AMY STOCKLEIN
Joe Willie Smith welcomed many people into Promega’s art studio to help him create an instrument from salvaged materials on the company’s campus.
At first, we’re grownups, listening politely in a fancy auditorium as Joe Willie Smith delivers a brief lecture summarizing his week as an artist-in-residence at Promega, a biotechnology firm in Fitchburg. But after a brief recess to see the visual art displayed in the Promega Fall Art Showcase, we become curious children, drawn to a remarkable instrument — a “sonic sculpture” Smith created wholly from materials salvaged on Promega’s sprawling campus.
The sounds emanating from the beast are percussive and scratchy, as if we are hearing a deconstructed New Orleans second line underwater. There’s room for a half dozen people on either side of a large, curved, opaque screen. Someone plucks at an electrified wire basket. Others drum on a huge piece of polished walnut that serves as a base for the screen. Invisible microphones pick up the sound from below, and amplify it through a PA. A small light board on the upstage side of the instrument projects a shifting color palette, and the players are silhouetted, creating dramatic visual effects to go along with the cacophonous sound.
It’s so loud it’s hard to talk.
I find myself magnetically pulled to the instrument and the raucous energy in the room. I’m using rubber tipped drumsticks to create what feels like a pretty funky beat, trying to sync up with Tony Castañeda, a longtime Latin jazz percussionist who’s completely in the zone on the other side of the screen.
Smith is holding court — hugging, shaking hands and encouraging anyone who is curious, or feeling shy, to get up and play the thing. The residency didn’t turn out how he planned, and the artist is happy about that. “I initially was going to make an instrument that I was going to play,” he tells me. “But I like that it turned out like this, an interactive thing. It allows people to release their inhibitions.”
I had visited Smith in Promega’s well-appointed art studio just four days prior to the Sept. 17 presentation. The artist, who is visiting from Phoenix, Arizona, hosted Promega employees, musicians and artists from the community for a series of open studios where, mostly, we played around with objects and sounds. When I sat in, he was troubleshooting technical aspects of the upcoming presentation while plucking, banging and blowing into various objects to test how they sounded. I came in using a hard-carved walking stick, which he electrified, and we took turns playing it.
Workers were hauling in the slab of walnut that would later become the base of the instrument. Members of the Promega band (yes, this company has a band) had first helped Smith deconstruct the screen, stand it up, wire it up, and play it.
Smith is definitely a go-with-the-flow kind of guy. “I projected an image of the ocean on here, a wonderful blue,” he tells me. “And as I was doing that I realized I just wanted a color field. And I thought, What would happen if it was just a silhouette of people, or a person. The person on this side chose the color. Now it becomes a personal statement. The person sitting on the other side creates a silhouette so you’re playing with this entity, basically, and it changes the way we communicate.”
Daniel Swadener, Promega’s curator, is beaming amid the chaos. “We had a sonnet and we made a haiku out of it,” says Swadener. “I wanted to just bring him into the campus for long enough where people could join in and see whatever happened. The experience is really important, and it became what it is now.” Swadener says he looks forward to having the instrument move to different spaces on campus.
Castañeda says playing the instrument is “like being a kid again,” and he notes that Promega has an unusual commitment to the arts, and hosts groundbreaking conferences on the pharmaceutical uses of psychedelics.
“They allow their employees — you’ve got these geneticists and biomedical engineers and whatever — and they’re like ‘here, go see this artist, and go see if you can help him.’ It’s totally cool,” says Castañeda.
Smith, the son of a UW-Milwaukee janitor, says art shouldn’t be an elite endeavor. “Art isn’t sacred. It shouldn’t be. We are all artists, and there’s no perfect artist out there, a master,” he says. “That’s a bunch of bullshit, as far as I’m concerned. Everyone has that ability. People think that artists are special people because most people have it taken away early in their life and don’t even realize that they had it.”
Things we played during Joe Willie Smith’s open studio:
- Rear projection screen, scavenged from auditorium
- Old space heater, shaped like a copper drum, stretched with rubber bands
- Jugs, beakers, test tubes and other glassware
- Branches and twigs, with rubber bands and microphones
- My walking stick
“I don’t use everything, but I have to look at it.”— Joe Willie Smith
[Editor's note: We removed the word "pharmaceutical" from the description of Promega. It is a life sciences firm.]