1997
Three to One
Paul Robbrecht: It is interesting to note that documenta was initiated by Arnold Bode in 1955 as part of an enormous event in Germany called the Bundesgartenshau. It was always centered around Kassel's main square, the Friedrichplatz, and a large park, the Aue. Between the two, on the corner of Friedrichplatz overlooking the Aue, is the site which Jan Hoet proposed to Max Neuhaus for his work in documenta 9. Hoet felt that this site was the 'elbow' of his documenta. This site, a landmark fifties building whose main feature is a series of large glass walled rooms connected by a spiral stairway, overlooks both the square and the park.
Neuhaus completed his work early, in January 1992. And as my firm was working sixteen meters below in the Aue, building pavilions for documenta at that time, I was able to experience the piece. It made me think about the connection of art and architecture.
But it was not until documenta was running and people were walking on the staircase, experiencing the work, that some elements all of a sudden became clear. Things are articulated by moving people into a space, all things are finally formed by the presence of people in a space, and I understood the work finally at that moment when people were there.
The work Max Neuhaus made there made me see that architecture has this materiality in the world and that art is doing something different. Art has the possibility of working with illusion, with something which is representing something. Although it is invisible, Neuhaus' work is very much there and has the power to do that.
Max Neuhaus: I've always thought of my work as immaterial because you can't see or touch it. On the other hand, I describe the process of making one as building a place. I don't change a space visibly in any way, as the sources of sound are never seen. But what I have finally realized is that my work is not immaterial at all. It's the place itself which becomes the material dimension of the work. But you still can't photograph it, and you can't record it.
In fact, for me the work only exists in the mind of each individual perceiver. It's manifested in the imaginations and perceptions of its visitors, and that's its only existence. I feel that what we do as artists is catalyze an experience, a train of thought, a voyage in a perceiver, whether it's through eye or ear.
I use this word 'catalyst' because I'm fascinated by the variations, the fact that most people perceive these works completely differently. It's not about projecting one image from my mind to theirs; it's about catalyzing a process, the aesthetic process.
R: Another element that I thought about was the idea of movement and all the possible ways that people could go through this building. Architecture is about statics, but a lot of architecture suggests movement. The fifties staircase suggests a spiral movement. Also in very contemporary issues of architecture, this architecture wants to suggest movement, change, differences of layers, and so on. Of course your work is supporting that possibility.
N: It is an amazing space: three glass boxes with this vertical pathway in the center, three glass boxes connected by this spiral staircase. One thing that I noticed immediately was the unusual way people entered it. Because you enter each space by the stairway, your ears enter each level before your eyes. Instead of entering a space face first, you entered it ears first. Immediately, the first ideas that I had about making a work there were to make three different layers of sound that you entered ears first.
It was complicated acoustically. Even though physically it was three separate boxes, acoustically because of the big opening in the center for the stairway it was one space. The final form and the name of the piece, 'Three to One', concern the three distinct sound layers. As you walk through the space finding each layer, your memory of the past layer and the present layer form one thing out of the three parts. You can stay on one floor for half an hour if you want to; but the experience of the piece is moving through it, your memory coming into play in the journey and the coalescence of the experience, combining the spaces into a new whole.
R: But as you use this word 'place', you also function in the world of the plastic arts. People see you as a sculptor.
N: I use this word 'place' firstly to distinguish between the neutral term 'space', something which just contains air. I also use it in a special way; I usually capitalize it if I write it or put it in italics. 'Place', for me, includes the character of a space.
I call the form 'place' because it takes a space and makes a place out of it. We perceive place with both eye and ear. Although we're more conscious about what we see than what we hear, in fact the eye and the ear function as a closely linked team. If you change what either one is perceiving, it changes how the other perceives. The best example I have is this experience that John Cage talks about but is very well known. If you walk into what's called an anechoic chamber - a room used by scientists to investigate sound, which has neither sound nor sound reflections - the room is quite plausible visually, but aurally it's implausible. Although only the ear's stimulus is missing, you feel completely disoriented if you remain in it for more than a few minutes.
