Christopher
Janney ’72 wants pedestrians to interact with his artwork
and each other.
Commuters
create music at New York’s subway station at 34th Street
and Sixth Avenue by running their hands in front of Christopher
Janney ’72’s “Reach” sculpture. (photos
courtesy Christopher Janney ’72)
Sound
sculptures
Artist Christopher Janney ’72 creates urban art
It has happened at a subway station in Manhattan and the Spanish
Steps in Rome, at the Miami Heat’s home basketball arena and
the Sacramento airport. People pass through a public space and find
themselves, intentionally or not, interacting with urban musical
instruments created by artist Christopher Janney ’72. Travelers
run their hands in front of a green hanging paneled box on the subway
platform at 34th Street and Sixth Avenue, producing a cascade of
notes and playing an impromptu duet with the person on the other
side. Other people walk underneath glass panels hovering over a
pedestrian area at the airport and their motion prompts a chorus
of sounds evoking the city.
Janney’s sound sculptures are diverse in appearance —
some, like the subway platform’s “Reach,” blend
unobtrusively into their environment, while others, like “Hyattsville
Horn Section,” a group of brightly colored (and noisy) oversized
musical instruments in Maryland, are impossible to miss. But the
works have a common theme. Besides humanizing often-stark urban
spaces, they help crack the isolation in which many of us go about
our daily business. “They’re a foil for getting total
strangers to interact with each other,” says Janney.
Janney has made a career and life out of creating these sound
sculptures. Even at Princeton he knew he wouldn’t be able
to fit his interests in visual arts, architecture, and music into
one department, so after taking a year off, he was encouraged by
mentor Michael Graves to take part in the nascent independent-concentration
program and design his own major. Living in New York City after
graduation, he built theater sets to pay the bills, played in bands,
and soaked in the scene. “I was working up to being an artist,”
he says. “I didn’t have a name for what I do, but I
knew I was going to do it.” Later, he earned a master’s
degree in environmental art at MIT, where he tapped the technological
talent of those around him to bring his concepts to life. “There
was someone there who could build anything I could think up,”
he says. His artistic home base is now in Lexington, Mass., but
he commutes to New York’s Cooper Union to teach a weekly class
on sound as a visual medium.
Though most of his creations are meant to be touched, one of his
favorite and most innovative creations is more ephemeral. “HeartBeat,”
a dance piece choreographed and first performed by Sara Rudner and
later by Mikhail Baryshnikov, is set to the sounds of the dancer’s
own amplified heartbeats. At the end, the dancer turns off the sound
machine. Every time Janney is in the audience, there’s a split
second when he thinks that the dancer’s heart, not just the
amplifier, has stopped. “Even though I know what’s coming,”
he says, “it’s a surprise every time.”
By Katherine Hobson ’94
Katherine Hobson ’94 covers medicine at U.S. News &
World Report.
