1995
TAPE 2
This is the first time you were required to reside in Germany.
Yeah
In Berlin particularly.
Yes
West Berlin
Indeed. I hated it; I really saw it as a prison.
It was very much Cold War, artificial sort of place
Any nobody would talk about the Wall. It was staring you in the face; nobody would allow you to talk about it in the conversation.
I was there originally in ‘74, ‘75, and to listen to the East and West Berlin television stations - a lot of the battle was taking place on news shows. You were telling about how you happened to make contact with Cologne because of your disagreement with this administrator in Berlin.
I deliberately made contact with Cologne, and it was rejected. The idea for Audium was rejected by the VDR.
But did you do other things in Cologne?
No, no, I just went for that meeting and came back, and then I realized I had to do something to refute this guy, shut him up, which I finally did. And then RIAS was a radio free center for Berlin and was also a cultural institution and they decided, because I was at war with the DAAD, that they should do a radio piece, I mean, do a water piece. Then I got introduced to Stekenburger about three months before the opening of Documenta; I remember coming up with - as I usually do now - it’s strange coming back to the same process, of looking for a site. And the first thing I saw was that underpass under the ... because it’s shaped like a horn. But I was told that Dan ... already had it.
Who introduced you to him?
I think it was Claus Rinke actually
And so he invited you?
No, he introduced me to Stekenburger, made the connection
No, I mean Stekenburger invited you
Yeah, that was the only way it could happen. And the money and all this stuff .. when the DAAD heard about it they called me up yelling, what did you do? The ultimate irony was that they had to pay half of it.
What did the people in Kassel think about it - was that a good thing to have a DAAD person?
Everybody knows they were bureaucrats. Stekenburger still thought this was music; in fact, he told me after Documenta was over that he was curious about it, so during Documenta he went down there but he fell asleep under the tree; I said, Oh, that’s perfect. He thought it was an insult that he could fall asleep during my music.
He tuned into it.
But I built it. I remember, when I found out that I couldn’t have this underpass, going down to the park ... and just finding this tree which was rather magical - which is no longer there, it died of - it was so huge, and knowing that was the place.
Would you call it a discoverable?
Yes, because I wanted it to be anonymous and it was officially marked with a ... and I kept pulling it out. They kept making new ones; I was the vandal, they didn’t know.
Somebody’s vandalizing your piece, Max.
Me. Also, even though there was a lot of art in the park it’s still public, and this was not on the main path; it was on a side path so it was something you would come across wandering through in looking for works.
There are really two things there. One is its being in the context of an art show and secondly - which actually reinforces the second point of wanting it to be a discoverable - was that it was still harder to discover than if it were not in the context of an art show.
I did agree that it should be on the map, but it was too late to include it in the first edition of the catalog so I’m only mentioned in the second edition of the catalog. And I never mentioned it to Documenta in ‘91, but one day one guy working in there came to me and said, but you were in Documenta in 1977 - the kid was six years old in 1977. I said, yeah, so what? I guess there aren’t that many artists who have been in it twice.
But it’s another novelty in the sense of being in a park.
In nature, mother nature, it was the first step into mother nature?
If we don’t include Drive-in Music.
No, not really, because a car - just the trees were the only things standing around I could put things in. It wasn’t about being outside at all.
And in this respect similar to Villa Celle in the sense that you consider the sounds that are there, could be naturally there, and shift them?
But it’s evocation - we can trace it back a little, but we should think about where this idea of building sounds that are almost plausible within a space, within a context, and that’s the shift, that’s my doorway, that’s how people get into it. The bell of Sankt Cäcilien is almost plausible because it’s a church, but it’s not that kind of bell. Times Square could be a machine because of its context mainly, but if we go back - OK, where do we go back to? We go back to, we don’t go back to Fan Music, we don’t go back to Southwest Stairwell, we don’t go back to ...
Walkthrough
No, these are deep clicks, high clicks; they were subtle and that was the only thing which made them ..., but this idea of consciously saying, OK, this is what people expect here, so after Walkthrough we have Round, we have Rooms
After Round is Documenta
OK, so this is the first time where I said, think of what people could find here and make something different.
What I’m reminded of is, in the book, the contrast between, what various writers talk about, the contrast between Locmine or Villa Celle and Times Square, that in fact they’re similar in the sense of discoverable.
I remember Carter came to Tuscany to hear Villa Celle, and he was kind of shocked to find me there because when I did Times Square and MoMA he began writing his experience of those two works - well, MoMA was ‘78 so Times Square had been running a year - but I wasn’t shocked, it wasn’t any harder for me to work ... and the same with Kassel, I didn’t feel like I was moving into a new territory - Times Square is outside. The hard thing is just the technique of working outside as opposed to inside, where you have to depend on weather, you have to ... and your whole working schedule is much more complex - but that’s just technical. Once the bell rings for a site it’s like no other site but the same thing happens and I don’t care whether it’s Antartica or Times Square - I don’t change anything; it wasn’t startling for me to be in mother nature, but I was very aware of where I was and what that place was.
Maybe this connects to the idea that I’m not interpreting the place; I don’t have to say, this is Times Square that I’m trying to interpret. This is not a park that I’m trying to interpret; this is just another foundation. The only difference is it’s got grass.
