1982
first published in Max Neuhaus, Sound Works, Volume I, Inscription (Ostfildern-Stuttgart: Cantz, 1994)
Notes on the Drawings
I
The process of building sound is an intuitive one - of trying, modifying, comparing, adding - by ear. The same process that artists have always used, I imagine, but with the ear rather than the eye.
The role of drawings as blueprints for something to be made by others is not necessary here. As I work alone with sound, the traditional procedure of drawing the idea on paper first, before taking the irrevocable steps of execution, need not be done. I don't have to communicate the idea to anyone else beforehand; even if I make a piece several kilometers in diameter, like a Time Piece, I do not need a group of workmen to make it. I build the sound with my own hand and my own ear, in place, no matter what its scale.
Which, of course, is not to say I don't need to draw.
Volume 2, Max Neuhaus, Sound Works, Drawings
Selected Working and Proposal Drawings 1978-1992
II
Many of my projects are large scale and require a proposal stage.
There is no possibility for me to conceive and develop a sound work on paper beforehand; my experience with the acoustic of the site is an integral part of forming the work.
The problem faced by sculptors who work in visual mediums - having to reduce their work to a maquette - becomes a physical impossibility with a sound work made up of its surroundings.
Perhaps more important, a proposal usually assumes the work is finished, and simply requires execution. For me, the proposal is the beginning of the process of conceiving the work.
The point of embarkation is the moment I try the first sound at the work's place. But to reach this point, approvals must be accomplished and the means need to be in hand.
Rather than the vehicle for reducing a three dimensional reality to two, the drawing here can become a means of stating an idea in an open medium, without the fixative of verbal language, a medium outside that of the sound work which does not impinge on it.
III
Sometimes, in order to shape a sound in place, I have to explain a problem to myself. Usually it's about what it is happening with sound in a particular space.
I start by thinking: 'If I do this, and this and this, that should happen'. Even if I know that it won't happen, by observing what should happen, and comparing it with what does happen, I begin to get a grip on this situation. Drawing is a good way to think about those problems.
In these working drawings I am trying to explain something to myself, usually in a special context. Say I am dealing with the aural topography of a space; making a drawing, transferring it into another medium, can show me another side of it. I can look at it in a different way. With the ear, you can only explore a sound topography by walking within it; it is a point-by-point exploration. But by snapping it into a visual world, I can examine it, imagine it with my ear, all at once.
In the elusive source works, in order to create this illusion where you find a sound and then it disappears or moves to another point in the room, I have to solve a problem like a complicated billiard shot, but with something you cannot see. You have to get the ball to go into the hole, without being able to see the ball. You only know that you have succeeded, when it goes in. Many times these drawings take the form of maps. When a work uses complex sound reflections from elements in the space, I make drawings which show sound pathways.
IV
The third volume of this series is made up of another kind of drawing - the drawing afterwards. delete underlined It is two panels an image and a text, side by side. They are a form of statement of the ideas which I have developed after many trials and errors. Although all these works are concerned with constructing places, the photograph is useless in describing them. In fact it is a distortion as it overemphasizes the absence of a visual component.
These drawings consist of two panels, an drawn image and a handwritten text hung side by side. For legibility in book form, though the text panels in volume III have been typeset rather than reproduced in their handwritten form. I felt that it was far more important to have the clear impact of the words than to reproduce the panels themselves.
The mixture of the two panels separates these works even more from the sound work. Not only to have a medium which is visual for something which is aural, but also a medium which is verbal; and then to combine the visual and the verbal at the same time, trading and passing ideas between them.
These visual works can also function as a kind of preface, reshaping the preconceptions around the sound work, without trying to replicate it on paper - clearing the ground around of what people expect a sound work to be, using both a visual image and a verbal image mixed in different ways. (strike)
V
These drawings are never shown within a sound work; they are not works within works.
The diptychs are sometimes shown outside a sound work, as a preface, depending on how difficult the context is.
The proposal drawings and the working drawings do not belong to the sound work. They are not part of the process of perceiving a sound work; they are reflections upon it.