Videos by Dan Senn

A House On Jungmannova
4+4+4 Days in Motion
A documentary by Dan Senn

Supplemental Writings

(continued from the Introduction)

For example, Milos Vojtechovsky, a festival curator told me of an installation by local Czech artists, who collected old medical supplies and equipment which they then used to create installations of faux medical environments. Within this house, the transplant was especially effective, in part, because the building had been used for many years as a dental clinic. Early on in the event patrons were seen innocently showing off the surgical tools they had found causing the artists to install a clear shield at the entrance to their piece.

This documentary is also about the social usefulness of art venues which exercise the continuum between "white box" galleries and rough alternative spaces, like this house on Jungmannova, as well as the spectrum of possible aesthetic interventions available to artists in a building which doubles as a work of art.

"Imperfection has always strove to undermine perfection, yet it has always turned out to be its unintended decoration, its subversive bijouterie. Imperfection establishes and marks up the line between what is flawless and what failed. Imperfection comes to life when certain rules are not followed and causes a defect. Imperfection forces the system to remain vigil, to search for faults, to respond, to change and to adapt. Imperfection is stimulating. There is no worlds without imperfection." (paragraph from festival brochure and website)

The White Box vs Jungmannova

White box galleries, like a good frame, should not interfere with the art they present and even have an amplifying effect. This is achieved through good lighting and comfortable temperatures, open space and white walls, quiet and security. In contrast, alternative spaces, like the Jungmanova house, are messy and visually intrusive. They are filled with refuse, code violations, broken windows, pigeon shit, leaky roofs, broken plumbing and inadequate power. Quite clearly, art that is created for a white box gallery may not work in a rough alternative space.

I think of traditional white box galleries as transparent vehicles which function to focus attention on the art as well as the individuality and will of the artist. By comparison, rough, alternative spaces, as represented by the house on Jungmanova, are opaque because they impede access to the art and artist individuality while raising many difficulties, logistical and otherwise.

The more opaque a venue is, the more likely it will function as an artifact, or as an anthropomorphic stucture which, in turn, will engage the artist in a form of aesthetic negotiation--a kind of give and take which has the effect of diluting the willfull individuality while, paradoxically, inducing a powerful individuating effect. As the venue shifts toward opacity, there is less room for controlled meaning and metaphor as the artist is absorbed by the mechanics of the integration process. For the patron, too, the opaque venue provides a non-traditional role and increased opportunities for aesthetic investigation, most of which are left to curators in the white box setting.

Therefore, in summary, the more opaque a venue is...

- the more it becomes an artifact and an anthropomorphic structure.
- the more an artist must engage the house in conceptual negotiation.
- the less the artist has access to willful meaning and metaphor.
- the less an artist is able to express willful individuality.
- the more likely an artist will embrace new ideas.
- the increased responsibility of the patron to critically assess what is and what isn't art.
- the increased benefit to society.

Framing and Attribution

When an artist is asked to present in an alternative environment, such as in the house on Jungmannova, they cannot count on an antiseptic and secure environment. Even before developing a concept, they must visit the site where they may discover the natural conditions already in a state of unframed beauty, and this will cause a peculiar sense of uneasiness.

The source of this discomfort is twofold.

First, most artists desire some form of establishment recognition for their work and this will require white box gallery exposure. Without these venues and deadlines, an artist's work will suffer. Yet, art presented within an opaque venue runs the immanent risk of being overlooked as it may blend too closely with the existing conditions.

Second, such a venue can be intimidating as the artist questions whether an intervention is justified or even necessary. What should follow, however, is that this "natural" beauty, the "brokenness" of the Jungamannova house, would itself remain undetected and unrecognized in the scurry of everyday life unless it is "socialized into usefulness" through framing, attribution and exhibition, and this is the justification for a considerate process of aesthetic integration.

House Negotiations

Here are 10 ways an artist might connect with the opaque venue.

(click on blue headings to see video clip; Quicktime needed; best viewed using an Apple computer)

1. DO NOTHING: This could be reaction to the complexity and beauty of the presentation space, where the artist chooses to do nothing or to intervene only to the extent of an attribution. One could, for example, claim an enclosed space where existing conditions are acceptable and, perhaps, beyond what the artist is capable of anyways. Afterall, atrophy can be quite beautiful. A gesture of this sort could also be taken as an act of preservation-an acknowledgement of nature's deft hand in making things beautiful. To frame this decision, that is, to make this choice clear to others, while reserving and protecting the room itself, it is necessary to "sign the piece" by posting an attribution.

2. SUBTLE EXTENSION: An artist may choose to interfere only slightly with existing conditions through minor alterations. Here, as before, the subtlety of the gesture will run the risk of being missed by patrons and will require overt framing and attribution. Such an intervention should also have a rocognized level of systemmatic regularity to it, an aspect of humanness not usually associated with nature. While the patrons attending an opaque venue are always questioning "what is art, and what isn't art," their are limits to their detective skills.