Do we need to talk about Times Square? One of the things I’d like you to talk about is its being a texture. In this respect you would compare it to Rooms.
Well
Except that there it’s above you whereas in Times Square it’s below you.
No, in Rooms the sound sources were up but you didn’t perceive them as that; the sound was in the room - you didn’t know where it was coming from. Round is a texture too, and so is Southwest Stairwell.
From one of the drawings it looks like it’s a piece that you would hear differently in different parts of it, but it’s not really that?
No. It had a shape, an aural shape - you’re thinking of this working drawing, but that’s part of these drawings where I explain something about how the piece is made, like drawing the loudspeaker in MoMA - they’re not about how the piece is perceived - these after-statements or working drawings in the process like the one you pointed to from the Hague which was the beginning of trying to figure out what ... could happen.
Whereas MoMA is not a texture.
No, it’s a terrain - because standing in one of these active places it was a lightening of sounds you were hearing.
How did you know that - you’d have to have something to compare it to.
There were the active places and the inactive places - drawing the terrain there - and the lines, because it was a resonance, the lines were abrupt. This much, you were in one; this much, you were out of one. Also it was strange - you’re used to hearing normally, so even if you were just put in that all of a sudden without being in the normal space you would have sensed something very different. It was like an opening up of - because there was this other thing that was going on with the sound that you didn’t perceive the sound - it was like air.
I understand what you’re saying. What surprises me is that as far as I know you’ve never used that again.
It was such a particular technique, I suppose. Also take a look at this thing.
No, it’s good that you don’t repeat yourself.
I had an opportunity to build this huge loudspeaker, and it’s not easy to make low sounds of any power. So here’s this ventilation chamber - this is a ladder, you’re standing inside this, and in order to go low you have to get big with the horn - it doesn’t make it louder, it’s physical bigness. So in order to do that again I would have to build something comparable - to do it on that scale outdoors; inside a room it’s not that hard.
Maybe I’m asking the wong question; maybe what I should ask is how, because it’s so different to anything that went before, how did the idea come about?
Same story, except in this case I had to find the solution ... the process always is the same with me - I go, I wait till a site or two sites in a place I’m given to explore ring a bell. Then I go talk to the people who control the place, get a feeling for them, and then I either insist on one or come to an agreement about site. The next thing is I come in with all the tools I think I could need to try and find a way to get sound attached to this place, and I start working with sound and try to get it, find a way, a method, to get it in there. Then I design the system because I go in there with ... tape, pull this out, anything to get it ... when it works and I know it works and I have enough information to say, OK, build the box this way, this big, place it here. That gets all built and then I go back and I start by placing sound in the space, and it’s like a journey - first sound leads to another sound leads to another sound leads to another sound - you’re in motion.
This journey where you don’t know where you’re going, deliberately; you don’t want to say, well, I’m doing this. You don’t know how long a journey it is; you only know when you’re on the road or off the road. And you only know when you’ve reached the place - it’s a funny kind of journey.
How can you know that you’re on the road unless you know that it’s the road to X?
No, you know you’re on the shoulder; you get a very serious feeling when you go off the road - whoops - and you know when you’ve arrived. That process runs through everything. In MoMA it had to be a little different because of the scale. I had to in a way without experimenting find a solution, to get sound in there, and also this connection of meeting this guy who was obsessed with horns, the horn designer, having the grate, going there together, him saying, well, I can build you a horn that will .. knock the socks off ... I told you what happened the first time I turned it on - all the keys started vibrating in the security office.
Talk about it again.
I had this big horn, and I knew I could go down to 10 Herz. We stop hearing sound as sound at about 25, so this is a full octave, an octave and more, below where ... I had all that room to play with.
Is it in a sense the opposite of Rooms in the sense that, instead of going out of pitch and then coming back to where it’s just discernable, you go down and see what happens?
Exactly, it’s the other extreme. This speaker designer was very naive; he was terribly upset when he heard the piece because he couldn’t hear it.
What did he expect?
He dreams of making a piece of sculpture; I had to push him into the hole - it couldn’t be visible. He wanted to take his friends there and point out his piece of sculpture. Good God, the things we do ...
How did the invitation come about?
Kinston McShine knew about the piece in Times Square, and he also made an association with ... because they were two ... one in front ... back. Those were all in the air, and then I had to find a solution and how do I get something in here. So I ended up there at the point of building this piece, having constructed a cement horn, which is still there by the way.
Turned off.
And I started tuning.
Was it anonymous?
No. I did make a label that was special; I’ve forgotten what it said. It had its own announcement - it was a one-man show, basically. It was what later turned into the project series; it was the first of those, but they didn’t know what to call it. It was tough in the first week; there was a crisis where Kinston called me up and said, look, we have to turn this off. And I said, you have to what? turn this off? I said, wait a minute, Kinston, I’ll be there in twenty minutes. And I was talking to a guy from some magazine who was interviewing me about this piece, and so I said, we’re catching a cab - whipped downstairs, jumped in a cab, up to the Modern, and Kinston, I walked into his office, he was sitting behind his desk ... his unanswered letters. Kinston said, now, Max, and I said, Oh, Kinston, this is a journalist. The piece went on. It’s war.
