Artist Interview: Christopher Janney

To get to the Louisiana Art & Science Museum’s (LASM) newest solo exhibition, Sound is An Invisible Color, one must first climb two flights of stairs. The stairs seem to serve merely as a thoughtless passage between exhibits. One only has to take the first two-inch step up though, and they’ll encounter Christopher Janney’s first installation—invisible, but coloring your upward journey with thrilling trills of jazz piano and birdsong.

The Soundstair is one of Janney’s most famous installations, and has elicited “performances” by passersby traveling up and down the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Boston Children’s Hospital, and—most famously—the Spanish Steps in Rome. This is also the second time the Soundstair has decorated the stairways of LASM—the first being in October 1981.

Janney gladly returns to Baton Rouge with almost forty years under his belt, having established himself as a one of the most innovative multimedia artists of his generation. Integrating color, music, architecture, light, and interactive technology, Janney’s grand immersive works have made their permanent homes in universities, airports, urban cityscapes, museums, and hospitals across the country.

Baton Rouge will soon be privileged to claim a Janney “urban instrument” for itself with the opening of Our Lady of the Lake Children’s Hospital. His newest project, called the Harmonic Grove—a space that uses colored glass, light, sound, and interactive capabilities to create a magical, soothing environment—will serve as the entryway for the new hospital, which is set to open in early October.

In conjunction with the project, LASM has partnered with the hospital to exhibit a series of Janney’s sculptural studies in sound and architecture, installations that—on a smaller, more concentrated scale—explore the interrelationships between sound and visual that recur throughout Janney’s body of work.

In mid-August, I stole a few minutes from Janney as he was helping to set up Sound is An Invisible Color. He graciously provided a one-on-one tour of the unfinished exhibition, and shared with me some insight into his artistic process.

We started with the massive introductory sculpture—a swirling sun-like form with arms of translucent oranges, yellows, and purples and a huge button in the center, urging the viewer to “TOUCH.” Obey, and one of a series of musical compositions—a light piano accompaniment to sounds of nature; a resounding, tribal gong; or a melody reminiscent of Alan Menken’s “Colors of the Wind”—will fill the room. 

What is it that draws you to multimedia art, to merging visual and the aural experiences?

You know, my training is as an architect and as a jazz musician, so my work has always naturally sought to combine those two disciplines.

It’s always a question, and there’s never really an answer. I’m always thinking like, if it looks like this, what might it sound like? If it sounds like this, what might it look like? Being able to sort of knock those two things against one another, different ideas come out—they’re infinite. I don’t seem to be out of ideas yet.

How are these sculptures in Sound is an Invisible Color part of this exploration?  

Well, I wanted to create a series of studio pieces that really embodied some interplay between sound and color. But then, if you do what you’re told and interact with it, you’ll get a whole other dimension. The tracks are all different, but they were all composed in my studio with the image in mind, imagining what might work.

I talk about Marcel Duchamp. He said that “title is an invisible color” in artwork, because of the way a work’s title will influence your perception of it. I sort of modified this for my work with sound.

The trilogy of sculptures [inside on the left wall] all sort of remind me of Picasso’s “Three Musicians.” You can play them individually, but each piece has its own composition and all three have harmonic interrelationships when played together.

So a lot of my time in the studio, when I’m making something like this, is spent thinking about the visual component of it, and then going in and thinking about the musical component.

Do you always start with the visual?

No, one doesn’t necessary come before the other. Sometimes I’ll get part of the visual, sometimes part of the music. I had to start one of these pieces three different times because something seemed like a good idea, and then it wasn’t. You have to get into it, to actually make it, to know for sure.

Tell me about the physical processes you use in making these.

So, I’ll usually start with a heating pipe installation—it’s about the same size of what the finished form is going to be. Then I’ll just start sketching things out. The color actually begins in a liquid state, and I’ll pour it into a mold. Then, once it hardens into a more leather state, I can pull it, shape it so that I’m literally molding color. And that’s a major part of this for me, being able to play with color in a physical way.

Why do you think that physical component is so important for you in your work?

Well, I’m trained as a drummer. It’s a very physical instrument. You hit things, it’s very loud, all this good stuff. And a lot of this process is musical by nature in that it is total improvisation.

I go in the opposite direction of the painter, who doesn’t even necessarily consider his material, is just focusing on the image, the power of the image. As a sculpture, I actually want to be able to hold the color in my hand and to shape it physically. All of these studies are a result of that.

How does all of this come to play in your larger installations, like at Our Lady of the Lake?

See these [three sculptures along the far right wall, diamonds made up of criss-crossed translucent bands in different shades of blues and greens]. These are some early color studies I did for Harmonic Grove, and they’re made using the same processes as the other pieces in this exhibit, just without the sound component and with a larger concept in mind. I was just making and casting studies of the color, and well, in the end everything seems to just turn into a sculpture.

How do you go about making decisions about color and design for a large-scale project like Harmonic Grove?

A lot of it is sort of solutions looking for problems. The idea comes, and then I sort of have to backtrack. Like okay, how do I make that? But you want to hold onto that spark, that initial spark. So I knew I wanted Harmonic Grove to have a glass canopy, and a I knew enough about space frames to know that it could hold all these sheets of glass, so the structural issues weren’t an obstacle. Things like that I can move right over and try to hold onto this idea of being bathed in shadow, bathed in color.

So when planning it, I know the doorway is here. So I had the glass colors fade from dark to light as they came into the middle. Then during the day, all this white space is filled with color because the sunlight bathes through the glass. The colored shadow on the ground moves slowly with the relative angle of the sun.

I start with that, and then I imagine what would work for a children’s hospital, what make this indigenous to Louisiana. This is the first thing you’ll experience when you come into the hospital—a pretty stressful place—and it’s the last thing you’ll experience when you leave. We want it to be calming, relaxing. So then there’s the sound component. We’ve installed 24 speakers, and they’re all playing sounds of being beside water, being in the bayous. Swamp areas, very natural settings while you’re bathed in this color.

Then there’s the interactive elements. Each of the columns in the space, when you touch them, you’ll trigger melodic sounds that play over the natural sounds.

What is the value is for you in incorporating opportunities for interaction in your works?

It’s about breaking that fourth wall. In my works, I want people to do more than just look at a painting. I want them to be able to actually enter into the painting, to become part of the art process. As the architect, I basically want to immerse you in the art.

It’s an idea that goes back to my early 20s at a time when I was really getting into art and thinking, ‘This is something I really want to do!’ I kept thinking, how can I get in the art? I decided to paint my bedsheets, put them up on the wall, started painting on them, doing crazy stuff. Then I put them on my bed, and was like “This is so great, I’ll be sleeping in the painting.” Yeah, I was tattooed for like a week.

I think that desire is part of why I’m attracted to sound and music. Sound is a very immersive thing . You can look at a piece, but if you turn away, you can’t see it anymore. But sound—you can still hear it.

Sound is an Invisible Color will be on display in conjunction with the broader exhibition, Harmonies in Color, at the Louisiana Art & Science Museum until March 1, 2020. lasm.org.

The Our Lady of the Lake Children's Hospital, featuring Janney's Harmonic Grove, will open its doors on October 4, 2019. ololchildrens.org. 

See more of Christopher Janney's work at janneysound.com. 

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