2004
Earshot to Here
Dasha Dekleva
The largest body of sound works that Max Neuhaus has created over what is now almost four decades stirs our capacities to receive a place on aural ground. Embracing the spatial and public characteristics of the place he selects along with the existing sound life that already permeates it, these invisible works build on the artist’s motto that our perception of space depends as much on what we hear as what we see. Their aesthetic is fundamentally experiential and inextricably tied to the places for and from which they are built. Sound is the primary medium but eludes coded forms conveying music and language, as well as the literal sounds whose source or origin we recognize, like a ringing phone or a person’s footsteps. By circumventing such ready associations, Neuhaus opens up the vast field of aurality ordinarily residing in the background of our everyday perception.
His longest running sound work exemplifies these features. Situated unmarked in the massively public Times Square, the work appropriates an aural wedge of space over the subway ventilation grating covering a pedestrian island. The sonority spreading above introduces a rich yet unobtrusive resonance, bounded as it is by urban din and the parameters of the subterranean chamber that houses it. Neuhaus installed a large speaker inside it, emitting an electronically generated and continuous sound tuned to the resonances of the chamber that shapes the sound’s undulating reflections. Despite its solid presence, the perception of the work remains indeterminate and depends largely on the passerby’s readiness to hear or sense the unusual difference when crossing the island. This fact agrees with the artist’s intention to create discreet works the listeners discover on their own and put in their own time.
Once perceived, the overlaid aural field is distinct and vibrant, holding strong in relation to the Square’s intensity. In contrast to the advertising glare snatching most everybody’s attention, the work interrupts the relentless commotion with a tranquilizing effect, forming a stabilizing offset to visual overload. The sonority’s peculiar filtering quality emerges, at times perforated with the rhythmic comings and goings of the subway trains below. If you remain inside the vertical block of sound for a while, a subtler spatial reversal begins to reveal through this aural filtering. As the sonority gets established in the aural foreground, the city sounds coalesce into a clarified background, from where they are easier to discern and let in consciously. Conversely, other sounds cross over the sonority’s threshold and these, too, become distilled punctuations within the enveloping sound continuum. A parallel, non-visual sense of the place takes hold in all its significant variety.
The idea of creating with a continuous sound was a pivotal step for Neuhaus. It allowed him to differentiate the work following his percussionist career from the time parameters framing not only music, but our experience of listening to sounds in general. Once he figured out how to create a continuous sound – in the days before computer technology was developed to the point of making the idea viable this required a measure of inventive engineering – he was able to shape the sound medium in an analogous way that malleable material is used in sculpture. In his phenomenological investigation of listening, Don Ihde talked about the “auditory field-shape” arising from our spatial experience of sounds in terms of “surroundability” and “directionality.”[i] We are, said Ihde, at once immersed in an encompassing sound world that is omnidirectional and penetrating, and are usually able to locate the sound source or sense the direction from or to which a sound is traveling. He went on to show how these qualities disclose the essential liveliness of auditory experience, “the timefulness of sound,” whereby sounds well up, move, and fade out. While for Ihde the temporal, transient presencing of sound events constituted a key experiential difference between our aural and visual perceptions, summed roughly in the sentence “sound reveals time,” Neuhaus took the reverse approach to demonstrate that sound reveals place. By bringing the two senses together on a spatial level, their intrinsic differences paradoxically emerge strongest through their interdependency rather than incongruity and this means, in turn, that a new way of hearing a place is also a way of changing how we look at things.
