The Execution Protocol

THE EXECUTION PROTOCOL: A WAR OF CURRENTS: FLOATING PAINTINGS / PIANO EXECUTION — ON ANDY WARHOL’S ELECTRIC CHAIR

$250 | 250 Clouds | 200 People | 88 Notes | 2000 Volts

Andy Warhol Silver Clouds (1966) / Slave Pianos Electric Chair (2007).

Monday the 22nd of October, 8:30 - 11:00pm. The Great Hall of The National Gallery of Victoria. Commissioned by the Melbourne International Arts Festival.

THE EXECUTION PROTOCOL

Created in April 1966 for an exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York, Andy Warhol’s Silver Clouds are floating rectangles of metallised plastic film filled with a mixture of helium and oxygen. The Silver Clouds, designed with the assistance of engineer Billy Klüver, are an embodiment of Warhol’s ‘farewell to painting’, a physical manifestation of his desire for paintings to leave the walls and to float away.

“Oh! Oh! Oh, this is fantastic, Billy!… It’s going to fly away! It’s like a movie! Fantastic! This is one of the most exciting things that’s ever happened to me! It is so beautiful. Oh, Billy, it’s infinite, because it goes in with the sky. Oh, it is fantastic! Oh! … Billy, do you know what our movies are called? Up movies, and up art.” – Andy Warhol

The installation of Warhol’s Silver Clouds at the Great Hall provides the context for a significant new work by Slave Pianos, Electric Chair (2007). These two works, taken together, provide the conceptual foundation for a minutely examined & carefully choreographed evening of extravagant entertainment: The Execution Protocol.

“Is not a man an artist who can painlessly and without brutality dispatch another man?” – Charles Duff

Beginning in late 1963, and continuing though until 1967, Warhol made a series of Electric Chair prints and paintings, part of his extensive Death and Disaster sequence. These works are variations on a photograph of the execution chamber at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining, NY. The Slave Pianos Electric Chair is, in turn, a large scale sculptural variation on Warhol’s work. It accommodates a suspended concert grand piano, held in an elevated position by leather restraints, and bound at its most delicate extremity by the QRS SLAVE PIANO mechanism. Throughout the evening this device will deftly execute the newly extruded Pianology repertoire, painstaking transcriptions of musical works by visual artists. The imminent demise of each work will be announced by an electrically lit sign, incorporated into the design of the chair, and modelled on the ‘SILENCE’ signal located above the entrance to the Sing Sing execution chamber.

“Being born is like being kidnapped, and then sold into slavery” – Andy Warhol

This will not be the first occasion where Warhol’s Silver Clouds have been subsumed into a larger endeavour. In 1968 they were incorporated by choreographer Merce Cunningham into his dance work RainForest, a collaboration with composer and electronic music pioneer David Tudor, and painter and costume-designer Jasper Johns.

“I immediately thought they would be marvellous on stage because they moved, and they were light, and they took light. So I asked Andy and he said, ‘Oh sure’.” – Merce Cunningham

RainForest was in turn subsumed into Persepolis Event, which was performed at the ancient Persian city of Persepolis in 1972 as part of the extraordinary series of international arts festivals held annually, and on an exceedingly lavish scale, from1967 until 1977, in honour of the royal court of the Shahanshah, and his artistically inclined wife, Shahbanou Farah.

“One of the odder aspects of the late Shah’s regime was its wish to buy modern Western art, so as to seem ‘liberal’ and ‘advanced’. Seurat in the parlor, SAVAK in the basement. …Nothing pulls the art world into line faster than the sight of an imperial checkbook… The main beneficiary of this was Warhol…” – Robert Hughes

“Examine the works of your predecessors and learn a lesson” – The Holy Qur’an

The ‘crippled-symmetry’ of the political, gastronomical and historical ramifications that this sequence of subsumptions suggests provides an illuminating framework to connect the central works to their contingent architectural presentation.

“I think of the whole thing as a huge deep, sonorous Persian carpet suspended in the air.” – Leonard French

A series of interventions are constructed to facilitate the provision of food and other distractions to the audience. A security entrance is reconfigured to apply 2000 volts of electricity to guests as they arrive. Dancers from the Merce Cunningham company will operate the electric chair and assist with the catering for the evening, which will be provided by McDonalds and Coca-Cola. Alcohol will be provided by Slave Pianos in specially constructed silver cans and from modified wine cask bladders.

