2003
A Talk between Peter Pakesch and Ulrich Loock about Max Neuhaus’s Time Piece
Peter Pakesch: How long was Time Piece up in Berne?
Ulrich Loock: I’d have to go back and look myself. It lasted about a year. It was the first Time Piece Max Neuhaus made, though. As far as the equipment is concerned, it wasn’t a finalized installation; it was actually a test version. If I remember correctly, we paid him about 30,000 Swiss francs, and that wouldn’t have covered a permanent piece.
PP: To us he said that he wasn’t going to do it without a permanent installation, meaning a purchase. But we were a long way from that, and it would require considerable negotiating skill.
UL: It is also true that a work like that can be purchased, and has to be purchased, and in principle dealt with like a large sculpture.
PP: The situation in Graz was special, and shaped the process in a rather thrilling way. There was an unusual new building, and the architects Peter Cook und Colin Fournier spontaneously came to treat Max’s project as a complement to the architecture, and as a congenial contribution. And they gave Max’s work their support in an artistically generous manner.
UL: In Berne you could hear the sound for more than two or three hundred yards around, all the way across the square where the Kunsthalle stands…
PP: Exactly the same as here...
UL: …And inside the building you could immediately hear the sound was an artwork. In fact I had thought it would be accepted as an element of the building, something like the noise a heating system makes. I remember an exhibition with Jean-Marc Bustamante who was downright bothered by Max’s work. He found it was an intrusion into his exhibition space, into the space of his exhibition. I can’t remember whether we turned off the piece during the exhibition….
PP: Max would never have accepted it.
UL: No.
PP: Here he ran a check. Each time the piece runs—for the five minutes before each hour—, he receives a report by e-mail that it has properly functioned again. And he complains whenever there is a malfunction. Time Piece is never felt to be a disruption, whereas we have had exhibitions like “Chikaku,” which also produced sounds, but Max’s sound here in the building is something perfectly obvious to everyone, an integral component of the environment. And then, unconsciously, you also begin to orient yourself to it, above all the one-second rhythm; it’s like the ringing of a chime. This is very much one of Max’s intentions, that the whole thing be an orienting sound.
UL: It was like that for me, too. I could always hear the sound in my office, inside the building, and always kept my ear out for it. It was soothing, somehow. I didn’t really connect to it in the sense of a chronometer, but it was a reliable presence, a sound that regularly recurred and indicated the passing of time. It was a gracious and affirming presence, inspiring trust in the passing of time.
PP: For me it went even further, from the temporal dimension to the spatial. It occurs to me there was once a very beautiful text by a Japanese architect [name TK] about the structure of the city of Kyoto according to sonic principles. Time Pieces also has something to do with urban architecture. I found your formulation of intimate(d) presence very illuminating: that a work like that can be an aid to orienting oneself. One mustn’t underestimate the part of acoustics with respect to our spatial orientation.
UL: One could probably define that aspect of spatial orientation even more precisely. We could attempt a comparison of the Time Pieces with the Place Works. With the latter, it’s more that a sound, and often even a complex sound (one should never underestimate this, for with Max it’s never just one frequency)…
PP: No, the sounds are very complex…
UL: Yes, they’re very complex. And I even have the feeling that the tones in the recent work have become even more complex—let’s say in quotes “more symphonic.” I sometimes joke with Max, referring to the tonal “richness” of the sounds he has recently been creating. There has been development in the texture and tone of the sounds he has been deploying. At the beginning he worked very much with desiccated sound, simple clicks…
As far as the spatial goes, with the Place Works, like Times Square in New York, for example, the sound is inserted into an urban or natural or park-like setting where it is more or less clearly demarcated. He establishes a sound-field or sound-block.
PP: And it is much more continuous than with Time Piece. . .
UL: …Of course; it is fully continuous. Each temporal cycle, each differential of time, is drawn out. Time stands, so to speak, even when it is rich in internal oscillation. That means that one either moves into this field, or moves out of it. Max has worked intensively to create the technical prerequisites for these fields and blocks to be sharply demarcated. With Time Piece it’s a little different. Because they come on only every hour or half-hour, there is no possibility of an active relation to the sound for us as ‘receivers.’
PP: We don’t know how to relate to it…
UL: We don’t know how to relate to it… When it is time, we are immersed in this sound, washed over or surrounded…
PP: …It breaks over us with clocklike regularity. When you compare it with an Indoor Piece, like the one that was part of the old Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, but no longer exists in the new site… In the Place Works, you can perceive yourself in your relation to the space…
UL: …Exactly…
PP: …And consciously perceive your perception, which is not the case with the Time Pieces. There it is more subcutaneous, that slow swelling of the tone, one you only notice relatively late, and then even that, when it is truly present, disappears again.
