democracy into our global and consumerist society. They mix sculpture, photography, performance, sound and video coming out with actions that broke any expectation.

It’s the same at Gladstone gallery, where musicians forced to play in such a painful way, are also mooving in the space of the gallery, reacting with the public and turning it from a still and stiff observer into a object itself who needs to move in oder to follow. And again the Synphony is the soundtrack for a parade. Are we men or obiects?