“The most beautiful thing in Tokyo is McDonald’s. The most beautiful thing in Stockholm is McDonald’s. The most beautiful thing in Florence is McDonald’s. Peking and Moscow don’t have anything beautiful yet.” – Andy Warhol

“A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke… All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good.” – Andy Warhol

Biographical details: Slave Pianos have surely justified their motto, “Nothing Human is Alien to Us”. Its members have made music, pulled hoaxes, divorced, married, and even given birth. Slave Pianos have taken hostages, grown flowers, kept pets, written books, volunteered as human guinea pigs for medical research, played cricket, held picnics, put on plays, saved lives, studied, committed arson, committed suicide, murdered, raped, pushed drugs, gone mad, formed a union, and found God. Slave Pianos are Danius Kesminas, Michael Stevenson, Neil Kelly and Rohan Drape. Slave Pianos are represented by Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney.

Meet the wonderful weird guys in their orange jumpsuits

Susan Shineberg
The Age, October 20, 2007

At the glitzy opening night of Berlin’s Art Forum trade fair, the Slave Pianos are in their element. The zany Australian art/music collective has teamed up for some intriguing performance-theatre mayhem with a group of American and European Fluxus-inspired conceptual artists. One of their number is, bizarrely, the ex-president of Lithuania, Vytautas Landsbergis, busily plunking away on a harpsichord and playing speed chess.

The Slaves scamper around in bright-orange boiler suits, getting tangled in ropes, holding placards in Lithuanian and ushering on the backing groups — a string quartet and small choir, whose members cheerfully munch on carrots between their respective performances of music by Monteverdi.

While anything is possible with this Melbourne-based group, the Berlin show seems at first a very different proposition to its collaboration with The Cloud Party homage to Andy Warhol at the National Gallery Of Victoria. Being touted by the Melbourne International Arts Festival as a “once in a life-time happening”, it’s a recreation of Warhol’s novel event in 1966 at a New York gallery, where the artist launched large numbers of silver helium-filled pillows, or “clouds” into the air; choreographer Merce Cunningham (also here for the Melbourne Festival) would incorporate them into his piece Rain Forest two years later. Yet the Slave Pianos are in many ways an ideal complement to Warhol’s clouds and the implied artistic exhilaration and anarchy of the ’60s.

“We wanted to turn up the heat on both those sides of Warhol,” says composer Neil Kelly. “You know, that really playful side — which is the silver clouds — but also that very curious dark side. Actually for us it was less about the image used in Warhol’s Electric Chair paintings and more about the idea of executing these mechanically played works.”

The great pity is there are only 200 available tickets to the Cloud Party performance, with a $250 price tag — that apparently only covers the cost of catering. Festival director Kristy Edmunds acknowledges this with obvious regret (was this decision forced on her?), pointing out that the rest of the festival is rather more inclusive.

“Actually we wanted to have Campbell’s soup and hot dogs,” says Kelly mischievously.

But guests get to take home a genuine Warhol “silver cloud”, and there’s also a rumour that Warhol’s contemporary, Merce Cunningham, and some of his dancers may take part in the Slave Pianos’ performance.

The Slave Pianos — comprising composers Neil Kelly and Rohan Drape, and visual artists Danius Kesminas and Michael Stevenson — come together at irregular intervals to present seriously playful art/music happenings, with an assortment of other groups. These have included the Astra Choir, Chamber Made Opera, and the Krasnyi (Red) Quartet, a Russian string quartet who play exclusively Soviet music; for the latter, the Slaves fashioned special sickle-shaped bows.

Computer-operated pianos also feature prominently in their performances, and this is certainly the case in The Cloud Party installation Electric Chair. A suspended grand piano will play a series of compositions, transcriptions of musical works by visual artists, using 88 solenoid-driven fingers. The pieces will be symbolically and systematically “executed” in the large electric chair underneath, the Slaves’ orange suits providing a clear reference to the uniforms worn at prisons such as Sing Sing and Guantanamo Bay.

“We’ve got about 20 pieces for this performance,” says Kelly, “and they range upwards from about one minute or so. Oh, there’s also a piece by George Brecht, one of the Fluxus artists, that goes for about 20 seconds.”

Kelly and fellow composer Rohan Drape are considerably more reserved than their live-wire colleague, installation artist Danius Kesminas. Melbourne-born Kesminas (also a singer in an Indonesian punk band) is of Lithuanian descent, which helps explain the Slaves’ significant associations with that country. This includes a fondness for the ideas of eccentric Lithuanian conceptual artist George Maciunas, founder of the ‘60s Fluxus (“fluid”) movement — a loose network of artists, composers and designers noted for blending different artistic media and disciplines. While Fluxus concepts are just one source among many of the Slaves’ offbeat artistic inspirations, the affinity is obvious, and the Australians have clearly got a kick out of working with the ’60s veterans in Berlin — and vice versa. One of them, New York artist Larry Miller, gave an entertaining but shrewd assessment of the Melbourne group in a running commentary fuelled by drinks afterwards.

“Well, there’s these wonderful weird guys in orange jumpsuits who somehow seem to have mystically absorbed some Fluxus history from various sources, and they sort of mash it up into their own ideas,” Miller says. “Then with their great, winning personalities they talk us into becoming kind of human, off the shelf ready-mades to be in their mash-up. I sense a kind of irreverent reverence about these guys, you know? I mean, three guys in orange suits,” he finishes, spreading his hands. “How can you say no?”

The Cloud Party, at the National Gallery of Victoria’s Great Hall on Monday at 8.30pm. Book on 1300 136 166. The Age is a sponsor of the Melbourne International Arts Festival.

Susan Shineberg is a Melbourne writer.

Clouds mostly hot air second time around

Penny Webb, Reviewer
The Age, October 24, 2007

Kristy Edmunds’ intricate third festival program draws on the creative legacy of John Cage. Given the genius of Slave Pianos (visual artists Danius Kesminas and Mike Stevenson; composers Neil Kelly and Rohan Drape), we might have enjoyed a Cagean moment at the NGV on Monday night. But, like a balloon with a puncture, The Cloud Party wound down almost as soon as it started. Certainly, the lyrical promise of hundreds of large, slowly circulating, floating silver balloons, glimpsed as you approached the Great Hall, was never fulfilled - but chance is a fine thing.

Billed as a happening, The Cloud Party took its name from Andy Warhol’s helium-filled silver “pillows” (Silver Clouds as they were called when exhibited). Festival visitor and long-time Cage collaborator Merce Cunningham liked them so much when he saw them at Leo Castelli’s gallery in 1966 that he incorporated them into the choreography of RainForest. David Tudor’s soundtrack for the work was the highly charged but minimal sounds heard as you entered the space, part of Slave Pianos’ concept for The Execution Protocol. (The name Slave Pianos comes from the Cagean device of a prepared piano.) At the centre of this event was a computer-controlled piano - a slave to a controlling mechanism, for sure - that executed about 25 transcriptions derived from sound works by visual artists as diverse as Rolf Harris and Joseph Beuys working with Nam June Paik; Jean Dubuffet and Tony Clarke.

Silver pillows/Slave Pianos - what odds would an SP bookie give you on the chances of this lovely conjunction of S’s and P’s? Although chance was more valued in early modern art and music than it is today, Cunningham still uses it as part of his working method. Did anything happen by chance on Monday night? Not that I could see.

Slave Pianos attempted an antithesis: a darkly disturbing Warhol motif, that of the electric chair at Sing Sing, was evoked as a contrast to the reflected light and floating movement of the pillows. A huge, chunky timber “chair” supported not only the piano, but a video monitor and two batteries each discharging 15,000 volts of energy intermittently. Unfortunately, this pristine structure lacked visual menace. The video monitor showed the title of the work being transcribed interspersed with the word “silence”, a detail of Warhol’s image that critic Robert Hughes found so chilling.

Poignantly, another chair and another mechanical movement had earlier taken centre stage. Cunningham, confined to a wheelchair, had briefly recounted for plainly adoring listeners his use of the pillows - “We never called them clouds,” he said. (A freestanding screen set designed by Robert Rauschenberg for Minutiae in 1954 and Jasper Johns’ modules for Walkaround Time in 1968 are on show in an upstairs gallery until Sunday.)

Perhaps happenings are always apocryphal. In years to come, I might boast that I was in the Great Hall when silver pillows filled the air and one nudged my leg like a cat at meal times, and that I gazed at the Leonard French ceiling and felt we were all in a giant snow dome with whirling particles reflecting the light. But right now I feel like part of a public that wanted to be participants. “Go, Slaves!”