Reversing the notion of sound as an elusive temporal event and instead employing sound as a shaping substance, Neuhaus begins his creative process by selecting a place which, already gathered, guides the way the rest of the process unfolds. The architectural or natural elements of the place establish the physical context, ranging from acoustics to installation options, with sound sources always carefully concealed. Its function, location, users and passersby, history, ambience, and sound life bring in and narrate the social context. Neuhaus builds his sounds wholly by ear with keen attention to the existing aural makeup. After the place is selected, he walks around, listens, observes and proceeds to work with what he calls a sound palette to build, tune, and adjust the sound or sound string until it feels right in that particular environment. He relies on his intuition, as well as direct experiences with audience reactions he gained when still a performer, to shape the sound character and its plausibility. The degree of plausibility leads his otherwise implausible sound continuums into a decisive relationship with a given context and the hearer. Without an identifiable source, his sounds are ambiguous once perceived, yet this very ambiguity directs attention to all other audible sounds with which the ear wants to identify the peculiarity. The sound character therefore has to maintain a plausible or implausible integration with the existing aural environment to incite the hearer appropriately.
Another tactic that Neuhaus can rely on almost by default is the need for the Western eye to see what the ear hears. Because the vision-centered paradigm is so dominant, he can create situations where undermining the ear-eye dialogue produces a jump-start for the listener. He describes this with the term liftoff that essentially depends on switching from visual to aural perception, the moment a listener finds the entrance into the sound work.
When restricted to indoor settings, such as galleries or museums, he has likewise devised methods that explore and convey his basic premises. Since the visitors there more predictably anticipate seeing something, he often chooses transitional locations like gardens or stairwells, where their visual attention is more relaxed. At other times, when the sound work occupies a traditional exhibition space, it teases out a revised relationship with which the visitors normally approach that space. For instance, in Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris (1983), he utilized the gallery’s existing ambient sound textures, generated mainly by the running air-conditioning system. The bare room offered nothing else to settle the visitor’s perplexity caused by unfulfilled visual expectations, except that Neuhaus modified the system’s humming by adding another layer of sound pulses, which resembled “a low steady wind.” Although the sound was implausible in the context, the contradiction was not consciously noticeable. The result was a congruent intensification of visual and aural perceptions “that were channeled into each other simultaneously and on the same level,” as the eyes wandered in search for a clue, balancing a perception of details like the peaked glass roof and overall stillness with a subtly amplified awareness of the ongoing sound.[ii] The contradiction between the two sound textures, though imperceptible, nonetheless induced a tangible sense of place within the space.[iii]
A permanent work Three ‘Similar’ Rooms at Galleria Giorgio Persano (Turin, 1990 – present) deals less explicitly with plausibility and concerns more orientation through sound color. Each room is saturated with perfectly audible sounds whose variation one encounters fluidly when passing through doorways. The three sonorities are in fact made of two – one for each side room and then combined in the middle, though it is impossible to separate the two from the mixture. A visual analogy would be painting individual rooms all yellow, blue, and green respectively, except that the image flattens the dimensional qualities extended with sound. The physical likeness and continuity between rooms gets undermined with each transition into a differently colored aural space, over time accentuating a nuanced dialogue with other sounds, like the street noises passing through the shared windowed wall.
The works above involve comparison and movement through fixed sound topographies. Two versions of Infinite Lines From Elusive Sources (Paris, 1988-90; Milan, 1990-93) presented gallery situations where the visitor was placed in a position of seeking the source of dynamic and shifting sound topographies. In the first version, the clicking sound switched location as one approached it, and in the second, the sound appeared and disappeared indeterminately as one moved around. Instead of an enveloping sonority stabilizing the place, “the sound is always putting you in a position of seeking it;…., it removes you the most from the place.”[iv] As Ulrich Loock observed, “what is elusive is not really the sound source but the shape of the sound space.”[v]With the possibility for orientation challenged, the gallery space itself became destabilized.