Traditionally people in the plastic arts have adjusted the way we experience a space visually. Having been focused on sound for all my life, I thought of changing this perception through the other sense, the ear.
Our sound world is usually only made up of events. It's the event of my words happening here; it's the event of the honk of the car horn outside; it's things which occur in time, they start and then stop. Another important element inherent in all the 'place' works is that they are not events; they are continuous, they're continuums. This fundamental dimension of sound - time - is gone. That's what pulls them into the plastic arts; they're static in time.
Yehuda Safran: I'm in a peculiar relationship with the other two speakers since they tend to speak about things that are not here, and I am here by virtue of being a critic who depends on what he can present at the time in which he presents it. The other difference that characterizes my intervention is that I do not belong to either and belong to both, architecture and art.
I think the great pleasure of Max Neuhaus' work is that it is always contemporary and always as it were ahead of its time precisely because it is a bit archaic: a work which is timeless, a work in which there are no events. It seems that almost every rubric, almost every category of his work suggests that it runs counter to most of the precepts of architecture and art plastique. In architecture the idea of event has become in fact the most dominant one. There is an important group of architects, not grouped as a group but understood to be subscribing to such a concept of architectural construction as events.
In addition to sound works, Neuhaus also makes drawings. They also are unlike other drawings. They're not like technical drawings, they're not like architectural drawings, they're not drawings made by sculptors as preparatory drawings for their sculptures, they're not drawings of a painter. They are drawings of somebody who thinks with sound. The lines are either before the sound in anticipation of sound, or after the sound, an elaboration between seeing and hearing.
Max Neuhaus has said that one of his intentions was to change perception. But in fact it's not only to change perception; it's to bring perception to life. And yet this kind of mark, writing, drawing acquires the unmediated character of a beginning, the peculiarity of a leap out of the unmediatable, which does not exclude but rather includes the fact that the beginning, invisible as it is, has prepared itself for a long time, often inconspicuously.
Another important aspect of Neuhaus' work is that the sound is not special except in being there in a particular relation, but in itself it is a sound produced electronically as are many of the sounds that we are exposed to most of the time.
In parenthesis I would like to say that I don't think that we have not yet come to terms with the shock of being in this world as it is now in terms of sound. This shock in my view permeates much of twentieth-century art; it's an attempt to accommodate, to make it possible to live with this barrage of sounds.
A terribly important aspect which I don't think has been touched on sufficiently so far and perhaps will never be completely understood by many is the idea that much of Neuhaus' work is actually conceived in a particular spatial configuration and could not exist otherwise. Hence the refusal which makes things much more 'complicated' but it is inevitable, the refusal of Max Neuhaus to record any of his works' sounds. This frustrates almost every novice on his or her first encounter with his work. You cannot hear it, he won't let you hear it, except where it is.
N: Yes, but that's because the sound isn't the work. Is this such a strange idea for an artist to work with a medium where the medium itself isn't the work? I use sound as a means to generate a perception of place. The analogy would be to say that the only thing that a painting was was the paint; so we could take the paint off the canvas and put it in a box, and we would still have the painting. To take the sound of a work of mine and put it in another place makes no sense. I'm using sound to build a place; it loses its spatial configuration in the same way that a painting loses its if it's not in its place.
But I have to take exception with what you said about the sound in my work not being special, because it is both to the point and misleading. I don't just pick a sound to play when I make a work. To get the things which happen in a sound work of mine to happen, the sound has to be very special indeed. Building a space with sound is very much more than simply 'playing' a sound there; I have to construct sound fields which articulate the space I am building for the listener's ear. In order to get that something extraordinary to happen, I have to utilize all my skills and experience in constructing the work's sound.
On the other hand, you're quite right because in each sound work I also have to make the sound fit in the space; I have to make the sound seem almost plausible to draw you in. I have to make something extraordinary appear ordinary, or else the sound would become the work.
S: Not special in its origin, it's special in its destination.
N: Its origin is my imagination, or am I mistaking what you're saying?
S: The sound comes from the sound that's there, in some sense.
