Don't Shoot Me, I'm Only the Piano

A review of David Bradshaw's "Fulmination Sculpture," by Jill Johnston, in the December issue of Art in America:


"On July 9, 2005, David Bradshaw, an artist of unusual means and implementation, put on an outdoor performance in northern Vermont called a "Fulmination Sculpture." The site was Mad Brook Farm, close to the Canadian border, a surviving outpost of the New Age commune era. An upright piano, a Wheelock built in 1902, would be "played to death," as Bradshaw's announcement read, "by gunfire." A number of shooters, 45 at least, one or more at a time, using revolvers, semi-automatic pistols and rifles of different vintages, created the engagement. They stood at tables lined up some 30 or 40 yards across a small pond from the Wheelock, which was positioned on an advantageous hillside with two auxiliary targets nearby--head-and-torso steel silhouettes, stuck upright in the ground. It was raining that day. A crowd of about 40 spectators milled around in the field behind the shooters in raingear under umbrellas, plugs in ears, some wearing the recommended sunglasses, watching, waiting to see when and how the old instrument--so badly out of tune after decades of disuse that it would not carry a recognizable melody--was going to die."



Mmm. Part of me wishes pianos could fire back.