David Bradshaw at Mad Brook Farm

On July 9, 2005, David Bradshaw, an artist of unusual means and implementation, put on an outdoor performance in northern Vermont called a "Fulmination Sculpture." The site was Mad Brook Farm, close to the Canadian border, a surviving outpost of the New Age commune era. An upright piano, a Wheelock built in 1902, would be "played to death," as Bradshaw's announcement read, "by gunfire." A number of shooters, 45 at least, one or more at a time, using revolvers, semi-automatic pistols and rifles of different vintages, created the engagement. They stood at tables lined up some 30 or 40 yards across a small pond from the Wheelock, which was positioned on an advantageous hillside with two auxiliary targets nearby--head-and-torso steel silhouettes, stuck upright in the ground. It was raining that day. A crowd of about 40 spectators milled around in the field behind the shooters in raingear under umbrellas, plugs in ears, some wearing the recommended sunglasses, watching, waiting to see when and how the old instrument--so badly out of tune after decades of disuse that it would not carry a recognizable melody--was going to die.

Bradshaw, almost a charter member of Mad Brook (having gone there in 1970 after its founding in 1968), had recently returned after spending nine years in Louisiana. His great piano shootout was perhaps his rip-roaring way of saying he was back. He is well known in those parts as a marksman, serious about guns and gun culture, a record-setter in long-range revolver competitions, a certified Master with high-powered rifles (a ranking established by the U.S. Military), a member of the International Handgun Metallic Silhouette Association, member in good standing of the NRA, and by the way no fan of Michael Moore's anti-gun film, Bowling for Columbine, which Bradshaw has only heard about.

He is also an explosives expert. At Mad Brook during the '70s and '80s he did at least 30 dynamite performances, blowing up sheets of steel laid over excavated holes. I saw one of these events in 1992 and was fixated by Bradshaw's careful process in preparing his materials, then transported by the deafening explosion when tin and steel rent the sky borne on clouds of smoke. Bradshaw looks for his steel to "liquefy" or bend under such impact in certain ways that please him, and then to show or store it as "sculpture."

From the destroyed Wheelock, shot at with two or three thousand rounds of ammo (it never did "die," i.e. keel over, but was in ruins otherwise), he developed a plan to extract the cast-iron "harp"--its music-making component-and maybe hang it on his wall like a moose head.

Leftovers from Bradshaw's violent events are his stock-in-trade. He hasn't cared much for their commodification, as he attests himself, and as shown by a history of minimal exhibiting. After painting with acrylics on large hanging canvases during the mid-to-late 1960s, he left for Vermont in 1969, abandoning the New York art world.

The "Fulmination Sculpture" is Bradshaw's only destruction of a valued cultural object as a spectator performance. He may bear some oblique relation to artists of the 1960s destruction art movement, like Ralph (now Rafael) Ortiz, who still occasionally smashes pianos, but I would say the connection is only psychological, if you count rage as a factor in ruination events. Niki de Saint Phalle's famous shooting actions of the 1960s come to mind. Far from making art like Margaret Evangeline, who sprays sheets of steel with bullets, or Cai Guo-Qiang, who often works with gunpowder and fireworks, both of whom are interested in the esthetic results, Bradshaw is a kind of outlaw artist, completely unto himself. The performance seems to be the main thing. He loves showing off what he can do with guns and dynamite, sharing what he describes as "satisfying, beautiful, frightening, exhilarating and dangerous."

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