Did it ever come out why he got cold feet?
He hated it. This is ‘78; it’s ten years after I stopped being a performer, but still most people thought of me as a musician kind of gone mad, but I was well known, I could get press. I think Paley must have realized that it was in fact sculpture; but it certainly wasn’t his kind of sculpture, and it was all over his garden! It even subsumed that George Ricky - clever bastard, that Neuhaus.
I started it up and just took it down, down and down.
How did you decide what the final form of it was?
I was trying texture, I was trying high sounds; but I knew I had this bottom end. I played with some resonances that were obviously of the whole garden, and then one day I came back and I said, what is all this - I’ve got it right here, this is it.
That must have been quite a discovery because it was taking things away.
Yes. When I was in gear to start building this piece it was about sound - what sound do I make here, how do I get something to work here? And then waking up one morning and saying, turn around, turn over.
Why does the place have a grating, incidentally?
It was a ventilation chamber for the building. Philip Johnson was angry because I cut down the ventilation flow out of it - this big speaker takes up half of the ventilation chamber. Lots of wars for that piece. They were happy to get rid of it. Kinston called me up and said, but you promised to take this speaker out of here. I said, good luck, kid. Jackhammers. That’s the only time that I’ve ever had the power of a monumental steel sculptor, where it costs more to take the piece out than to leave it there.
It’s obviously not in the way.
Philip thinks it is - is he still around or is he dead?
How did Amsterdam come about?
This woman Vee Smals who had started this organisation called Dappell in Amsterdam which was a very interesting space and did a lot of things and she was a very interesting woman - she had been kind of chasing me for a couple of years. She was there when I was building Times Square. She came and saw it, and she saw that at one point they wouldn’t let me in the chamber; they barricaded the whole thing. And we were standing outside the barricade and talking about why is all this going on? why was I having so much trouble getting in this hole? So when I went to Berlin she said, OK, but I want one of these water pieces, I want to do one of these water pieces. I went; we found this swimming pool - it was Prinzenbad - but she had a space too, and it was my initiative, because water whistle and underwater music was still me as a musician for these people, and this was ‘77. And I just had the idea that I would make a sound piece in one of the rooms there.
It’s exhibition space - you’re in a gallery?
Yeah, and it’s very different because it’s more like Round. It’s a texture, but in terms of loudness it wasn’t subtle; it wasn’t a discoverable in any way. You didn’t hear it moving past you like you did in Round. You were in it; you were in a vortex - big, healthy, rich sound.
Is the smallness of the room relevant?
There was something special about the room - why I didn’t choose it and another room, getting four speakers, working in the room till it worked.
Round has a lot more than four speakers.
But in this size room four speakers was big enough to get it to turn. No, you’re confusing technique with perception.
What I’m trying to do is to see if in any way it grows out of, either by similarity or difference to anything that existed before it.
I don’t think so; it’s one of the things we’re establishing that it doesn’t. By then I didn’t have to call anybody to figure out how to turn the sound. I had the little block diagram; I built it. But it was just a solution for this space at that time. It was meant to be temporary, but it was bringing up the issue of a sound work that was not music.
I don’t think I want to ask anything more about that unless you can think of something. Did the Chicago work come about as a result of the MoMA and Times Square?
Yes, I think so. There was a new director of the museum; they had decided to take over several buildings that were adjacent to the museum, to expand it, which meant rebuilding the whole thing. And this guy had the idea that he wanted to commission a sound work for the permanent collection of the museum, and those were his terms when he came to me - John Neff.
It must have been very much as a result of Times Square in the sense of another permanent work.
Yes, and in taking that on. It was all happening - ‘77 Times Square, ‘78 MoMA. Usually people get excited when they see something moving that fast.
I think this has been covered in the book, but it’s an interesting piece in terms of its being discoverable.
Yes, in a contradictory way. I remembering encountering this kind of idea that somehow by working in a museum I was compromising myself, and I couldn’t understand what they were talking about. And that was when I said to myself, I’m not a politician; I’m not fighting for this, I’m an artist - it’s hard to remember really the frame of mind and all that again. I started with how to get sound in there, and it was a big column of air with this three dimensional pathway through it. So I wanted to be able to activate this column anywhere, so I said, OK, we build this speaker system of 30 channels that goes from the floor to the ceiling, we put it in the corner. And we build a 30 channel amplifier - a 30 channel amplifier!
What I don’t understand is why some people can’t hear it - that must have to do with the issue of the plausibility of its sound.
Well, there are people who refuse to kind of hear it - Chicago is really a provincial town, and they are dogged. Once they decide that it’s not there, they will never hear it. And they will soon kill it - it’s about to be destroyed.
But you spoke to Neff recently.
Yeah. I think I got a letter from them; they made me this wonderful proposal - they said, if you agree to build a piece for the new museum we are willing to offer you salvage rights. So what they’re saying to me is, Oh, we would never suggest that this piece wasn’t site specific - we’ll give you the materials to build a new piece - or you can take the materials and somehow build a new piece for us for free. Amazing, really amazing people.
It’s a kind of blackmail. You didn’t do what they wanted you to do in the first place, so they’re trying to get you to do it.