N: No, I synthesize it just as a painter synthesizes a color. But yes, I make it by ear by applying it to a space, listening to it, comparing it with another sound, modifying it, gradually evolving it until it embeds itself perceptually in the given context. It's not something which is casual; it's a process which usually takes ten days or so before it finally gels and works.
Question from the audience: For the piece in documenta, did you try different sounds or did you have the right sound from the first?
N: It's not a matter of choosing a sound. The reference for most people is having a collection of CD's and selecting which ones to play, but I use sound as a kind of paint to transform a space into a place. I begin with a palette of sounds, the same function that a palette has for a painter. I use it to build the work's sound by ear in space itself. It's not a matter of choosing the right sound; it's gradually forming the right sound in place.
In Kassel it was complicated by having to make three layers in one acoustic, three different sounds next to one another - a complex puzzle to put together because they all had to appear different even though parts of each were heard in all three places.
It's always a process of building by ear - trying one thing, trying something else, saying 'well, what if you change this a little'. But in this case, because of the three levels, it was a little like three-dimensional chess.
Q: Is one of the essential properties the difference between one sound and another?
N: Yes, especially in these works where I take identical spaces and make different spaces out of them. Here the spaces are physically identical, but I can make contradictory spaces out of them with the different sounds that I build for each one. It is the differences between the sounds that does that.
Q: Do you accept the space as it is? Do you look for some particular kind of space, or do you accept a space offered to you as something given?
N: In the case of 'Three to One', the piece in Kassel, I was offered the space. I had the choice of either accepting it or proposing another space; but it was offered after reflection, so in fact it was a very good foundation for a work, three vertically juxtaposed spaces.
Often the selections are intuitive. I can't find a practical reason why I made a piece in a hole in the ground in the middle of Times Square (1). I just knew that that was the place. I guess I have to feel that I can come to an agreement, come to terms with it, that I can in some way do what I do with it. But I don't really know why.
Q: Could you do a work anywhere?
N: No, the site has to work. Something has to be there; I have to know I can get it to click. I'm usually commissioned by an institution or a city. The first thing that happens is that I visit and am given a range of places where I could do a work. I look at them and then I talk to people there because, although I can see it physically and acoustically, they can tell me its meaning in this particular context. With that information I can usually propose several specific locations, and then we come to an agreement about the site. But if someone said 'you have to do it on this street corner', chances are I couldn't. A good site flashes at me; if it doesn't flash it's not going to fly.
R: Your interventions function like processes in the world. They need particularity, particularity of place. But you also deal with another idea - of moment.
N: Yes, one group of my works is this idea of place; but there is another group of works, which are less known because I've made fewer of them, which are the opposite. These concern the idea of moment. They are sounds which occur over a whole city or a large area of a city regularly, but there is a contradiction. The sound arrives so gradually that you don't notice it, and then it suddenly disappears. It's the disappearance which you notice; that's what creates the moment. They're related to the tradition of sound signals in cities but at the same time they are different; they signal with silence rather than sound.
These moment ideas are the opposite of the place ideas. They create a moment, and the place works create a place. On the other hand, although the place works make a place, it's a place where people exist in their own time. The moment works make a moment, but because they're in many different places at the same time they create a sense of place at that moment.
I like the contradictions inherent in these two forms. I hope to start doing more of the moment works, but because they're so large-scale and involve many people they're more difficult to realize in a practical sense.
Q: Hearing and seeing are two different worlds. The memories of what you hear and what you see are very different.
N: Those are two very interesting points. Hearing something and seeing something are two opposites. You're immersed in a sound like you are in a liquid. Even if the sound is very subtle like the sounds in this work in Kassel, they still surround you. And you perceive them by their touching you; they actually touch your eardrum. Whereas visually we stand back from it; we're perceiving from a distance by reflections of light. I think these are fundamental differences.
Each of my works is different, and each's sound is different. The sounds of these three layers in Kassel aren't static; they're moving. The sounds are what I call sound texture. It's a constant color, but within this color there's activity. Maybe this sense of activity also contributes to the idea of liquidity.