A somewhat similar approach with sound dispersion in a non-urban outdoor setting produced a distinctly opposite effect. The untitled contribution for 1977 Documenta VI in Kassel was situated in a clearing around a tree. Hidden in the tree were eight highly directional speakers emitting clicking sounds that seemed to spring from the grass by way of sound reflection. The clicks were reminiscent of “the sounds of stepping on a twig, or a drop of water falling from a leaf.”[vi] They might have gone unnoticed as part of the naturally occurring acoustic phenomena, but their persistent bouncing from one spot to another provided an adequate threshold to trigger attentiveness. “The clicks were separated by a second or two of silence, and also had physical space between them. This pointed out, emphasized, directed attention around the clearing in a way that created the sense of this place.”[vii]
It is largely due to our everyday visual perception that Neuhaus’s sound works can function effectively and deliver an alternative experience through the ears. The spatial quality of these works varies considerably yet always engages our elemental propensity for orientation. The turnabout occurs when the ears become the prime orienting instrument with which we now establish the place, and our place and activity in it. Although each of our senses is specialized to obtain sensations from an autonomous field unknown to the other senses, the sensations affect and convene in the same, singular body, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty said. Conversely, while each specialized sense opens and provides access to a particular aspect of space, all senses must at the same time “open on the same space” if the communication with other beings and the world itself is to have meaning for us.[viii] A Large Small Room (Cologne, 1989-92) compactly revealed this sensorial interplay. Neuhaus created a sound piece in a small room, the gallery kitchenette in fact, adjacent to the large exhibition space. He simply added a system that created sound reflections appropriate for a large room inside the small room. “…when you walked into the space, of course, your ear said it was very big, but the eye dominated and said, no, look, this is a very small kitchen…. But when you walked out of the space into the larger room with normal reflections, the ear came in and said, no, this space is very small. Because it rescaled itself according to the eye’s dimension.”[ix] The ear got to lead the discussion for a while.
In an earlier work in the sculpture garden at the New York Museum of Modern Art (1978) visual orientation through space was amplified another way. For this occasion Neuhaus installed a subsonic loudspeaker in a grille-covered chamber beneath the pavement. The sonority remained inaudible but its specific subsonic frequency affected the sounds normally heard in the garden. The effect was stronger in particular spots, so that a visitor would start noticing aural “landmarks” while moving about. Carter Ratcliff described the experience:
After a while, certain pitches associated themselves with certain points – the ear found aural equivalents for the landmarks (works of sculpture, trees and shrubs, a fountain) by which the eye had already charted the garden. So one’s visible map was augmented and in subtle ways changed by this new one, which was audible…., yet a map of the work’s sound patterns never comes into focus. Ear and eye interact as one moves through the installation, achieving something very like an equality. That’s why it is impossible to translate the aural aspects of these works into terms exclusively visual. They cannot be mapped.…[x]
The visual field is supplemented differently again inside a health insurance building in Kassel. Permanent work Three to One (1992-present) infuses three floors of the glass walled building with distinct but very soft sound textures. These become quietly apparent when ascending the open stairway that connects the floors and consequently causes the sounds to partially intermingle between levels. Doris von Drathen described the gradual recognition with which the ear begins to discern the extrinsic sounds as if increasingly filling the space, landing by landing: “On the stairs to the third level, our ear is now so practiced that we can indeed distinguish an acoustic threshold. The topmost space seems to expand as the two notes [second and third level sounds] converge, seeming to become a whole open landscape of a space.”[xi] Neuhaus compared the process to the iris expanding in a dark room.[xii] The combination of three sounds commingling in some areas, along with an aural memory, recognition of the aural experience that forms once the listener descends, finally brings the piece together into a single differentiated entity. What the stairway contributes to the interior structurally and visually, for instance – piercing and unifying the stacked interior – is tangibly enhanced with this new aural image. When standing close to the glass walls, on the other hand, the sounds seem to emanate as if shimmering from glass, again challenging the eye to accept an impossibility that otherwise conceals the true location of reflected sound sources.
