FRANCES MORRIS

DIRECTOR OF TATE MODERN

‘Rebecca Horn came out of surrealism and the Dada movement – an absurdist tradition – but also explores the darkness of your imagination, and those two things come together beautifully in Concert for Anarchy. At first it seems like a mute object – a very bizarre one, why would a piano be hanging upside-down? – and then every two or three minutes, it suddenly throws itself open and the keyboard vomits out the keys, making this incredible cacophonous crashing noise, before slowly pulling itself back up into its case. There’s a personal reason why I like this work, which is that one of my mum’s favourite poems by DH Lawrence talks about “a child sitting under a piano, in the boom of the tingling strings”. I still remember the sensation of crouching beneath a table or piano as a girl, occupying that space of my imagination. Standing here gives me the same feeling.’