The other point you're bringing up is a special aspect of these works. They can provoke a kind of afterimage; your ear's mind remembers the sound. And because I make sounds which aren't literal but are still plausible - they're near-literal - they sound close to something real. After you've heard a work of mine, often when you walk out of it and hear a sound that's close to that sound, you remember the sound and recreate a sound of the work as an afterimage in your own mind. These are all things which we usually don't think about because in daily life we don't deal with sound this way; we only deal with it as the codified or as the literal. These works provoke another kind of sound life.
Q: Do you remember the sounds of all your works?
N: No, I remember them as places. I know the sounds of course because I've made them all, and I can go back and find one and say 'this is the sound'. But listening to the sound is not something that brings a work back. It's the place that brings the work back, because it's the place that I've built with sound.
Of course if I spend ten days building a sound, I never forget it. It's like a color a painter mixes on a palette; it's special, he knows it intimately. It's a good analogy.
Some people are shocked when I, who use the latest technology, make analogies with painting. People talk about the influence of new technology on art and tend to think of people who work with new media as working in a completely different way. I think artists fundamentally work in the same way, always have, always will. We take a given material, we work it until it works. And the most important thing you need as an artist is to know when it works.
Q: Are your works in any way about silence? When you experience one, do you feel like you're in a void?
N: I think that the best answer to that is that it's within each listener. But if we talk more generally - indeed, because there is no time in a place work, there is no silence - the work is continuous, a continuum.
It is the moment works which are concerned with the silence that's created when you notice the sound has disappeared. Ideally you never hear the sound of a moment work; you only hear its silence, its disappearance.
But these are very big words, 'silence' and 'void'. They have a multitude of meanings; we could play with them for quite a while.
Q: How do you deal with the lack of consistency between your works? All the sites of your works are completely different.
N: Why would I want to be consistent?
Q: I ask this question because the places you choose to work in are full of the sounds of the real world.
N: When I take on a space to make a work in it, I accept its acoustic givens including its sounds.
Take 'Three to One'. It's next to a street with a traffic light, so every three minutes there's the sound of all the cars stopping and then all starting again. People in the field of music spend millions of dollars isolating concert halls, putting them on rubber feet, putting them underground. For me the outside sound is part of that space; the fact that every three minutes this other sound occurs is something I use to build the piece with.
As an example, when you take two sounds and put them together - if you take sound A and sound B and put them together you don't get sound A plus B; you get sound C. In other words, one sound transforms the other into a new sound. This traffic starting up on this street every three minutes when you're inside this work is not something I want to exclude; it has become part of what I've built.
S: I think there is a parallel here. It's not unlike a successful measured building. A measured building does not change the entire environment, but it provides a certain kind of figure in the mind with which everything else is being perceived.
I think that the question of distance is very important. In the case of the visual world we can turn our eyes away; we can as it were not see. Max Neuhaus has made the observation that with sound to some extent we can do the same thing, especially with sound which is 'familiar / not familiar', for example a foreign tongue. It's easier not to hear a foreign language than a language that you know well; it's more difficult not to hear your own language. So there's something about distance that we can change.
The most difficult thing I think is to appreciate that whatever distance it is, it is something in the mind rather than in the thing. The advantage of the more familiar kind of sound which we describe as musical or as language is that it is completely determined by that which is invisible, by an order which we imbibe, which we have in our mind. When we listen to a symphony we hear a symphony because our mind is ready for a symphony; if we did not have this symphony form in our mind, it would be a cacophony.
N: Which is why musics of foreign cultures sound strange to us. They're codified and have meaning only in their own cultures or to those familiar with those cultures.
S: I think what we have here is an oeuvre which does not rely on that kind of preordained grammar, and therefore it can also deal with other sounds in a way which other sound works cannot.
In this way it's almost as if it washes our preconceived ideas of sound. I can't speak for others; but from my own experience of these works, I know very well that each sound that impresses me not only lingers on but actually gives me a different perception. Some people find this different perception welcome, and some find it unwelcome. For example, if you subject yourself to the Ring cycle of Wagner and you go there night after night, when you come out the world does look different.
N: I think what we do as artists is indeed to open up another way of looking at everything. The works that I do in identical spaces also change the way those spaces look. They can change the perceived dimensions. I can make one space feel smaller than another even though they are physically exactly the same size.