No, I did. Neff was completely behind this piece, and he fought very well. He did an amazing thing with the Board because when it was finished before the public opening they were outraged and said, we paid 50,000 dollars for this sound piece and we got another 25,000 dollars’ worth of loudspeakers that they had to use three different airplanes for because the magnetism was too much - huge stories like this - and what is here? First he came to me and he said, I know that we agreed that once this piece went on it would never be turned off, but I want to ask you this one favor - one evening can I bring the whole Board into the space and have them stand there and then turn it off and then turn it back on again. And these people were just emperor’s clothes ... asked them all to be quiet, and they were quiet for about a minute, and then he gave the signal to the engineer to turn it off. And this space just imploded, it disappeared, it was like something left the room. And then he put it back on again, and that’s probably what they really hate - that he did it. But he went through a divorce, and his power structure in Chicago - his wife was socially connected, he wasn’t; so she made sure that he got fired from that job. Then it’s been a succession of other people, and he’s been the enemy, and he’s not in a position to do anything.
His questions on that telephone interview, how were they, I’ve forgotten.
One of the things that struck me, like the remark you made to Loock, how one thing grows out of another. The more specific context was that in general you wait till you have a site, and the work comes in this intense period of at most two weeks where you’re building it in the site; when you’re not in the site you try not to think about what might be in a particular site.
No, once I start to make sound in a site then I’m thinking about it all the time.
But you don’t as it were practice pieces for a concert.
You’re saying that the process of making the piece is a kind of performance? It’s not, but I’m sure I use the discipline of being a performer to channel energy.
No, I don’t mean that it’s a performance, but the thing is it’s not something that you’re doing continuously; it’s only when you’re in particular places or thinking about particular places that the works get realized. Except for those occasions - maybe you’re learning certain computer programs or something like that ...
What I’ve been working on for the past three years is the fourth generation of this system; it’s upstairs.
But you don’t try them out against this wall - it’s only when you’re actually in the site that the learning about sound in that place ..
Exactly. You can only illuminate a space with sound, and the space is absolutely pitch black when I walk, and many times when I’m doing a site survey I snap fingers. That’s a lot of information, but it’s very general. It tells me a lot, but it doesn’t start the sound idea at all. I don’t start thinking that I can make this in there; that happens when I’m in there with the system, but at that point I can’t build tools.
Also, it’s two different people within me, completely different people. One is an engineer who thinks like an engineer, who builds tools and who hires other engineers to build things. And the other person is the user of these tools, and it’s very hard to make the transition. I’m just about at that point with this fourth generation system, but the engineer in me doesn’t want to let go; he just wants to hold on ... I’ve been going through this for the past three weeks. But when I get in that space I can no longer be the engineer; that’s the point when I don’t care ... this is the car, this is the steering wheel, this is the gas. There’s no time to repair it, baby, get going, stay on the road.
So there are really two things. One is the peculiarity of the site and then the preparedness you would have in terms of what you can .. what kind of means you have of generating sound or putting new sound in it.
I didn’t follow the beginning of that.
When you start working in a site, you have to use the means you already know.
Sometimes what I can do - I’ve gone in in many cases, in some cases I can’t, like MoMA or MCA - I didn’t hear those speakers, didn’t make any experiments; I couldn’t in the MCA because the space wasn’t built. I’d say, OK, with this speaker system I know I can build a piece. But usually, like in Three to One, I go in and I work with sound to find out how to get it on there; so in the time when the hardware is being designed, built and installed I’ve also got a premise to start building tools so to speak that I know. Like with Documenta - I was there and designed the speaker system, the source system, in May, and in October I went back to start building the sound, and in the meantime I was here, and I knew that I had this problem of somehow making three layers and that it was going to be hard. And I didn’t try to build the textures; what I did was try to set up .. build software that allowed me to switch, to take a layer that I had had on one floor and put it on the top floor and switch this very easily. So it’s that kind of problem, that I know what I’m going to be doing is comparing this floor and this floor. Then I’m going to find a sound that I like, but I’m going to want to try it up there; and so since this is an unusual problem I’m building software that says, bang, that’s that sound there and that’s that sound there. It was a new problem which I could build in June, July, August, September here without knowing anything. Also I did build a kind of library of, not textures but foundations for textures. It’s more building a palette; I built a palette so I wasn’t involved in having to build the palette there because the building of the palette, to have it accessible, is again an engineering problem. It’s the way of getting this thing arranged so that you can get to this one, get to that one. You have something to draw on; you don’t have to start mixing from scratch. You’ve got basic pigments there; you know you can build a lot from this pigment or this pigment. You don’t try to build them; you just get them placed on the palette and start mixing them there.
It’s always mixed and always different, depending on what I know and how much time I have to build it. The real panic is knowing that at one moment I got to go in there and run with whatever I got, and this car better be ready. I can always go back, but there’s also a time limit too. Two weeks of working with sound is a long period of time because it’s so abstract - you’re shaping something which you can only hear, and you’re forming it. I have a hard time going more than two weeks on the same road so to speak. If you go on longer you can find yourself on another road going in another direction. You can still go somewhere else, but it’s somehow jumping into this thing and getting to the end of the road before you run out of concentration and focus and energy.
