Visual Edge: Visual Music at UW Tacoma
Alec Clayton, Tacoma City Paper, November 11, 1999

Dan Senn's 'Vertical Penduling' is a sound sculpture installed at the University of Washington Tacoma, in the atrium of the West Coast Grocery Building. It la a work of art that can easily be over looked, because of its location, within a window on a balcony high above the atrium floor, and second because it meets very few people's preconceived notion of what public art should be. The ideas behind this work of art and the amazing ingenuity that went into its construction are fascinating, but the actual piece left me cold. Perhaps that says more about my personal taste than the quality of the art, but it is definitely not a work with broad public appeal. Vertical Penduling is a very simple sculpture that happens to move, but it moves so slowly that a person passing through may not notice. It also happens to make music, but it is a quiet and sometimes atonal music with pauses between notes so tong that our hypothetical passerby may not hear the music, or may confuse it with ambient sounds coming from other parts of the building. It is a work of far greater complexity than meets the eye and ear. Senn says his intention is to create art that works as music and also works as sculpture when the music is not playing. Like an organ in a cathedral that makes wonderful music and is also visually beautiful. "Sound and sight are symbiotically related from the outset,' he says, explaining that some sound artists may create an instrument that makes sound and then they try to make it visually attractive as an afterthought, whereas for him the visual and the musical must be interwoven. The piece is constructed of aluminum, steel, wood and electronics. It consists of 16 pendulums suspended on wires that are connected to the wall with springs. The top of each pendulum is a bell with the open end facing the ceiling. They look like funnels that can be purchased in any kitchenware department, but they are actually precisely tuned bells that Senn has made to order. They are connected to black stems and wooden dowels with variously colored wooden beads on them. The crafts store beads make the piece look like a tinker toy construction, and Senn says he likes that they have a playful look. But the beads are more then decorative. They are precisely weighted to strike musical notes. All of the parts form a repetitive pattern of overlapping pyramids, and all of the parts move like pieces in a Swiss clock. Visually, Vertical Penduiing makes me imagine what Alexander Calder may have created if he had lived long enough to meet Donald Bell and the minimalist sculptors of the '70s. That analogy, however, may be misleading, because Senn's work has none of the kind of Art Deco biomorphism of a Calder mobile. They are more repetitive and industrial looking. The sound is also minimalist and repetitive, and it reminds me a lot of compositions by Phillip Glass. John Cage also comes to mind, because like Cage, Senn uses sounds not ordinarily associated with music. He says Cage was a big influence on him. One big difference, however, is Cage was famous for building chance happenings into his music, and there is none of that in Senn's sound. 'It's nothing like wind chimes," Senn says. 'If,you play itfor an hour today and come back next week and play it again, it will sound exactly the same.' The score is a suite of five compositions written by Senn and recorded on CDs in subaudio tones. If you took them home and played them on your CD you would hear nothing. The overall composition is called "Patty Quake.' It is played with a remote control that is preset to play every day from 1 to 2 p.m. Vertical Penduling is a project of the Washington State Arts Commission Art in Public Places Program in collabo ration with the University of Washington. The University of Washington-Tacoma is at 1900 Commerce St.

MORE ABOUT DAN SENN'S VERTICAL PENDULING

Main Menu