UL: Exactly. And with the differing degrees of involvement on the part of the receiver, the pieces take on a different social position. While it is true that the Time Pieces are comparable to chimes or other similar social signals, we should not forget that the sound in a Time Piece is an individually found sound. This distinguishes it from the sound of chimes, which we owe to a long cultural development, to a social bond.
PP: Here we have a clear issue of acceptance. Thus, in Graz, the question of getting a potential permit became quite a suspenseful one. Inherently, for a regional state institution like ours, it would be expedient to get one. Then again, the municipal bureaucracy could not find its way clear to issuing one. Now it is quasi-sanctioned by custom. That much we can agree on. But such an intervention into urban space, which today is highly regulated, would now be completely impossible. Noise-reduction ordinances have become quite rigid, which was not true earlier to the same degree. What we have here is arguably a remarkable transformation of public space. Public space changes with noise, especially through the noise of automobile traffic, which cannot be controlled. And the fact that it cannot be located and identified arouses opposition. As a consequence the public would like to protect itself against it, so there are strict regulations. They are extremely difficult to get around, and even various traditional sounds would no longer be possible. Of course there are various customary exceptions for churches and the like. But it is interesting that in our social fabric we treat only very defensively qualities that, as Neuhaus’s work teaches us, among others, are essential for our orientation.
UL: It makes a difference whether an individually created work, an artwork, finds its place in a museum or Kunsthalle, which under our modernity are created for things of that type, or whether such a work finds its site in public space. The difference lies in the fact in public space we cannot choose whether we pass by just there, whether we allow ourselves be affected by the work. With the museum however, we go in or we don’t go in. We can also go out. But I cannot choose for myself whether I go to work over this bridge, or whether I cross Federal Plaza every morning in order to reach my office building. To this extent it is proper that there be a permit procedure. But it also means a social consensus is produced as to whether we as a society would like to be confronted by an artwork or not. There is a delicate and awkward balance between the claims of the individual, or individual proposals, which come from the side of artists, and the claims of the collectivity.
PP: And here I believe that humans, on the acoustic plane, because of other acoustic stresses, and the impossibility of withdrawing from them, are, in today’s city and in comparison to earlier times, more sensitive than in relation to visual noise, where people are apparently prepared to accept much more.
UL: Yeah, right, but with Serra’s Tilted Arc, for example, and other cases, we saw that it isn’t always accepted. As far as sculpture in public space goes, Max’s work is particularly interesting. The Place Works, and the Time Pieces also tend in this direction, do not impose themselves. Max leaves one a relatively wide degree of freedom as to whether one wishes to engage his work, even though it is publicly present. If someone is not prepared to consciously take in the sound that comes on every hour, and would rather offset it against some street sounds, new street-cleaning equipment, for example, that person is free to do so. When one is ready to or has a desire to engage with the work, one has a different experience. Thus this piece is an important example for work in that area of tension between the claim of the individual and the social claim.
PP: That corresponds to what we were able to observe in Graz. There were absolutely ambivalent reactions. A couple of people objected to it. We came to a slight compromise as far as nighttime playing, and stopped an hour earlier. But at the same time came extremely positive feedback. We had a very lucky launch. Graz was just then a cultural capital of Europe, and the Kunsthaus was built for the occasion. In the end the inhabitants displayed a very open attitude to this distinctive architecture. The previously rather neglected quarter underwent a particular appreciation in its value from the building and running of the Kunsthaus. So the launch was borne with a greater tolerance than could otherwise have been expected. The first objections came only a couple of months later, when normalcy set in.
UL: In any case you can say one thing, that the sound itself and the placement of the work was never provocative in itself.
PP: …They are never offensive…
UL: …They are never offensive, like the Tilted Arc, which took a stand against its architectural situation, which the artist saw as impossible. This was an iron fist in the face to the generic architecture. This doesn’t happen with Max.
PP: I would define the effect of those works as subcutaneous. Like an undertone, they go under the skin, without your being able in the first moment to clearly locate it.
UL: The sound is produced with a view toward the situation in which it will then appear. Each time Max takes on elements of the sonic texture of the site and its surroundings.
PP: In Graz he tried many different things all over the area. There he was, sitting at a café on the other side of the river, trying out things through a wireless network. Sometimes the effect was as if he was trying to tune the building.
UL: Yes, I also think he is seeking a very exact balance (which can only be found experimentally) between sound that is to be expected in the situation, and so which tends not to be distinguishable from the sonic texture of the surroundings, and sound which appears here, somehow strange and other, where you can hear it. But even when his sounds relate to the sonic texture of the surroundings, and thus have something of the contextual, as we know from the 1970s, they do not imply any analysis of the surroundings existing in reality.
