1995
ʼDrawing
Traditionally sculptors have used drawings as a means of working on an idea before committing it to construction. In my case things are a little different. One might ask in fact, since I build aural structures, what there is to draw? It turns out there are many things.
We have two standard methods of drawing sound: musical notation and of course the one you are looking at now. As my work lies outside both speech and musical language, I have naturally had to invent some others. The articulation of an aural idea with a drawing is an abstraction certainly, but what we tend to forget, because it is so common, is that the drawing of a visual idea is also very much an abstraction. As a medium of expression, I find drawing a complement to sound precisely because of its tangibility and concreteness.
Working Drawings
Drawing has always been an integral part of my working process. Many times it takes the form of maps: when a work uses complex sound reflections from elements in the space, I make drawings which show sound pathways; when I generate a sound topography from the space's resonances, I draw the topography. These drawings help me understand what sound is doing in a space, or more accurately, they tell me what a sound should do there. Rarely do they tell me what will actually happen with a sound in a particular situation, but they show me where to look with my ear.
While building a work, I am frequently confronted with the problem of being able to think much faster than I can do. The act of quickly making a drawing lets me capture a frame of mind, so that I can find it again, later.
I also use drawings to talk about the structure of a sound work--how it is made, in a general way. In this case, the act of drawing, because it is an oblique view, becomes a means of looking with peripheral vision and These working drawings become informal journals of my working process. They are reflections of what I imagine and observe during the explorations of building a work.
Proposal Drawings
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 and therefore the proposal itself is a dilemma in my work. The problem faced by visual sculptors of having to reduce their work to a maquette becomes a physical impossibility with a sound work made up of its surroundings. Perhaps more important though, 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 actual point of embarkation is the moment I try the first sound at the work's place. To reach this point though, 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 in my case becomes a means of overcoming this chicken/egg impasse. It is a way 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. In the cases where the sound work is never realized the drawing becomes the only statement of the idea.
Post Realization Drawings
Discourse about a work is inevitable; people naturally interpret and discuss it. In the case of new ideas, there is a tendency to try to force them into old known categories. One aspect of these drawings is an attempt to avoid this misplacement and form a foundation for discourse without defining it.
A month or so after completing a sound work, I make a two panel visual work which is related to it--it usually takes me that long to realize what it is I have done. One panel is a drawing, the other a short handwritten text. They do not try to define the work, they talk about some aspect of it. Frequently the two panels overlap: they talk about the same thing in different ways, speaking in two different languages, both outside the medium of sound.
This diptych sometimes becomes a component of the sound work, forming one of its possible entrances: a vehicle of orientation bringing people to the point where they are ready to find it. These works also form an always accessible visual trigger for the aural memory of those who have experienced the sound.
The sound works themselves are experiential. The drawings are neither guides to that experience nor descriptions of it. They are manifestations of ideas; forming catalysts for individual trains of thought, active memories, viewpoints into process and projections of what an idea might become.
I build my sound works by ear on site using a computer controlled sound palette. The computer is an ideal modeling tool in many ways, in fact one of its most powerful uses is to plan and shape things too unwieldy or large to shape in their real form-- physical structures, for example. When used as a modeler, it allows the development and evaluation many different possibilities, but the result remains a model: the nature of the reality will always be somewhat different.
I build sound structures. When one uses a computer to generate sound, it is quite a another matter. Here, the computer generates not a simulation, but the reality itself. At the same time, it still allows that reality to be as malleable as a model, no matter what its size. This great advantage in technique allows me to put myself directly in the perceiver's place at the point of the work's conception.
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. There is also no need to: I have the advantage of being able to directly shape the full scale reality.
Max Neuhaus
Lists of Drawings: