s painting stubbornly resists to the obsession definitely break the links with its objective model, hanging in the atmosphere of those times. Neither the hand in the right lower corner, convulsively grasping the last accord of the liberating sound off, could the keyboard prevent from total dissipation in trappy waters of the lake. The objective reality disappeared and only from time to time it allusively appears in rangy meanders of the artistic discourse, of course considerably modified. Kandinsky's incorporeal form uses as crutches for its spiritual content the elements of piano mechanic. From the viewpoint of harmony is the Beethoven's piano however more perfect than Orpheus's lyre, so no wonder, that it gradually starts to replace it also in the realm of metaphors and even here are sticking the roots of the majority of dalliances with the “colour” music. Visual and acoustic predisposition of the piano are like created for the synestesy. Already Roger Fry stated, that we owe for emotions, awaken in us by visual arts, to main keys of some of our positive physical needs. But the different reincarnations of the subjective reality do often take the shape of the piano or its fragments. Once they have a character of free visual associations, as in the case of Mondrians's swinging boogie-woogie, some other time of morphologically more concrete parables, as for example in some portraits of Morgan O'Hara.

But the brake in the form of Picasso's and Braque's wittgensteinian simultaneous “plain view” was more effective. Not only it had save leastwise the mimetic picture of the reality, but by the consequent incorporation of its fragments it had break new ground for the Satie-Duchampian revolution in the form of musique d'amaubliement and ready-made. Felt pads of piano hammers could evidently not let Joseph Beuys indolent, who this, for him “sacral” material expands onto the whole body of the royal musical instrument. The piano, hanging from the ceiling, of Rebecca Horn is shooting out its entrails in a regular “noisy” monotone. And “the best known bad pianist of the world” Nam June Paik is preparing his pianos not only acoustically, but also visually, using the TV screen as a medium and anticipating some aspects of the virtual reality.

In the sphere of music it was Béla Bartók who sounded an alarm by ostinate rhythms of his famous Sonata for two pianos and battery. Cage's prepared piano, the legendary exhibitionist “piano” actions and events of representatives of the Fluxus movement, or Paik's “videopiano” are only the most transparent exceptions, confirming the winged rule “Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi”. And although the experiments of Alois Hába, Henry Cowell, Harry Partch or David Tudor are representing the more exact and structural input into the piano creation of our century, the synonym of the avant-garde piano turned to be John Cage thanks to his “poetic” pragmatism, linking the avant-garde sense for experiment with the oriental wisdom and spontaneous submission. In the light of the detection, that even Steinway once reputedly played with the “heretic” idea to transform the artificial tone of the piano into “violin sound”, the experiments with the piano mentioned above seem to be really heretic.

Is there after all this hard to imagine the piano in the shape of Kosuthian tautologies? Absolutely not. The musician Frank Zappa in his pre-mortal creative spasm - opera-pantomime Civilization, Phaze III - accomodated its fictive and real, human and animal characters into the colossal “abstract” piano. The space, adjusted in ebony, defined by quasi cubist relations, is suggesting an identikit of a piano of stylized chords, resonators, hammers and fragments of the resonation plate, inside of its splitted interior. In its surreal coordinates there are then happening diverse forms of “inexplicable socio-physical communication,” their central and sometimes the only semantically relevant theme is, how otherwise, the piano. After a coloured, cubist, quartertone, prepared, mechanical, toy, destructed, felt, burning, electrified, deconstructed, interactive...... piano, we finally live the conceptual, virtual piano, the piano as a metaphor.

“The piano play - dance of human fingers,” sighed once Ludwig Wittgenstein. The piano figering has lost its aristocratic nobleness and now it serves only to pragmatically describe the way, how to shift the fingers, what has remarked also Roland Barthes: „... fingering establishes in a deliberate manner what will become an automatism: in short, it is a programming of a machine, an animal inscription. Now, if I play badly - aside from the lack of velocity, which is a purely muscular problem - it is because I fail to abide by the written fingering: I improvise, each time I play, the position of my fingers, and therefore I can never play anything without making mistakes. The reason for this is obviously that I want an immediate pleasure and reject the tedium of training, for training hampers pleasure - for the sake of a greater ulterior pleasure, as they say (we tell the pianist what the gods said to Orpheus: Don't turn back prematurely on the effects of your action). So that the piece, in the perfection attributed to it but never really attained, functions as a bit of hallucination: I gladly give myself up to the watchword of a fantasy: „Immediately!“ even at the cost of a considerable loss of reality.“1 The piano is therefore gradually losing not only its sonic and visual, but even its metaphoric magic. And what about the toy piano, the “gamelan” sound of which once inspired John Cage to write a suit for it ? Neither it is such as it was. Just try to buy in a toy-shop a non-plastic acoustic piano, which will be not pink, violet or screaming green and which is not twinkling !

