Thrum n’ bass: Dan Senn’s Air Lift, Lilt with Traffic
Installation art is very easily misunderstood or easily faked-which might explain many folks’ reservations about it. Throw sound and other media of the multi- sort into the mix and every lower-cased air-blowing would-be-avant-gardist gets involved–and that’s where you separate the boys from Dan Senn.
Easily the region’s most consistently interesting sound installationist-TJ Norris hailed him as the best of 2007-Senn’s fantastic work is deserving of far greater notice and a much wider audience. Balancing on the fulcrum between sound/music composition and kinetic, public art, Senn has a long track-record (in the midwest, Europe, Tacoma and Seattle and more recently here at home at places like PAC and Hillsboro’s underused Glenn & Viola Walters Cultural Arts Center ) creating work that shows great “concern for egalitarian access and aesthetic awareness,” to quote our old friend David Means. Past projects have include pots-and-pan lids to create “lydes” (instruments that produce an otherwordly ringing
tones. . .think glass harmonica or Tibetan prayer bell), wind, transducers, commercial PVC pipe, subaudio pulse, and fishing line (interlaced like a sci-fi tensile lyre or kora-like harp) that limns nearly inaudible tones.
Inspired by things like raku ceramic work, chance and natural processes, and the fluxeriffic mashup and invention of art into life and vice verse, Senn’s sculptural works are wildly successful at appropriating the properties of sound/music or sound installations that capture and hold close the strategies of minimalist, conceptual environment art. It’s a lovely moebius strip-”a variety of time-based and space-defined viewing and listening experiences” that inspires more wonder than it does frustration or confusion like lesser installation work.
His installation Air Lift, Lilt with Traffic opening this evening at PSU’s Autzen Gallery consists of eight inflatable sound sculptures- airbags placed atop eight microtuned PVC pipes that function as air pumps, which are activated using subaudio frequencies from woofer at the PVC’s base. As Senn notes, “The lowest frequencies, 0-30hz, have the effect of pumping up the airbags. Frequencies in the audible range, breathing, whistling and traffic sounds, have no effect on inflating the bags and are redundantly used to deflate them. A percussive sounds reminiscent of helicoptors, occur as the columns are oscillated (pumped) in the low frequency range. The bags rise and fall continuously as they inflate and deflate in a sonic
environment of clicking, breathing, whistling and Portland traffic.” The whole piece-resembling an alien anthropomorphic, mushroom field of sorts-takes approximately an hour and 15 minutes to cycle through an “algorithmically re-arranged composition comprised of subaudible and audible frequencies”. . .you can’t help buy marvel at and appreciate Senn’s rigor,
conceptual mien and careful precision.
Recommended for fans of the sublime art rich in discrete, small gestures, followers of Ann Hamilton, Trimpin, or the late great Flux artist Joe Jones.
–Tim DuRoche
Dan Senn: Air Lift, Lilt with Traffic
Autzen Gallery, Neuberger Hall 205, 724 SW Harrison
Street, Portland State University
Opening: 5-7 pm, Monday, January 7 (on view through
February 7, 2008)