That’s something about you, and it may be generally human. But you started all this, and it’s how you’re comfortable to work.
It’s how I found to work after a lot of these ...
What about Five Russians?
1979, after the MCA in the fall. The MCA was open in the winter.
Five Russians is again a gallery space.
A very well respected, special kind of space in Manhattan, and a place of the plastic arts and the visual arts completely. I went in and put a speaker on the floor and said, OK, what about some resonances in here and found this amazing thing happening because all the resonances were symmetrical because the room is. It’s unusual to find a cube. Then the process over a number of days - first saying, where the hell am I going to hide this speaker in this room and building a shelf 8 meters up or whatever, 11 meters up - it’s 11 by 11 by 11 - getting it up there and then selecting resonances basically and finding these big shapes.
In terms of its discoverability and also its texture - it seems to be an obviously exhibition situation.
Yes and no. I have this wonderful thing to play with in the plastic arts that people want in there with their eyes open - they don’t see anything. It is a texture because I wanted people to sit in there for a while and be comfortable, because standing and listening is one thing (end of first side)
TAPE 2B
Also, anybody who was there ... walk into that space by accident, but still it took a movement from what they expected. I remember the opening, it was really horrible, because as soon as a group of people get in a space of mine for an opening and the conversation starts the piece absolutely disappears. Sound Line is the same way; all these people came from Paris - it’s just over and over again.
They must be impossible - openings.
They are.
Because the main thing is in exhibition spaces where openings occur is that they’re looking for something to look at, and the relevant shift is from seeing something to hearing something.
Also, these pieces really aren’t exhibitable, they aren’t exhibits. It doesn’t mean I can’t make a piece in the exhibit; in fact I use it. The fact that they expect to see something, and they don’t - this is one of the main characteristics about this place that I’ve chosen. People walk in with their eyes open and their ears closed. So this is a very strong point of character.
Did you use a diptych as an introduction to this?
No, I wasn’t making them.
When was the first diptych - was it the last Documenta?
No, just the words. They start with the pieces in Milan and Turin, and I had this idea that while the piece was permanent in the gallery the drawing should be not in the space of the piece but somewhere in the gallery - in the office or something, on the wall ... It’s an announcement, it’s a key, if you’ve got a situation where there’s another exhibit. The first drawing in the show was 1989.
How does that piece differ - the previous similar one is presumably Amsterdam in the sense that you have an exhibition room to put something in - are those worth comparing or not?
Also, Round was a plastic arts institution
Round is a good case because there was a carpet on the floor and people could lie down or sit, make themselves comfortable. I gather that was not the case in Amsterdam.
No, it was just an empty room with these four speakers in the corners; the speakers weren’t hidden. I just wanted to do it, so we just got the speakers, and I had the stuff there because of building that water piece - I used the same system. ...
Discoverability is obviously very important in certain public spaces, and the different works that you’ve done in galleries - what strikes me about this one is that it’s in an exhibition space, so it would seem that your emphasis there would be on the difference between visual and aural.
No, but again not being conscious of how I ..., of knowing as much as I can about a given space and then going in and making this piece ... where I’m a vehicle for this idea, and I know when I’m on the road and I know when I’m off, and I know when I’ve reached .. and that’s all I know.
What’s new here is the chairs, and the chairs related to the fact that the place is a cube - there’s some sort of symmetry presumably both visual and aural that makes you want to sit people down and just take it in.
It wasn’t in the beginning. I had finished the piece completely, and I remember saying ‘chairs’ and going shopping and finding these chairs on Sixth Avenue and they were perfect.
So that wasn’t part of the original conception.
Nothing is. I didn’t walk in there and say, OK, it’s going to be these shapes and let’s get it done. It grew, and this was the final growth.
I guess I didn’t ask how it happened - how did that opportunity arise?
It’s pretty strange because I was estranged from the director - I may have blocked something out.
That’s touched on earlier when you were talking about the Institute. What about the opportunity to work in St. Paul?
That was this thing called New Music America which was a yearly festival in St. Paul, and they had wanted me to do a piece, the people at the Walker, because we’d been talking about things. I made a proposal for this - they have this network of overhead walkways downtown. And they’d just built this big building with a big atrium in it ... and I wanted to make a piece in this atrium that was sound responsive, that it responded to sound in contrary ways of balance and stuff. And we went through this long fight because Muzak was bidding to put a Muzak system in there, and eventually Muzak won.
They wanted me to do this piece, and then this festival came up, and they commissioned it. The Walker organized it, and I built it, and it was supposed to be a permanent piece, but I was again done in by the maintenance people. The botanical garden
Some of this background doesn’t exist anywhere else, and it relates to the nature of the work in the sense of whether it lives or dies.
I used this project as a way of building the second generation electronic system. The problem was that there was money from the festival, the Walker raised some money, the National Endowment put some money in, so there was a decent budget to work with - I spent a lot of time working with an engineer I installed in New Jersey, literally building specialized computer systems from scratch.
This resulted from the choice of the space?
