There’s this guy Luciano Chessa, Italian, classically trained at Bologna’s conservatory, PhD from UC Davis, teaches at the San Francisco Conservatory, and he’s here at the Performance Studies International conference making a goddamn piano sing like it’s possessed by the ghost of Luigi Russolo himself.
He’s performing Variazioni su un Oggetto di Scena, Variations on a Prop, and the prop in question is stuffed animals. Stuffed fucking animals. Alongside a Steinway. And somehow this isn’t precious art school bullshit, it’s visceral and strange and necessary. Because Luciano gets it. He understands that noise isn’t just sound pollution, it’s the raw material of modern consciousness. He wrote the book on Russolo, literally, the first English monograph on the guy who invented the intonarumori, those beautiful noise machines that tried to capture the sound of the twentieth century being born.
At Stanford, at Franconia, at YBCA, wherever I’ve pointed my lens at this maniac, there’s this sense that you’re documenting someone who refuses the false choice between scholar and shaman. He’s both. He plays the Vietnamese đàn bầu, the musical saw, conducts orchestras of reconstructed Futurist noise intoners featuring composers like Mike Patton and Pauline Oliveros. He stages operas with Gertrude Stein librettos and puts them in museums.
The thing about documenting Luciano is that you’re not just photographing a performance. You’re catching the moment when academic rigor and pure creative chaos decide to fuck and make something beautiful and weird and completely unpredictable. He’s digging through archives in Bologna, uncovering occult connections between Leonardo da Vinci and early twentieth-century noise art, then turning that research into performances that make your spine tingle.
This PSI conference moment, it isn’t about the university or the institutional frame. It was about witnessing someone who’s spent his life understanding how the avant-garde works, then choosing to live inside that understanding, to embody it rather than just analyze it. To make it matter agai
Variazioni su un oggetto di scena (Variations on a Prop, 2002/05/07), for piano and stuffed toys. Var. XXII (Valsugana) Var. XI (Maridemi mi) Var. I (Reposare) Louganis (2007), for piano and TV/VCR combo (video by Terry Berlier)