The unfavourable situation could be reversed by pianos of two Milans. First of them thanks to the excessive care of some Slovak gallerists has already lost his pianos. And what about the piano of other Milan ? He lately sold his beautiful white piano for 45.000 Czech crowns ! And therefore there was established the PIANO HOTEL. It was, surely, not established by itself. For its origin it is bound to the initiative of Michal Murin, who took up the thrown glove of the Australian musician Ross Bolleter, the co-founder of the World Association for Ruined Piano Studies (WARPS) and established it daughter branch in Slovakia. The Piano Hotel had its opening at the 3rd year of the intermedial project of the Society for Nonconventional Music SOUND OFF in synagogue of Šamorín, siding as exhibition room for the domestic At Home Gallery. In the invitation to the exhibition we can read: “Equally, like there exists the need to free animals, there should naturally exist also the need to protect old music instruments - memorials of the cultural heritage. The Guild for Protection and for Freedom of Pianos through its hotel, or rather asylum, offers to musical instruments resuscitation services through the artistic appropriation and reinterpretation. The work of artists in this process is much more than sanitation, because the visually sculptured objects are resurrected in the view of spectator-listener and they are not condemned to age in some whatsoever institutions, establishments, stores or lofts. Mentally and physically handicapped destroyed pianos are by their qualitatively new presentation again integrated into the fully valuable life and they are participating on the forming of our cultural social environment.”

To resuscitate old “non-functional” or by different reasons squelched pianos in Šamorín have undertook: Milan Adamčiak, Bartolomé Ferrado, Peter Kalmus, Rav Kiel, Otis Laubert, Viktor Lois and Rachel Rosenbach. In the case of the first one it was not a resuscitation, but rather a last Sacrament to a torso of a piano, destroyed not only by natural but mainly by social, in this case even cultural climate. There was levitating upon it the author’s disillusion of the permanent weathering of the general cultural consciousness, so far away from the nostalgia, radiating from the centrifugal harp of Viktor Lois, towering in the immediate neighbourhood of Adamčiak's ground-based piano. The framework of the object, which made Lois famous due to the concert on the water surface on Venice Biennial five years ago, creates the shield of the piano from the heritage of the legendary Hungarian actress Lujza Blaha. Lois did “trepan” it, fitted by a pair of wash machine drums and equipped with a rotating bicycle mechanism, what enables to the potential player on this bizarre orchestrion to wheedle out sounds during an orbicular ride. Adamčiak's piano and Lois's piano-harp turned to be fat acquisitions of the instrumental stock of the musical-theatrical performance The Left Hand of the Universe, initiated by mentioned Ross Bolleter and two performances of it preceded the exhibition in Šamorín. Together with the Murin's solo meditation about the “piano silence” at the end of the project they were simultaneously coordinated with concerts on ruined pianos in Perth and Colorado Springs. The Šamorín part of the triple concert had an undertitle “multimedial oratorio” and the trinity of performers, Milan Adamčiak, Michal Murin and a composer from Brno, Zdeněk Plachý - moving in their creation on the edge between music and theater systematically already for a longer period, managed to defend the semantic connotation of this notion demonstratively. In spite of Bolleter's (right) hands binding scenario. The unfulfilled desire of Peter Kalmus to throw into the river Váh a concert piano was leastwise partially realized in Piano Hotel and the spectator ought to be satisfied with a stylized computer print of the reproduction of the effective sequence from the film Piano. But Kalmus's communication with other participants of the exhibition was more successful. In the assemblage Hommage a Fluxus he reposed residual fragments of the children piano keyboard, which was three months ago “disseminated” by the Spaniard Bartolomé Ferrado during his performance in Nové Zámky. The appropriate reconstruction tried to recall the original context also by simultaneous video-projection of the Ferrado's performance. Very inventional was also Mailart Fuga for Piano, Kalmus's common object-graphic installation with Rachel Rosenbach. Neither she remained indolent to the heritage of John Cage. His spirit was transcending, more or less, directly or indirectly, the whole Piano Hotel. Rosenbach's Prepared Coffin Piano for Cage's Silence was not only an appealing meditation about key aspects of Cage's philosophy, but also a quiet manifestation of the silence, which the artist left behind by his departure from the mundane world. Rav Kiel, who was invited to the exhibition in Šamorín by Jozef Cseres, presented himself by a text-visual-acoustic installation, recycling the ideas of John Cage, text fragments from the bizarre scenario of Zappa's work Civilization, Phaze III, and the Jewish piano music by John Zorn. Otis Laubert used the hospitality of Piano Hotel for the realization of his older project I’m Playing Quietly and I’m Unheard. Although the white cotton-wool package of the piano body muted visually the “edge” of his tacked keyboard, but the more obsedant was the desire of spectators to “prelude” on it. Authentic blood traces after such a sado-masochistic play was the best evidence of it and apparently a satisfaction for the author’s intention.

“Piano play - dance of human fingers,” are sighing along with Wittgenstein the contemporary artists, and it seems, as if the loss of reality, mentioned by Roland Barthes, does absolutely no matter to them. Contrariwise, they are compensating it by “hallucinogen” resources of hedonism, enlarging so not only their own consciousness, but above all the consciousness of the spectator-listener, who starts to be accustomed to the context confusion of the “non-authentic” communication, moreover, he starts to enjoy it gastronomically. And so he rather does not turn back on “Orphean way” and gladly gives himself up to the watchword of a fantasy: „Immediately!“

Notes:
1 Barthes, R. - Roland Barthes_ Papermac, London, 1995, pg. 70.