While on Saturday night the Love Parade was raving in Tiergarten, in the atrium of the nearby Kunstgewerbemuseum a re-performance of Charlotte Moorman's John Cage piece 26'1.1944'' was staged. "A small competition," said the director of the Kunstgewerbemuseum. "An alternative," my friend Michal suggested, "or rather, an addition."
The atrium at the Kulturforum, a small oasis with pink roses, was unknown to me. Archivio Conz knows how to welcome people in. For its exhibition Holy Fluxus at the nearby St. Matthew church it installed a large "Festtisch" (party table). With a same generous gesture, it made the exhibition's accompanying concert series for free.
I have been attending the Tuesday evenings: a charming talk of living legend Rudolf Zwirner, an Open Cage by Agnese Tonuitti on toy piano and prepared piano ("both music and laughter have no meaning"), and an evening of deconstruction on piano (think of picking a sonata apart note by note).
Saturday night was extra special: it was the first time that Moorman's interpretation of 26' was re-performed in forty years. Katharina Haider spoke about her restoration of this weird instrument, the cello bomb. Weronika Trojansja and Deborah Walker talked us through Moorman's many notes and scribbles that covered Cage's minimal score. Tabea Schrenk, accompanied by an assistant, did the re-performance.
The re-performance was based on a video of a concert, one of the many that Moorman performed from the 1960s till the 1980s. Cage's score was free for interpretation and Moorman added a collection of "instruments" that include a pistol, various toys, balloons, a telephone call to President Nixon, and that infamous cello bomb: literally, an arial bomb equipped with strings.
Moorman is frying mushrooms, citing Cage, and on stage a portrait of Cage himself is nicely framed with decoration lightning that she at one point plays with a hammer. Moorman smokes, drinks coke, pricks balloons. A pop art version of Cage.
Was Cage himself happy about Moorman's interpretation? "Murder", he called it. Last Saturday night at the atrium, we called it love.