3. IRONIC AMPLIFICATION: An artist may choose to emphasize an existing condition through a sense of irony. Here some playful trickery might exist as patrons are already in a state of planned confusion and not always certain of what they are looking at anyways. This was the case where one artist painted shadows over existing shadows.

4. IMPOSED AMPLIFICATION: An artist may choose to impose alien characteristics on top of existing conditions as was the case with Michaela Petru's work. Here, the intervention surmises what might have been present, given the history of the venue, and then reinstates it. Like other interventions already mentioned, without framing and attibution, this too will run the risk being overlooked.

5. ON SITE RECONTEXTUALIZATION: An artist may choose to use materials from other parts of the house, like the sound of the first floor transformer buzzing or the many doors which had were laying about abandoned and then to relocate and recontextualize them elsewhere.

6. AMPLIFIED DISSIMILARITY: In an inverse relationship to what happens in a traditional gallery, an artist may choose to use the rough environment to contrast and amplify their work. This option is the most transportable even to white box venues as it may lack an hint of site specifity.

7. EXTREME INTERVENTION: This is possible in an alternative spaces where the building is slated for removal or complete remodelling, as with the Jungmanova house-where damage incurred will be of little or no consequence.

8. OFF SITE RECONTEXTUALIZATION: An artist may choose merge a reality with the opaque venue. This was most effectively done by Czech artists who brought in old medical supplies and equipment and filled a space to create a kind of feax clinic of sorts .

9. SELF REFERENCING: As many artists entered the Jungmannova house before the festival, after years of abandonment, some experienced a fear and foreboding in reaction to its dark, dirty, damp and overall complexity. Pigeons were every-some fluttering in your face. This experience became integral to the concepts developed for the house.

10. SOCIAL RELATIVITY: An artist may choose to link their concept with the "spirit" of the house itself, with its history, local, or regional aspects. Here, for example, are some possible connections of to the Jungmannova house.

- The house was likely owned by a Jewish person who disappeared in the 1940s during Nazi occupation.
- The building was used as a dental clinic during the communist years.
- The house is located on Jungmannova street, named after an important Czech linguist who, in the 19th Century, helped to reestablish the Czech language.
- A Jewish cemetery once existed near or beneath this building.
- Organizers for this festival made links between this house and Franz Kafka's imaginary Odradek character.

The Odadek Complex, an installation by Dan Senn

As a regular visitor to Prague, a city from which I often stage exhibition tours to galleries elsewhere in Europe, I was only invited to be part of the festival after arriving in mid-March of 2006. My original plan was to travel the first 6 weeks, then return to Prague and work in isolation on some upcoming American projects. But my friend Milos Vojtechovsky, asked me to participate in the festival and, after visiting the Jungmanova house, I readily agreed as it presented an unique set of challenges for me, not the least of which was the chance to develop an installation from scratch away from my well-equipped Oregon studio. I would have to make do with the materials at hand.

As I considered the various levels of integration with the Jungamannova house, after having had a good dance with the building, I chose a practical solution that took into account my limitations, but also the fact that I needed an installation with "legs," that is, an expandable concept which was transportable to other venues. Milos had also suggested that I consider including references to Kafka's imaginary Odradek character in my piece, a mysterious impish character very befitting of a house in central Prague. And then I had stashed away in my catalog of unrealized installations an idea I had first encountered in Düren, Germany in 1998. While setting up a kinetic sound installation of suspended paper tubes, I inadvertantly set a 1m by 10cm paper tube on top of a subwoofer which was cycling subaudio frequencies of 0 to 12 cycles per second. This resonated the tube but when I placed a piece of paper on top of the tube, it pushed it into the air and then sucked it back causing it to strike and resonate the tube loudly. I was so taken by the effect I remember wondering if there was any way of using it immediately. For years afterwards I pondered this effect, and since I had subwoofers with me now in Prague, I decided to experiment further with it. The trick would be to find proper tubing and then to keep the paper positioned on top, perhaps, using a fold or a hinge. I could also see how this effect might dovetail with the Odradek suggestion, say, if I were to purposefully incorporate human-like sounds and gestures emanating from the tubes. I envisioned a kind percussion piece using subaudio freqencies to move paper mallets atop pvc tubes combined Odradek-like utterances. You see, the same speakers used to move air columns with subaudio tones can be, obviously, to play back audible tones. This, of it all worked, was a doable installation given my limited resources, one that satisfide aspects of site specificity, while providing me with a new, expandable and transportable concept.

Finding the correct weight of paper to use as a mallet was the most difficult problem to solve but after two weeks of trial and error, my concerns advanced to matters of having dependable power and security. Also, because the installation was mysterious in its operation, I was a little concerned that a child, or an exuberant adult, might tip over my towers. I was also intrigued by the idea that using tones beneath the hearing range might infer continental rumblings from beneath the house. Such low frequency waveforms, furthermore, would certainly flow like flood waters into the adjacent rooms, an especially interesting prospect given that my room had once been the director's office during the dental clinic years. All the more appropriate. DS 10/06