PP: Absolutely not. They enrich, shape, and mold the environment.
UL: Yes, and change it in a certain way. How is the work to be situated esthetically? Could one say, in order to be more precise, that it belongs with Abstract Expressionism?
PP: Well…
UL: To Pop art?
PP: I like very much Max’s idea of describing his work as sculpture. Yet I am interested in understanding the work as coming from music, since I know he comes from there. He was a percussionist, supposedly one of the best of his time. For me in music for percussion there is also always something sculpturally disrupting into space. And this holds not only for so-called New Music. Even in the pop music of our time, you will remember, drummers have erected amazing spatial installations.
I think Max has quite concretely and consciously oriented [his work] with respect to Minimal art. But he also sets himself apart from it to the extent he operates with notions of perception which come more from “minimal music.” And in this regard one can absolutely perceive a difference between the Time Pieces or the Moment Pieces and the Place Works. One could consider the Place Works as being much more in the context of Minimal art. The other works, by virtue of the different way they thematize perceptual history, are associated more strongly with abstract sculpture à la Anthony Caro. But I am also thinking of the phenomenal way Minimal art can be seen even more strongly in terms of the discourse introduced by Michael Fried. Max’s pieces in and of themselves have something of the “theatrical” about them. They imply a “relating-to,” and cannot be merely “perceived.” Whereas with the Time Pieces, it is just this special “perceiving” that gives them their quality. It is a completely different form of perception, a questioning of perception, which we also know from Caro’s sculpture, or more recently from artists like Liz Larner or Taft Green. So the [idea of] sculpture I like well enough, but to assign him a place in Minimal art, as he himself might like to see it, I would, in turn, be less inclined.
UL: I do agree with you that the work shares characteristics with certain examples from Minimal art. Take Carl Andre for example. When you look at one of his floor pieces as a place—“sculpture as place”—which changes the spatial conditions for the person standing or moving on it, or moving around it, and changes the conditions for sensation and perception, even when the physical transformation is minimal, the parallels are quite clearly drawn. In the Time Pieces there is also the added moment of social convention which we mentioned earlier. This is probably less strongly marked in Minimal art, which tends rather to a singling out of the receiver, whereas with the Time Pieces others are quite obviously hearing the same thing I am hearing in the moment.
PP: But there is one thing we shouldn’t overlook. Back then, when Max began making installations, there was already, precisely in the milieu of Minimal art, or in what subsequently came to be called Process art, a confrontation with sound as sculptural material. As an example one could mention certain works of Keith Sonnier’s. Also, that was a scene that was quite close to music, to minimal music, which, as was suggested earlier, is another form of Minimalism.
UL: …With the great activating figure of John Cage…
PP: Certainly, but it wasn’t just John Cage. I think that in music Morton Feldman was of the greatest significance, especially for Max. There was a milieu, one which didn’t consist only of John Cage, but where Cage was of course an important figure. And where artists quite rightly keep looking for material and testing its usefulness. In my eyes, Max was massively involved in this, too, and this constitutes an important aspect of his significance.
UL: Yes.
PP: In this regard, I would like to once again bring up the significance of Keith Sonnier’s sound pieces. Unfortunately he didn’t continue working with this form, but there was great ambition there, to work with sound in completely different way, and much more with original sounds in the sense of musique concrete, also context-related, both in the choice of material as well as analytically. Here the Minimalistic takes on even other facets. This, I believe, must have always continued to interest Max, and I think it would be interesting to discuss the significance French musique concrete had for him, and concretely Luc Ferrari, who worked with ambient sounds very early on. There was thus an entire field laid out in the 1960s which favored the development of this work from many sides.
UL: Yes, that was surely so. Here, too, one should once again repeat that for the discourse around his work it was extraordinarily important to make a break with the concept of music.
PP: I think by now it is clear that we are not dealing with music here…
UL: Through the fact that sound is abstracted from the temporal dimension, one essential characteristic of music is lacking. Even when this sound—and this addresses Time Piece as well—even when this sound periodically recurs and appears to crescendo, which again implies a temporal moment, it is in its essence a static sound inserted into its surroundings. The repetition probably plays an important role. Sound is in and of itself a temporally structured element set on the space, even generates the space, as the case may be. To that extent, although it has this temporal dimension, it is more sculptural and site-bound. Now here, when we have heard the sound again, I would like to reemphasize what I alluded to earlier, that the sound, despite all its ties to place, to the existing ambient sound, to the social convention of chimes, is also very personal. The sound-color Max produces—we heard it again just now—this sonorous hum, which it would be hard to attribute to either an animal or a human, but could plausibly attribute to some organic being, rather than to a technical, or technoid one...
