It’s a little difficult to know where to start with Slave Pianos, which is why most articles about them start by listing the members; from where you can begin to understand the extent of their work. Slave Pianos is made up of artists Michael Stevenson and Danius Kesminas, composer Neil Kelly, musicologist Rohan Drape and inventor David Nelson.
Slave Pianos deals with the interrogation and integration of art and art history through the medium of the piano. Who the slave is remains uncertain; the piano is played by eighty-eight solenoid fingers fed by a MIDI track, but it could just as easily be the artists, slave to the task of investigating the musical history of art (or at least the history of art through music).
Penalogical Pianism: The Timbers of Justice (2010) is the work created for the Biennale, situated in building 142 on Cockatoo Island. It’s a gallows, built specifically for the odd task of executing a piano. It’s magnificent in its construction, with no detail overlooked; from the arrow styled truss connectors to the studio lighting that so many artworks on the island lack.
The work references Cockatoo Island’s history as a penal colony. Although it did not serve as a hangman’s lair, arriving on Cockatoo Island for many resulted in the same fate.
An important part to understanding the work is the performance that occurred on Sunday the 16th of May The Fatal Score Or The Spectacle Of The Scaffold (The Way Up And The Way Down Are One And The Same). The Piano was captured at slipway one, carried to the gallows and sentenced to death in a quite unfair trial. A fifty-piece band from the navy accompanied the procession as well as a quartet in authentic period costume. After a final piece played by Michael Kieran Harvey the piano was then hanged. However, instead of crashing to the ground the piano’s fall is arrested, where it begins to play itself.
The ‘fatal score’ comes out of Robert Hughes’ 1987 novel Fatal Shore on the founding of Australia; a further example of the ever-expanding layers of meaning in the works of Slave Pianos.
The falling and rising (‘the way up and the way down are one and the same’) is repeated for the duration of the biennale. The counterweight to the piano serves as a platform for a two-channel video and sound installation. The video shows a judge sorting through piles of ‘evidence’ (artworks and transcripts) that are later used to sentence the works for “crimes against humanity.” In conjunction with the sentencing, each work listed is ‘played’ by the piano on the other side of the scaffold, where after a short while, the works are all hanged. Through the work of Drape and Kelly, each work has been transposed from its audio or physical form into a musical composition for the piano to play; some are more literal translations than others.
And here is where most articles on Slave Pianos end, at a point without conclusion, having only begun to skim the surface on the work.
