by Art Chantry (art@artchantry.com)
THE first time i encountered dale travous’s art (pronounced like ‘travis’), it was what he jokingly called “catabotics”. seems his father was a hobby taxidermist. when his efforts failed, he would mail them to dale, who would use them in his art. i was visiting dale at his studio (a sort of warehouse hangout for demented weirdoes) a huge black dog named ‘junkie’ (a huge half great dane/half wolf vegetarian dog owned by a blacksmithy friend) started freaking out and barking like mad. then, suddenly, this little ‘cat on wheels’ came screeching up to my feet and stopped and it’s eyes (one of which was hanging out of it’s socket by a wire) started to blink red at me and the tail twitched. then, it just as suddenly backed away and went after junkie the dog again. eeeeesh! creepiest thing i ever saw.
AC:there was a huge two-part article on jim acord that ran in consecutive aissues of the new yorkerback in the 80s' (or maybe 90's). for a brief shining moment jim was a star. then he sank back into drink and no one knows what he's up to. he once took ashleigh and i on a tour of graveyards and gave us a crash course in the history of 'monument cutting'. it seems if you are going to use radioactive materials in your art, you need to work with heavy granite and basalts. so, jim became a class A#1 stone cutter. to do that, you have to learn in the gravestone industry. so, he had lived all over the US learning that craft. he'd even become an expert n the entire history of gravestones. it was fascinating. he'd point out how acid rain changed materials. what was difficult to do and what was easy. good work and bad work and lazy work and mistakes and other stuff that was pure artistry. he knew all the secret codes and imagery on monuments and where all the famous folks were buried - and the secrets. and then once you got him talking about ghosts and the occult. he spent so many nights camping in graveyards (when your a poor student stonecutter, you sleep in the classroom a lot). the stuff he'd seen was amazing.
dale was an artist, but of a sort of art that seemed to be best termed “mad scientist” art that was practiced in the northwest (and west coast) during the 80’s and 90’s. these folks were deeply inspired by genesis p. orridge’s ‘industrial culture’ and other techo-performance madness like ‘survival research laboratories’, as well as true technical enclaves like microsoft and aerospace and the nuclear industry.
indeed, one of this little group of mad scientist artists was a man named jim acord (he was profiled in a huge two-issue article in the new yorker back in the 1980’s). his unique gift to the world of art was radioactivity. he was the only person on earth legally licensed to possess nuclear waste. he made radioactive art. go figger.
dale was a little more reasonable than some of his cohorts. he did things like build giant tesla coils. his beautiful contraptions averaged about 15-20 feet tall and would generate something like 35 million volts in the 25 foot lightning bolts it emitted. standing there and watching him fire up one of those monsters (he tapped into the seattle electrical grid and stole about 6 million volts ever time he started one up. it would destroy radio reception on the AM dial for about a 5 mile radius) it took your breathe a way. i swear it was like watching god. it rendered you speechless.
i would drag people over to see him run the thing – i took genesis p. orridge there (his comment? his eyes buggered out of head and he leaned over and whispered, “i LIKE IT! i want TWO!”)
i took the band ‘man or astroman?’ there to see it.
MOAM (man or astroman) immediately hit it off with dale. it helped that one or two of the guys in the band had degrees in physics and could understand his weird techno-speak language he had drifted into. he even began building tesla coils with band members that they still use in performance to this day. their original idea was to hang one upside down from the rigging above their heads and then wear safety helmets with little antennae on top, so the lightning bolts would ground out on their heads (high voltage, but low amperage, thus you don’t die). but, they couldn’t quite figure out how to prevent it from shorting out their guitars….
dale’s studio was a mad scientist junk store. he kept having little art events and parties there (he mixed the scariest cocktails you could imagine.) i once attended a ritual branding of a body art practitioner. joe coleman, the extreme ‘outsider’ artist, even showed up for that one. once you smelled the odor of searing human flesh, you never forget come BBQ time.
one piece of equipment dale had in his studio was what looked like a big piece of electrical junk from the 60’s. some scientists over at the hanford nuclear reservation (in eastern washington, where they first created plutonium as part f
he manhattan project) were going to toss it out, but decided to gift it to dale instead.it was the light source for an old early experimental military laser weapon. the first time dale tested it (after rebuilding it) he took it out late at night into the parking lot next to his warehouse space and aimed it at the sidewalk, shielded his eyes and fired it off – just to see what it was like. the enormous bright flash seemed to fill the entire city. the next morning, he went out to inspect the spot and he found a thin layer of glazing covering the curb and sidewalk. the intense light had literally melted the silicon in the cement and coated the spot with a thin layer of glass.
a photographer cohort and he conspired to take that thing out onto a boat in the middle of the night on elliott bay (part of puget sound). their idea was to use the military laser light source as a huge photographic strobe and photograph the entire bottom floor of puget sound when it lit up. but, they never got around to it. man, i’d love to see that photo.
this strange but familiar little artifact i show you today is one of dale’s “art” pieces. obviously, it’s a quarter, a 25ยข piece (a ‘copper’ clad, dated 1991.) but, if you look at the scale next to it (crooked, sorry. but you get the point) you’ll note that it’s about the size of a dime. no joke.
dale could physically shrink quarters. the more voltage he put into the process,the smaller they would get. i once saw an group show that dale had a piece in. it was a small black frame with a dozen little quarters in it, arranged from normal size down to about a 1/4″ (highly distorted). under each quarter, in pencil, was jotted the voltage used to make it. nobody paid it the slightest attention. it was innocuous. but, it was maybe one of the most astonishing artworks i’d ever examined.
his methodology was as mad as you could imagine. he built a high energy plasma generator (again tapping the seattle power grid illegally). it centered on a heavy (1/2 thick wire) copper coil, wrapping around a quarter. he’d place a huge surplus acrylic tube (with a 1″ thickness) over the top of the contraption and turn it on. there would be a blue-green glow that would slowly climb up the interior of the clear tube until it reached about halfway and would stabilize. pure plasma energy.
then he would fire up his tesla coil and stand back. eventually, one of the lightning bolts would find it’s way down the tube INTO the plasma. the whole would blow to bits (dale didn’t start using shielding until he noticed after several tries that the shrapnel was making his face bleed.) then he’d dig into the rubble and pull out the quarter, shrunken. the higher the voltage, the smaller the coin.
dale was never sure where the rest of the coin actually went. he had several theories. but, his favorite speculation was that it may have been transfered into pure energy. this was his “art.”
toward the end of the 1990’s, seattle basically drove it’s artists and bohemians out of the city through high real estate prices and general gentrification and development. condo developers drove dale out of his warehouse studio. he was also having serious health problems (he inherited a form of colitis that required enormous medical work).
on top of that he, began to experiment with exotic drugs. he actually began ordering drugs from veterinary catalogs and had group experiments with them. rich ‘grunge rockers’ from the music scene began bringing extremely exotic aboriginal drug concoctions from out of places like the amazon rain forest. they would conduct tests with these in dale’s studio. even DMT experiments were conducted.
all of this did not do dale’s health any kindness. eventually, i moved away from seattle, as did most of the folks in the scene. nobody seems to really know what happened to dale or his “art”. the most informed (but very old) info is that he finally had to move back home to the mid-west and be cared for by family. i hope he’s ok.
dale was maybe the one undisputed genius i’ve ever met.
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