Andrea Büttner

Andrea Büttner’s multichannel video installation Piano Destructions (2014) on view at the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, Minnesota), in 2016.
”The immersive video installation that presents, silently on four screens, interventions by (predominantly male) artists. A fifth screen offers a powerful counterpoint—and a soundtrack: nine women pianists, orchestrated by Büttner, perform works by Chopin, Schumann, and Monteverdi in tandem…
Piano Destructions takes as its starting point the international Fluxus performances of the 1960s, in which predominantly male artists destroyed pianos as part of their artistic process, notably George Maciunas…Joseph Beuys, Nam June Paik, and Ben Vautier. The burning, dropping, smashing, and hammering of the pianos—an instrument traditionally associated with bourgeois female education—resulted in highly charged and gendered acts.”
Photo and text courtesy Walker Art Center.

Andrea Büttner’s edition
Parkett Vol. 97