PP: I find it quite comparable to techniques in painting where ostensibly simple phenomena become charged through highly developed technique, and through which that plainness is subjected to a complex perception. One example of this is the many sophisticated glazes in the work of Barnett Newman, who didn’t just do painted canvas. I know from Max how much he cares about the “building” of the sounds. He produces multi-layered textures, which is an important quality for the reception of the work to last.
UL: With a painter one can speak of color sense or signature. Sound has a breadth and a depth which is closely bonded to Max Neuhaus’s sensibility. To that extent here we are dealing with the artist as auteur, and the traditional conception of the artist is maintained—which perhaps in a certain way stands in contradiction to the original desire of dissolving the opposition between performer and public into which Max was tied as a solo percussionist.
PP: Yes, I do think he was trying to get at something very specific. On one hand, what he uses as material is not at all interchangeable, which is different from the case of Minimal art. There, especially when it moves into the conceptual, as with Carl Andre or Sol Lewitt, someone else can also produce it, or the industrial processing or fabrication is interchangeable. To this extent, Neuhaus is traditional. He is one of those sculptors or artists that consciously build. He builds not only space, which in the case of the Time Pieces consists of urban space, but sound itself, and one which is finely chiseled.
UL: But now we are getting close, it seems to me, to saying he is actually a traditional landscape painter.
PP: Yes, if sculptors could paint landscapes. One could draw out the genre idea in interesting fashion to the point of absurdity…
UL: There was one important experience in Berne: at the moment where in Time Piece the sound breaks off, all the other background noises return, and are heard again, different—and here I can confirm the formulation comes from Max himself—cleansed. As if they were cleansed. All of them. The standing noise of the city is once again there…
PP: …But comes back differently…
UL: … It comes back differently… Max contaminates the standing sound of the city with his own sound, which on the hour and the half-hour swells and moves into the foreground, before breaking off. When Max then removes the sound he has himself inserted, there is an effect of cleansing.
PP: For me it was of great significance that the Graz project first be presented in the framework of “Imagination,” an exhibition project around the shaping of perception. We approached our “naïve” conception of “true” perception of the surrounding world as a theme, and were able to show how various individual forms of perception function, and how our representation of homogeneous images in homogeneous space is constructed within a framework of complex cerebral and cultural processes. Max’s contribution is important in this regard, because he deceives our “naïve” understanding. In the field of the visual, we know that images are composed from quite varied areas of brain activity, and that here the eye is of rather secondary importance. It is different in the field of acoustics. Here I am thinking of how selectively we listen and hear, how much the brain filters, suppresses the unnecessary, in order to very, very precisely condition everything we mean to objectively perceive. We would probably go crazy, or in any case be overwhelmed, were we perceive the total range of a particular acoustic spectrum fully unfiltered. Here Max produces an interesting kind of irritation, and it is in that sense a cleansing, that he brings in sound that cannot be classified. One might say one’s hearing is recalibrated. This is effected in an apparently quite simple manner by the crescendo, the slow rising of the sound, and then the sudden breaking off. In this way Max steals up on passers-by with sound.
PP: We can classify the bird that sings and filter him out for ourselves. We can classify the car that drives by and filter it out for ourselves. It is no different with visual perception. Max’s sound is no known sound, and it is not music, either. The relevant part of the brain must itself be re-oriented, so to speak…
UL: That’s an interesting way of putting it…
PP: …The sound also has no clearly defined location. We are used to linking sounds with one place, “siting” it, so to speak. There is nothing worse than sounds whose location we cannot determine. This is in distinction to the Place Works, where the location is much more clearly definable as a place to which one can relate.
UL: Though there, too, one doesn’t know where the sound is coming from…
PP: But at least it has a location…
UL: It has a localization, but the source is of course hidden, which in itself is something rather seldom seen when one aligns oneself to the postulates of the Modern and an exactness of material and transparency in all the elements involved. But within the logic of the work it is true the sources are removed.
PP: But nonetheless, for me the Place Works much more concretely have a location, one I can relate to, while with the Time Pieces there is this “coming-upon-one” that intensifies the irritation and challenges the perception.
UL: Here I find that the Time Pieces bring something very generous into Neuhaus’s work, in the sense that he shares with us, as receivers, a stance that rests on the setting in of an acceptance of that which is there. Max does not exclude any particular sounds as being noise pollution. Indeed, these sounds, and we ourselves, are enwrapped in the sound of Time Piece. Somehow—how shall I put it—they are part of the beauty of the piece and of the beauty of this sound.
PP: They have the potential to produce, so to speak, the orchestration of the city. The idea is now to continue on, with the other buildings of the Landesmuseum Joanneum in the city. I would like to do further Time Pieces with the next big set of building plans, to create the urban constellation of a museum that is present in many sites.