The big silent - softening No. 7 (2023,2024)
Inside tissue of a disassembled grand piano put into jars thereby rendering its ab/(para)normalities.
An act of softening what has become sedimented.
Point of departure.
The grand piano is an instrument heavily imbedded within Western institutions of music and has historically been considered a cultural marker of “an educated home.”
The grand piano is equally embedded within a tradition of renegotiating the instrument in various ways: ways that lead into different musical spheres as well as spheres of both performance and visual art. These range from Charles Ives’ quartertone piano duets and John Cages’ prepared piano and piano walks (with Yoko Ono) to the (Fluxus) tradition of destroying or altering pianos by artists such as Yam Jun Paik, Phill Corner, and Annea Lockwood.
In a more modern context, we find Rebecca Horn and Andrea Büttner entering into dialogues with both the instrument and the history of how the grand piano has been renegotiated before.
The Big Silent is the result of Disassembling together a grand piano
To the right (and below) 88 piano parasites, and other giblets of the grand piano.
"When entering a room with a grand piano I experience that even though nobody is playing it, the room is still saturated with the instrument just being there in its sonic silence.The silence of the piano seems to pour itself right out into the room, filling it and oversaturating it.
It is sticky. The grand silence speaks volumes in its stickiness. Within the work I seek to contain the grand piano.
Softening le grand piano—softening the big silent" NLL
