Fooling Around Visual Music: Sound artist Dan Senn plays performance art on your ears. By Judy Wagonfeld, TacomaCityPaper, September 18, 1997
Contemplating. Speculating. Priming the pump. Cylinders charged, the engine devours fuel. Gathering speed, it sucks in a battalion of sensory-laden side cars. Diverse tracks converge at the central station; a fluid place of innovation in Dan Senn's mind. Watching him feels like catching a train through his head. Nothing falls aside--except tradition.
A prophet challenging a new breed of "Sound Artists,' Senn stirs up sound-dance, sculpture, voice, literature, nature, history, everyday materials, and video-from the base of human consciousness. Molded and meshed, the multimedia performance emerges like a speeding bullet train--a blur grasping the edges of your mind. Focusing on any one segment becomes as preposterous as singling out a star in the Milky Way.
"Sound Art" perforates the curtain of rules dividing audience and artist; a routine Senn describes as, "play, bow, play, bow" and "piece, applause, piece, applause." It's a conditioned response which "doesn't ask people to come to a different place," believes Senn, a response which "locks people into a perceptual rigor." Such rituals, prophylactics of the mind, keep the unknown at bay. Viewers, playing established roles, miss the heart and soul of an artist's conception of life.
Listening to the sound of art
Not so with "Sound Art:" Senn lures viewers to distinctly different places--emotionally, intellectually, and physically. Caves in Yucatan, Minnesota, where local residents, on video, convey the poignancy of their valley's Depression-era history. A gulch at Point Defiance where he arranges listening rocks. Among Enumclaw's trees where Senn strings Pendulyre instruments. In an abandoned Tacoma Municipal Dock building, he converts the structure into a massive resonating chamber--a trail penetrating the frontier.
"Sound Art" said Barbara Johns, a Senn fan and chief curator at the Tacoma Art Museum, "is performed in non-traditional ways by people who test everything they touch." It explores non-westem musical scales and experiments with harmonic structures. Instruments, constructed of wires, bolts, kitchen equipment wood, metal and plastic PVC piping ring, ratfle, chime, pierce and drone to the touch. Electronics and visual images crackle, set in motion by sound. Akin to a rock concert's assault on the senses, Senn expects no specific behavior. He wants "people to consider the work as a child would."
Show and tell
"When you see a work of mine, you see the world as I do," Senn explained, comparing the thrill of performing to "show and tell" for big kids. In his Shy Anne studio, tucked behind his white frame North End home and vast vegetable garden, he chatters about his art as if he just discovered the Northwest Passage, revealing a passionate dedication to his craft. Dressed casually in beige chinos and a cotton shirt, he flips on a television screen, coordinating an instrument's sound with "Two Shacks," a video which maps richly textured wood in angled puzzle-like pieces. They lock, not to each other, but to clanging alarms, whining metal wires and the whistling of a "Scrapercussion" named Fayfer (Yiddish for whistle).
One-quarter of the building functions as an office; immaculately organized desks, tables, and a dizzying computer and sound arsenal. Here, he creates, constantly adding to a resume that-stretches the limits of imagination; a prolific output that must require a 36-hour work day. Scattered about, as if.animals grazing, Senn's intriguing constructions pique curious nerve endings. Wiggling wire sculptures,.called "Too Lips," resemble flowers swaying in a breeze. End-table sized Scrapercussions, constructed of white PVC piping, wood, and red and yellow wire, cast-off utensils, and nylon twine tempt your fingers to go walking. Like a fann's tackle collection, hand-sized pieces, wires, and odds and ends dangle from walls. Though unlike instruments catalogued in our brains, we may recognize the everyday, low-tech components as well as the high-tech stuff.
"What you see is what you hear," says Senn. A cherubic, round-faced guy with cropped graying hair, he radiates warmth. "An artist" he says, "is more than a vehicle for art" An artist should stretch minds; a process he guarantees with the "elegant awkwardness" of his work. He strives for symbiotic unity of diverse elements, but also insists that segments stand alone; instruments as sculpture; sound as music.
Fear to freedom
"Art" Senn says, "is for everyone. When people encounter art in a context that is familiar, they let go of fears." Raised in a fundamentalist family in a small blue-collar Wisconsin town, Senn knows those fears. Enthralled with the French horn and classical music, he headed to the University of Illinois, known for its excellence in music. Minoring in ceramics leapfrogged to an awareness of visual art; manipulating clay eased the pain of his 16-year old sister's death. Receiving a doctorate in Music Composition and Ceramic Sculpture, Senn held professorships in Australia and the United States. In 1992, Senn took a leap of faith. Slipping out the back door of universities and the Midwest, he landed in Tacoma where he lives with his wife of 26 years and three children. He's challenged by the environment and the relative simplicity of life. He feels at home.
Sound garden
In Tacoma, Senn founded Newsense Intermedium, a non-profit, experimental arts group and organized "The Six Exquisites" sound art shows. When performing, teaching and recording, Senn spouts no political agenda; his art bears no message other than his hope of impacting social consciousness. When asked to participate in the Point Defiance Promenade, he visited and noticed people using a gulch as a contemplative resting spot. Discovering that sound shifted dramatically within it, he found one unique acoustical spot. There the lilting cadence of Puget Sound "was cut off like a curtain dropped." Proposing a "Listening Garden:' Senn ushered the skeptical planning committee to the park. Blindly, they hit upon Senn's exact seating location choices.
"It's a curiosity--a subtle but powerful way to use public art to raise consciousness," says Senn. It combines the everyday with exploration, the antithesis of static performances on a far-off stage. Called Sound Garden, it draws people in. Kids try out their own sounds; parents smile. All for only $300 worth of rocks. Indeed, if you always walk the same route you never glimpse the frontier.