No, I just needed this tool; it was clear. I started to talk about it in Walkthrough ... it took a month to do and it was because I kept having to walk back into this room, change something, come out, stay there for a little while, hear it - so I said, this is stupid, I know enough about electronics to be able to stand out here and do this. So in Chicago the first computers - Rockwell made a little computer, so the first personal computer was coming out, it came out of a circuitboard, it had a keyboard and an LCD display - you could see one line of type. It had a printer like a cash register printer. You wrote in machine code and got it to do things. But with Chicago there was also enough budget that I could build this system which would allow me to try different pitches - it was controlling a board that generated sounds, several boards. I put this thing in a wooden box with a typewriter keyboard for display there, and the box was like this - strap around my neck, and was going up and down trying and comparing. I wanted the sophistication of this comparison that I could generate this group of pitches, put it over here, generate another group, and then I could hear this one and I could hear that one. It was the whole beginning of this search, but nobody in any of the offices of the museum had a computer - they couldn’t understand what I was doing out there, but then these tones that I was generating were, they weren’t clean enough really, because A to D and D to A converters were not very well developed at that time ...
So I could find these pitches and know what their interactions would be and what their resonances would be in this space, but I had to build another system to realize these in an analog way to be clean. And then I realized that in fact by the time of St. Paul there was enough hardware around, there were enough parts - there was this German engineer who wanted to work with me, and I had this cheap studio just across the river in Jersey City, and so I just put him in this apartment and we built this thing. It was a revelation to have that much ... for the first time - carry this little TV set and change anything.
And that’s still what you use?
No, that system, I don’t remember when it died or how it died. It died in Brown - just because Villa Celle was not funded at all, so I had to go back and build circuits by hand for that piece, buying parts.
What has replaced the light-pen TV?
The system I use now which I developed at the Metro is this ... what I ran out of with the light-pen TV was that each ... it was continuing with this idea that in order to make a sound work I needed a multiplicity of sources because then I could approach the complexity of the real world. So the heart of this light-pen system was one computer controlling many, many independent boards which made the sounds and told me what to do with them. But after building it I realized there was a real limit and that was the power of the central computer because it was constantly having to tell each one what to do, when to do it. And when I started the Metro project - when I start a really big project I look around at the technology and say, OK, these are the current materials because it transforms itself hugely. And at that time there was a computer put out by Yamaha that had a CPU, a processor, but also had a module connected with it. And because it was manufactured - it would have cost 3,000 dollars five years before - but because they made a lot of them it was cheap, cheap enough - it was like a thousand dollars.
So with a group of French engineers I had gotten past this limit because each one had intelligence, and it’s also a precursor - it’s parallel processing before parallel processing - it’s a step forward in computer science actually too, this concept, that nobody has gotten to it yet - they’re still building basically dumb systems. And when they have built the biggest computer they can get to try and tell it what to do ...
Each sound source had its own intelligence; and instead of sending ‘do this now’ to the sound module, I send program to the intelligence, and they’re all connected on a network - they know what time it is among themselves - which means that this is endless, because there’s no strain on the main machine - it just sends program, changes in program.
There it was a question of two hundred.
In the Metro, yes.
And that was not a strain.
No, because each one added its own intelligence - the more you added, the more intelligence you had, and the main computer was just there. Since each one has intelligence, now when I make a piece I burn a permanent memory which is the program for that computer and stick it in the computer, and the main computer is only a tuning tool. The computer goes on; as long as it’s on it does its job, it makes a piece. That’s the system I’m still using in various forms.
The choice of Como Park was because the public gathered there?
No. I’d been fascinated with those kind of spaces, glass domes, and there was talk at one point in the late seventies of doing a piece at Kew. In fact I went to Kew and looked around and talked to them.
It’s not a dome, but it’s an interesting glass house.
It was the idea of glass.
It’s very similar - tropical plants.
So I was fascinated with that kind of space, and it was always on my mind. Also other people thought I would be fascinated with it; I don’t know why. The whole system of commissioning in the plastic arts - the traditional role of the curator is to site a work. They know your work, and they say, OK, we have this place and we’d like one of these or one of those - which is very hard for me because they make up their mind where I should make a piece. Obviously they thought Round; you could do Round in the dome.
Is that what they said?
I’m sure that was in somebody’s mind. My battle is always to say, I don’t want to hear where you want my piece. We start off on the wrong foot every time.
It’s very different to Round, isn’t it?
Nothing to do with it really.
Do you think it’s sufficient described in other things, like Tokyo?
I’m very happy with that piece. ...
You said it’s something that musically oriented people like.
The percussion thing in musical terms equated to an ostenado of some sort, and the bell they didn’t really hear. This whole idea from Documenta VI of using a source which moved to articulate a space, to cause a space to come into existence by focusing attention, by moving this thing around. It wasn’t within the musical idea, but it sounded nice - nice ostenado. Nice minimal music for them. ... The dome had straight walls at the bottom, and then four meters up it had a shelf, then the curves started so that along this shelf the sources were all around.
Was it intended as a permanent work originally?
Yes, but the problem was that the garden had been without funds for many years, so the gardeners were really horrified that all this money, which never could have gone to them anyway because it came from other sources, went into this strange kind of thing that wasn’t even music. They ripped it out.
Their reward was to have Muzak?
