Six Exquisites art festival will combine sight, sounds Tacoma's Dan Senn offers festival of 'sound art' featuring international creators of aural imagery. by Judy Wagonfeld, for The News Tribune, Tuesday, July 22, 1997.
If formal concert behavior turns you off, sound art is for you.
There's no worry about when to clap. You can cough. In fact, you might even get to play a too lip. You can find out more this week at the Tacoma Art Museum. If defies any definition of music you learned in school.
"Sound art is symbiotic art," said Dan Senn, multimedia artist and Tacoma resident. In organizing The Six Exquisites International Sound Art Festival, he's convened five top experimental artists from Germany, Amsterdam, Taiwan, California and Illinois. They exhibit the best of a new generation's interplay of visual and sound images.
"What you see is what you hear," Senn said.
Don't expect a piano, a clarinet or even a catchy tune. Instead you get the fusion cuisine of art; sound sculptures known as Scrapercussions that arise from scraps of shimmering steel, white PVC pipe, red and yellow wire, cast-off utensil and nylon twine. Though unlike any instrument cataloged in our brains, we recognize their everyday, low-tech components as well as the high-tech transducers, videos and computers.
Senn defines their output as "elegant awkwardness." They ring, rattle, chime, pierce and drone to visual happenings; similar to a rock video's assault on the senses.
"Sound Art," said Barbara Johns, curator at the Tacoma Art Museum, "is performed in nontraditional ways by people who test everything they touch."
It might explore scales from non-Western music, experiment with harmonic structures or use the body as a resonating chamber.
When words compose the score, as in artist Pamela Z's work, they echo and cavort in frenetic play. Augmented by electronics, the voices weave a tapestry that's vaguely reminiscent of an opera's chorus. Performer Brenda Hutchinson sing-song's her sad tale against her mother's recorded chatter, while rotating a Lotto-sized orange drum. Inserting pegs intensifies the beat and transforms the drum into the driving center of a music box. Composer, poet and visual artist Manos Tsangaris and pianist Pi-hsien Chen create eerie resonances using wires, chairs, strobe lights, bells and water.
On an actual violin, Dorothy Martirano plays in pensive counterpoint to computer feedback.
In Senn's "Two Shacks," a video maps richly textured wood in angled segments that feels like pieces of a puzzle. They lock, not to each other, but to clanging alarms, whining metal wires and the whistling of a Scrapercussion named a Fayfer (Yiddish for whistle) Harp.
"I rarely intend a (political) message," Senn said. He believes that to "impact society, you must first work with materials and let the messages arise independently." Sound artists strive to impact opinions on art, a process that Senn believes hits everyone attending a performance.
"If Rush Limbaugh were to come and play one of my instruments, I believe he'd consider the work as a child would," Senn said.
Visual art has accepted change more readily than other art forms, Senn said, perhaps because it doesn't require group audience behavior. The ritual behavior of dance and music concerts, described by Senn as, "play, bow, play, bow," and "piece, applause, piece, applause," locks people in and "does not ask people to come to a different place."
Not so with sound artists, They see no separation of art forms. Tossing dance, music, sculpture, voice, literature, nature, everyday materials and video into one bubbling pot, they stir up an ambrosial stew. A carrot remains a carrot, but the meat and herbs infuse fresh dimensions of taste.
A sound artist is more than a vehicle for art; the artist and work mesh in a cohesive whole.
"Art is for everyone, " Senn said. "When people encounter art in a context that is familiar, they let go of fears."
Coming from a small blue-collar town in Wisconsin, Senn knows those fears. He's enamored of Tacoma because he feels at home, and the city challenges him to integrate art with life's daily experiences. It's a goal he fosters through Newsense Intermedium, the non-profit, experimental arts organizations he founded. "When you see work of mine (or other sound artists), you see the word as I do," Senn explained comparing to the thrill of performing to "show and tell" for big kids.
Immersing yourself in these performances feels like hopping on a train through the minds of "The Six Exquisites." Sounds like a journey worth taking.