2009
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)