No, they may have put Muzak in there; I don’t know. Somebody from a cultural institution in Minnesota called me and said, I have this box of this piece, I have this work of yours which you’ve kind of forgotten, and why don’t you set it up over here. It was like - well, you had this concert over here, why don’t you play it over here now. There was no piece in there; it was just a box of junk.
Extraordinary.
People also were asking me, what happened to the piece in Documenta VI, why don’t you just do it - here’s the tree. What do you mean, it doesn’t exist? I came back, packed my Hasenkampf, a bunch of wires, a bunch of speakers.
Do you know anything about the public response - never mind these maintenance people or the gardeners.
I don’t know. It’s always the question people ask. Every interview about Times Square says, have you ever asked people whether they hear anything here, what are you doing out here, all this money for nothing - hole in the ground.
I meant that it’s a popular place because of the plants in the dome and the difference in temperature to the cold.
Some people in Minneapolis said it was kind of like Times Square. It’s a strange place because it’s not revered but it was also the place where everybody who was married in St. Paul goes after their wedding to have their picture taken for some reason. It had a terrible kitchy statue right in the center of Aphrodite or Venus ... it’s of a level that you find in garden stores. No, I was very disappointed with the Walker. ...
Even though it’s arts funded, it’s unlike any other gallery space.
It was a public space, a strange kind of public space. Because some of the funding came from music there was no objection that it was destroyed, because the festival was over with.
Let’s go on to Round.
A very typical gallery space - this system of one wall projecting perpendicular to one side, two other walls ... to hang things ...
How do you compare it with the St. Paul and the first Documenta as a terrain?
I realize by telling you this process that it doesn’t really have much to do with the piece at all. For a long time people would ask me what these pieces were, and I could only say, well, I made this thing. And doing these drawings was the first time I forced myself to stand back and say, what is this piece? And that’s what we should focus on, not my trials.
The remarks about technique were important because of the question of imitating the complexity of real life in terms of sound - these are the opportunities where you’ve been able to .. you know what you need to develop in terms of equipment in order to do that. What you want to concentrate on is the works themselves although it’s difficult to talk about sound, and the best thing is to be in the works.
What I want you to force me to think about is indeed what the perceptual result was.
What I was thinking was, yesterday we compared Round to the first Documenta and to the Como Park, and I wanted you to go over that again.
This idea of having sound events - it’s surprising, I always say that these pieces are Place - one of the reasons they’re not music is that they don’t have any sound progression or sound events, but in all these cases it’s not a progression .. they have sound events in them, but they don’t begin at a certain point and end there and don’t go anywhere. So they are like part of a texture even though they are separated and as separate events it is a texture of these points moving around the clearing in Documenta, a succession of this bell pacing in different patterns from these four points, and these very complex shapes in this gallery - very subtle. You didn’t see it but your ear saw this thing go like that and then this ...
So it’s much quicker moving?
Yes, the other was like you had time to take .. each thing that happened drew your attention there, because it was slow, a slow pace - that happened, nothing happened, then it happened over there. And this ... it’s just that the event was much more complex; it happened at about the same speed, but the event was very complex in terms of timbre and shape.
How does it differ as you walk round it?
We were talking about whether it was a terrain or not, and in a way it’s more of a terrain than Documenta because it was a homogeneous space, it was a clearing - you could move to this side of the clearing or that side of the clearing. The same with the dome - there were different plants in different parts, there was a palm tree there, but basically it was the dome. And this space, even though it’s symmetrical and simple - what I was saying yesterday is that if you’re standing behind this wall it’s different than standing up here. I don’t know whether it’s a serious point or not - whether it’s a terrain - I don’t think it is.
It reminds me of the move into the Like Spaces because here you’ve got several rooms; there’s some partitioning, yet what you’re doing in there is not yet in the Like Space activity.
There’s a little of that there, and I guess that’s why I brought it up as different than Como Park or Documenta in that your assumption is, because this is a conventional way to arrange an exhibition space, that you’re in a different place - that these little alcoves are indeed kinds of rooms.
So what you were doing is countering that.
Yes, by having this thing move through it, to have these walls transparent - this shape went right through that wall and came out on the other side.
It contradicted the space. The perceiver .. their sense of the walls not working like walls.
This is an amazing place to be in because this was a very subtle thing but it was very complex and very powerful. The illusion was complete; something moved through the wall. If you were talking you didn’t hear it, but if you were silent it went there. Very explosive, but contradicting the explosiveness because of its subtlety. Even though it was explosive, it didn’t threaten you as an explosion. ...
It’s to do with the quickness of the movement.
And the complexity. Do you have the catalog? It’s four pages ... it’s color and it shows different patterns and how it was put together.
How did that come about - this is connected to the university. I think you also gave a talk on the occasion, or was that later?
No, I did. I gave a lecture there. There was a woman who ran the gallery who knew about my work. She had received somehow a Listen postcard and was very proud that it was on her refrigerator when I came to Brown. This was the postcard decal ..
A lot of universities in America have so much money that they have art galleries. They have very good collections.
This wasn’t a collection, it wasn’t a museum, it was a space in the university buildings.
But it was used for exhibiting. ..
