On a cool April evening in 2007, the balcony at The Church (now Babeville) was packed with riveted onlookers staring with a mix of horror and awe at a gruesome scene unfolding on the floor below.

Two University at Buffalo professors, uniformed in blue work suits with matching gloves and protective headgear, were ceremoniously hacking away at a pair of dilapidated pianos with axes and sledgehammers. While local punk band the Vores screeched out a menacing soundtrack, the destructive duo took turns reducing the instruments to unrecognizable piles of wood and ivory.

Was it art? Few could say. Certainly it was cool to watch.

But what others did say, especially after a subsequent piano-smashing performance on the steps of the Albright- Knox Art Gallery last year, was that the perpetrators of this provocative performance piece had engaged in a pointless transgression against music and culture. Further, some took the opportunity to decry the very notion of contemporary art itself.

A Smashing Time at the Albright-Knox

On Friday, the group, led by UB professors Gary Nickard and Reinhard Reitzenstein and accompanied by London-based artist Craig Smith, launched another intellectually challenging performance piece – this one sans pianos—on the lawn of the Burchfield Penney Art Center.

The debate about Nickard and Reitzenstein’s project, dubbed “Monsters of Nature and Design,” illustrates the seemingly untraversable gulf between much conceptual and academic art and the public’s ability to make sense of it.

And there’s more than enough blame to go around for that misunderstanding.

In Nickard’s words, which he posted on The Buffalo News’ ArtsBeat blog, the project was after “a dialectical encounter between the unconscious and consciousness –in order to blur, indeed even to collapse, the difference between manifest and latent content, and also to present the unconscious in all of its violent splendor as an entertaining spectacle.”

You may now all scratch your heads in unison.

After the first “Monsters” performance, Nickard wrote a fascinating essay explaining the artistic precedents and deep underpinnings of the project. The problem is that the essay, in addition to being as dense and overwritten as anything out of Judith Butler, was not made widely available to the general public. Nickard’s subsequent explanations on the ArtsBeat blog have been seriously illuminating but have come too late for his project to save face among those who it immediately shocked into disenchantment.

Nickard had to expect, then, that public reaction to his very public spectacles would be uninformed, speculative and, as a result, largely critical. But he might not have expected the outpouring of snide, philistine reactions criticizing the group for destroying pianos, or of the ease with which many viewers were able to dismiss the entirety of his project without so much as a question about what it meant.

Read Nickard's extensive explanation of the "Monsters of Nature and Design" project on the ArtsBeat blog.

Pieces like “Monsters of Nature and Design” ask quite a lot of viewers—frankly, a lot more than most viewers are willing to give. That requires artists, curators and journalists (guilty as charged) do everything they can to foster a public understanding and appreciation of that art’s complexities.

That’s even more important since performance art, which had an intense period of popularity in the 1970s and ’80s, is now back in a big way. Local arts organizations, including Big Orbit Gallery, the Burchfield Penney Art Center, Hallwalls and CEPA Gallery all have a history of presenting this work and are likely to present much more of it as its popularity continues to resurge.

As any trip through the halls of the Albright- Knox Art Gallery will show you, conceptual, public art can be seriously difficult stuff. But it only achieves its true potential when its creators clue us all in to its purpose, and the public returns the favor with an open mind and a sense of curiosity.