The thing that's interesting to me about a landscape painting is not how accurately it represents a landscape; it's how it changes your way of looking at landscapes for the rest of your life. That is a commonality between all kinds of art.
The sounds I make are not the sounds of real life; they are never recordings of real sounds. They may sound like X and of course automatically when you hear a sound if your eye doesn't see what's making it your ear tries to tell you what's going on, so you say it sounds like X.
Our daily sound world exists in two broad categories, I think. One is literal, that is to say, the sounds of things, that identify those things - the sound of a dog barking, a car passing, a door closing. Those all carry literal meanings of sound; they tell us something about the event that has happened. We also have another part of our sound world which is codified, which is the sound world that I'm using right now with language. The meaning of a word doesn't have anything to do with its sound. The word 'sound' doesn't give you a meaning because it sounds a certain way; it gives you a meaning because you know this particular sound means this.
These sound areas of our daily life - the literal and the encoded - are only a minuscule part of the whole spectrum of sound. I can work completely around the sounds of speech, music, and events. There's a huge space around them. They are only small points, pinpoints in the universe of sound.
Q: Didn't I once see a show in Bern in the Kunsthalle where you worked with other artists?
N: That was one of the moment works. It was there for three years, and you heard it within the Kunsthalle as well as a kilometer around it. It was there through many exhibitions; it was not part of a group show. But it brings up a good point. None of these sound works fits into an exhibition. I'm an artist in the plastic arts who is unexhibitionable, except for the drawings which, of course, are in a traditional form.
In fact, I think it is strange to limit artists' activities to exhibitions as we seem to do. An exhibition is a very particular thing; it focuses attention in a unique way. But it's certainly not the only possible avenue for artists to approach a viewer, a perceiver. Working outside it offers, in fact, an escape from preconceptions.
Usually when I'm in a group show I insist that the work is commissioned, as 'Three to One' was commissioned for documenta 9. It was then inaugurated the following spring as a permanent work (2). For me, a group show often also functions as an inauguration of a work which remains as part of the institution's collection.
But also I'm not happy with the idea of a group show in general. Originally it was a curatorial statement, about comparing artists - the science of the curator. More recently it's become just a marketing exercise.
But neither of these two things has much to do with the aesthetic experience. I think it's very hard to have an aesthetic experience packed in with a room full of people. I think the communion between a work and a person is delicate. Usually a group show is also surrounded with verbal propaganda which obfuscates the aesthetic experience. If you explain an artwork, you kill it. I think the aesthetic experience is natural although fragile. We are born with the ability; we don't need to learn it, we only need to exercise it.
I think art exists in a zone of minute shifts from reality. A landscape painting still looks like a landscape; its differences for a lay person are impossible to analyze perhaps. It's only the artist that needs to know that this color is just a little different than reality, and that's what makes the painting. It makes it a painting rather than a photograph. That is the catalyst, the thing which creates the aesthetic experience. The viewer only needs to look.
S: One can say something more about it. It's very close to what Bertrand Russell said when he said that if you could speak a language that nobody could understand you could say what you want. In some sense I believe that every artist aspires to this condition knowingly or unknowingly.
N: I disagree. Certainly every artist wants to escape verbal language, unless he's a writer. But I'm saying that the sounds in my work are a language that everyone understands, almost from birth.
S: That's a kind of thinking that not everybody would necessarily subscribe to. There have been many poets, painters or otherwise who have invented something comparable. For example, Khlebnikov invented what he called 'zaum' which was all the sounds in the language which had no meaning which he claimed could have a meaning in a poem, which they did. There are many examples of people who invented comparable 'arbitrary' systems. Ultimately the more you know yourself what it is that you have done, the less it is serviceable for you. Then you will have to be forced to change. Once I know my style, then I am in trouble. So I have to invent it again.
N: Yes, I think one of the most difficult skills to master as an artist is keeping yourself from knowing what you are doing - riding on your intuition - not knowing what you are doing, knowing only what to do.
