The day I sold my destroyed piano to the Tate

One day in October 1966 I came home from school and found a large man stripped to the waist, attacking the family piano with a woodman’s axe. Seeing the anxious look on my face, my father assured me there was nothing to be afraid of. The axe-wielding man was, he explained, an ‘artist’ who was ‘creating a work of art’.

My 11-year-old brain was puzzled: how could this axe-wielding lunatic be an artist? Can you destroy a piano and call it art? These same basic questions came to my mind last week when I went to Tate Britain and found that very piano hanging on a wall after 11 years in the Tate’s storage rooms.

The piece – entitled, ‘Duncan Terrace Piano Destruction Concert’ – was by the American destruction artist Raphael Montanez Ortiz. Duncan Terrace was the street where my family lived in Islington, north London. So what was Ortiz doing in our house destroying our piano? And, as many will no doubt wonder, what was that piano doing in Tate Britain?

Ortiz had been invited to participate in a Destruction in Art Symposium (DIAS) held in London in September 1966. Poets, scientists, writers, thinkers and artists from America and Europe – including the notorious Otto Muehl and the then unknown Yoko Ono – were invited to explore how the creative community could respond to the violence of modern life. This, after all, was the era of Vietnam and fears about nuclear war.

I’m not sure how Ortiz ended up in our house – most of the DIAS events were held in the Africa Centre in Covent Garden – but I suspect that he’d been invited to pop around with his axe by my father Jay Landesman, who collected avant-garde art and avant-garde people.