It was very well done, and it was there, and she produced this catalog. She was interested in doing it.
This might be a good place to stop, because we next talk about ARC which is the first sort of solid texture to me.
Where’s this book? It really does put it in perspective to see these in a row. Southwest Stairwell was a texture, if we do texture as opposed to terrain. Also Rooms. It’s not so much different than Rooms; it’s much more complex - the technique is much more complex. ... In terms of perception, no.
Then describe this space in ARC.
It’s a big exhibition room on the top floor. There’s this grill ceiling, and it has a glass roof. They have louvres to protect it from but you only see below this grill surface. It’s not a dropped ceiling; you can see above it. But the space is really closed there. It had this window in the wall, but it was closed. I found out about it and opened it up - no one had ever seen this window open before ....
It’s such a very fine texture, really fine. .. I’m always fascinated by the sound - it’s an unrecordable sound in nature - of a certain kind of pine tree with wind moving through it. The pine is in the Bahamas, and the thing that’s always fascinated me is that it’s the accumulation of the rubbing of pine needles against each other - this is an absolutely inaudible sound - you can rub two pine needles as hard as you want to get it, you will never hear anything. But the fact that there are five hundred thousand of them rubbing together - you get this incredible rustle - it’s so rich because no two pine needles are the same; each one is adding this absolutely inaudible difference. I remember trying to record with that recorder this sound in pine groves in Florida in 1979. You can’t. This is a binaural tape recorder; when you wear the headphones the illusion is that you are there. If you record something with the headphones on, it duplicates your head structure, so the aural cues for the two different ears - it really puts you there. If you hear a car go past you, you keep seeing the image of the car in front of you because it’s so clear. That’s where this came from.
Is it then something contradictory to the space that it’s in - you’re not in a pine grove.
It wasn’t about interpreting; it was the fascination with this texture which had nothing to do with pine trees or the smell of pines or anything else. It was also, in terms of plausibility - there was no air conditioner in there; Jean Christophe thought it was the air conditioning system.
Is that why you point out the window - that it might be a window sound?
No, I think I opened the window because it was such a sterile space. And it brought it into reality in a beautiful way because it’s high and you can see Paris. ..
How many sound sources are there, or is that not relevant?
No, it was just building up enough density from enough different points. They were placed in the ceiling grid, but you didn’t perceive it as there. It was completely fine but so rich because it was all this activity but made so soft - like a very subtle taste - rich, but not rich in the sense of chocolate cake, rich in a very dry sense - fine, really fine density.
Is that in any way an outgrowth of the work in Round in that in Round you have a lot of movement whereas this on the contrary sounds like it’s still.
Absolutely. I know where you’re driving at because it’s the way generally artists work.
It may not be true; that’s what I’m asking.
It’s like jumping onto this journey - when everything’s there to start. And I literally don’t know what I’ve made; it’s now that I can look and see what I’ve made. The process of building and shaping sound is so complex that you’re not saying, Oh, I did this before. I never think about it; I don’t say, Oh, could this be the thing I built before? And if it is I would still do it if it works.
It’s a completely different problem than the painter who’s stuck with that canvas - that’s white, that’s rectangular. I start with a whole different foundation each time, so it’s a different problem that I have to solve. He has one kind of problem to solve; I have another.
One of the starting points at Brown is these projecting walls and trying to eliminate them - not eliminate them but to have a sound experience with them.
Every time you ask me a question about process, all I can go back and say is, I know how I got there. I can describe this road, but the road has nothing to do with where I got. I walked into the space; I said, where am I going to put the sources. There was traditional track lighting in the place, so I took the lighting fixtures, built the speakers into however many sources there are in that piece, and pointed them. A corner is a kind of horn; it’s a sound projector because it expands. The first thing I really saw was the corners, and I said, these corners are going to be the sources. They’ll be directional, and they’re big forms but they’re invisible, huge forms in this space - what more can I ask? So how do we get the sound in the corner without seeing the speaker? We got a track light ... fixture and stick a speaker in and get set up - lock the door - this woman’s husband was determined to see my process. I remember being in there working and this guy was pounding on the door saying, let me in, let me in! I pretended I wasn’t there. They know some kind of magic is going on in this place; they want in.
Each place would be different in terms of making the sources invisible.
And as a way to attach it - to get it onto the space. I couldn’t project these sounds directly at you - then you would have said, that sound came from there, now it came over there from that speaker. But the fact that it’s coming out of the corner and there’s nothing in the corner - that’s lift off, that’s levitation, because it’s going into the realm of contradiction of the foundations of our aural perception of space.
In orde to have this sense of quickness at Brown, is it done by passing things between speakers?
Yes, but in a complex way, not just one speaker to another, but different configurations of speakers. That’s what gave it a shape. Instead of being a point .. it was a shape, because it was coming out of two over there, one over there, which made a shape in the room. Then all of a sudden the same sound quickly was coming out of two there. Your perception is, it’s a shape that’s moved.
That’s an interesting variation on the shape of sound; this is a moving shape.
Exactly, and it’s dynamic. And the contradiction between its explosive nature being both explosive and gentle at the same time, in the same way that it’s the degree of contradiction in the MCA piece where (end of tape)