Generally, I work with what I've come to call sound character. Sound character is the nature of the sound itself. We all have a highly developed sense of sound character even though we don't think much about it. We use it when we're speaking by inflecting our speech, by changing the emphasis and the tone of voice. It's a language that we superimpose on our verbal language, on the words themselves, that tells the listener how to interpret those words; and often it's what people really listen for and trust. We listen to it unconsciously, but its meaning is direct and profound.
It's a highly refined sense. For example, most of us can listen to another speaker in our native language and through only sound character, the difference in the way that he pronounces his words, pinpoint where he was born.
Sound character is not literal, and it's not codified, which means that it can pass between cultures. Anyone from any culture can perceive a work of mine because it's not limited to a culture. It uses a fundamental carrier of meaning - sound character - which is cross-cultural.
I haven't invented sound character; what I have identified as sound character isn't arbitrary. It's an existing channel of communication which all of us use every day. It has nothing to do with style; these pieces don't have a style.
S: Of course not. If they did, you could not go on doing them.
N: The language of sound character isn't arbitrary, or these pieces wouldn't work. I can't just claim it. These pieces function; they get people off the ground. If it were just my own private language they wouldn't fly.
Q: So in fact you always try to make something new.
N: It's not so much that I feel I have to make something new. I've worked in this field for thirty years. It would be very dull for me if I always repeated the same form.
But let's come back to the question of codification. This language of sound character is something I learned about through being a musician, specifically through being a percussionist which is the world of sound timbre, the world of sound color. Having communion with an audience for ten years as a soloist, I know its meanings and they are what I use to build these works. I believe it's universal because these works work universally; they work as well for a Chinese as for an American.
It's a strange thing to talk about because indeed there's no scientific discipline that deals with sound character. Much of it is immeasurable. If you made a recording of the speech of a person from one section of France and one of a person from another section of France and gave them to an acoustician to analyze, he would find few differences. But as a normal French speaker you have no problem whatsoever identifying where those people were born. You can hear gross differences - an 'a' is an 'ahh'. What you place that person with is your sense of sound character. For me as a practitioner, to have that as a vehicle is marvelous.
Who gets to sum it up?
S: Paul should say a few more words.
R: I would just like to hear a little bit more about your ideas of time in your place works.
N: There is of course at the same time no time and only time because the place itself doesn't change; it's always the same. As the work is the experience of its perceivers, the place puts them in their own time. The place pieces are only about time even though they have no time. Is that too convoluted an answer? As you walk up this stairway, you create a journey in time for yourself. In music the sounds are placed in time for you. Here you place them in your own time.
R: Do all these place works use the idea of the circular?
N: In 'Three to One' you go up and you come down the staircase, but I've also made place works in the form of large spaces which have topographies that are completely irregular. No, I don't think it's inherent, the circular idea. The central idea is terrain, aural terrain. But Yehuda, you should sum up; you're the critic.
S: The difficulty is of course conceptual in the sense that this work obviously stands apart from any other identifiable group. Indeed even among other so-called sound artists or whatever it's very difficult to find anything comparable; and at the same time luckily or unluckily there are no epigones, those who come after the heroic ones.
In a certain sense the development of this oeuvre owes something to what happened in music earlier in our time - the music of Varese, of Cage - but this music itself has remained only an important margin of the sound culture in which we live. On the whole, in music, we are still dominated by Mozart.
Now at a time when so much of the aesthetic of the world of contemporary art has been corrupted by the market, the fact that we have such an occasion to discuss an immaterial work is remarkable. I think that discussion between artists and architects is just as rare, and indeed it is exceptional that there are institutions such as this in which these two sides of the coin can come together. I want to thank the Fondation pour l'Architecture again for making it possible.
Excerpted from a conversation between Max Neuhaus, Paul Robbrecht and Yehuda Safran under the auspices of the Fondation pour l'Architecture, Brussels, 1997
(1) Neuhaus' well known work in New York's Times Square, due to be reactivated in 2001.
(2) The sound work 'Three to One' is open to the public Monday through Friday from 8 AM to 4 PM at the AOK Building, Friedrichplatz 14, Kassel, Germany