Allora and Calzadilla

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

Museum of Modern Art - New York

By Marco Antonini

Ninth in a series of ongoing live and documented performances presented at the MoMA, Stop, Repair, Prepare: Variations on “Ode to Joy” for a prepared piano has been already labeled by many as Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla’s masterpiece. The two artists will represent the United States in the upcoming Venice Biennial and have emerged as one of the most ambitious and interesting voices in the international visual arts scene. Their brand name is usually associated to installations, videos, and performances as emotionally and sensually strong as conceptually and politically loaded. In Calzadilla’s words, “Not making Sense” still remains a top priority on the duo’s agenda, as the playful, absurdist situation created by Stop seems to confirm. The details, anyhow, suggest a penchant for extremely well thought and carefully constructed situations, images, and narratives that dig deeper and deeper into the gap between art world-sanctioned aesthetics and the problematic implications that the minimalist “What you see is what you see” credo implies.

Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla,?Stop, Repair, Prepare: Variations on “Ode to Joy” for a Prepared Piano. 2008. ?Prepared Bechstein piano, pianist (Evan Shinners shown). ?Piano: 40” x 67” x 84.” ?The Museum of Modern Art. Gift of the Julia Stoschek Foundation, Düsseldorf. ?© 2010 Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla. ?Photograph by Yi-Chun Wu.

Watching Allora and Calzadilla’s performers taking turns, struggling to play their own variations on Beethoven’s culturally loaded and universally famous theme, can be a life-changing experience or just another nonsense moment in a gallery hopping day. As the pianists slowly drag the wheeled piano around, small crowds follow them, take pictures and video, chat loudly, and laugh at the cartoonish image of a musician literally popping out of the heavy instrument (itself a massively culturally connoted object) to play it backwards, reaching the keys from its inside. More than a Cageian piano “preparation,” this is a smooth and technically exquisite violation. The central hole actually removes two octaves of strings, creating another limit to the musical execution of the pieces.

Since the beginning of their careers, the artists have explored performance, subtly and intelligently extending its limits in space and time. In this sense, Stop is particularly apt to exemplify the peculiar attitude that Allora and Calzadilla have towards the traditional role of the performer. Worn as a mechanical dress, the piano is an impossibly dysfunctional extension of the musician’s subjectivity. It limits and detours his or her effort toward the accomplishment of a vision whose final result will always necessarily be greater that the sum of its components. Chance and context have always been major factors in their work, but in this case they really seem to reclaim the center stage. Once again, Allora and Calzadilla question the meaning of what we consider art and the validity of the “real life” references and ideas that seem to contribute to the great complexity and undoubted depth of their works. It is a way of destabilizing us and our own preconceptions. It is an urgent alarm message; a last-chance invitation to stop, re-wire our imagination, and prepare it for action.

(December 8, 2010 - January 10, 2011)

Marco Antonini is an art critic and curator based in New York. He is the gallery director of NURTUREart, in Brooklyn.

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