David Michael Levin’s reading of Martin Heidegger, the 20th century philosopher who brought attention to listening, is broadly pertinent to a discussion of sound in the field of visual art. Starting with the premise that modernity was founded on and promoted a vision-oriented paradigm, which has had significant consequences in all spheres of Western thought, culture, and social relations, Levin discerned an underlying criticism in Heidegger’s philosophical discourse aimed at destabilizing the ocularcentric dichotomy steeped in subject–object relationships. For instance, Heidegger pointed out that our everyday concerns with things for the most part revolve around their presence and use value. Things that present themselves to vision consequently “become an object to be beheld…or to be acted upon.”[xiii] Levin proceeded to show how Heidegger traced our habitual visual experience – limited to these immediate concerns, everyday commerce, surface perception, and a corresponding tendency “to fixate whatever our eyes behold”[xiv] – to metaphysical discourse, in essence contributing to the transformation of the original understanding of truth as unconcealment to truth as correctness. The presence of being that is disclosed to us through vision, “the power that emerges” into unconcealment, was in the process reduced to the presence of an object. This relation engenders a very instrumental exchange that obscures other forms of interaction and receptivity. By embracing listening as an alternative and parallel existential model, Heidegger in fact presented a counterbalance to the existing hegemony of vision that has shaped a kind of grasping, predatory spirit in our culture. “Heidegger’s critique is not, therefore, an attack on vision as such. On the contrary, it is intended to facilitate the recognition and development of the great potential inherent in vision.”[xv] Levin observed an opportunity for creating an entirely different and necessary new paradigm that would encourage a development of the character of our seeing. The model of listening opens up to this challenge precisely because it operates through receptivity and partaking, the existential modalities forgotten or displaced through our accustomed visual attitudes.
We hear this undermining of the visual hegemony, including its grip over place, in all Neuhaus’s works. The constant concealment-unconcealment interplay of the perceived world is played up with various tactics of visual or aural suspension. Among these arose yet another supple idea of delivering sounds by way of silence. Or rather, by way of subtraction, a kind of aural slippage Neuhaus makes palpable with his Moment works.Their predecessor was his Silent Alarm Clock that awoke the sleeper at the moment the gradually increasing high-pitched tone, to which one’s ear-mind subconsciously attuned, stopped. The invention led to Time Piece ‘Archetype’ at the 1983 Whitney Biennial, installed in the sunken sculpture garden in front of the museum. The piece hinged on the prevailing sounds coming from Madison Avenue, which Neuhaus piped into the garden through a device that slightly altered their timbre, so that the real time acoustic events doubled a bit shifted and minutely delayed. The added relay began inaudibly and increased very gradually over twenty minutes until it matched the volume intensity of actual street sounds. At that moment, the relay suddenly ceased. Inaudibly, a new cycle recommenced, yet for most hearers it was the cycle’s cessation that first made them aware of the building electronic reflections. As Carter Ratcliff described, “With half one’s aural environment deleted…the site seems astonishingly clear. Din no longer sounds like mere din, but a rich aural texture instead. And with this clarity comes a calm…., an earlier version of which we’ve encountered in the Times Square installation.”[xvi]
The Whitney archetype was a small realization of a Moment work that Neuhaus envisioned on a communal scale. An occasion like that came with Time Piece (1989-93) that covered a larger area around Kunsthalle Bern. Neuhaus built a sonority that resembled “the noise of aeroplanes as well as the after ring of bells, without, however, really imitating these noises” and with a third component that was “a hidden melodic line, a vibration to be sensed rather than to be heard in the aural complex.”[xvii] Projected from four loudspeakers that carried it across diverse ambients of the nearby park, a highly trafficked bridge, a wooded area sloping toward the Aare river, as well as the Kunsthalle’s interior, the sonority increased audibly for several minutes and ceased clocklike on the hour and half-hour. More recently, Neuhaus was commissioned the first permanent work in this series. Time Piece Graz (2003-present) functions in one-hour intervals with a sonority characteristically shaped to encircle, immerse, or merge with local sounds as in the Bern precedent. It covers 300 x 500 meters around the Kunsthaus Graz whose walls it appears to give a voice. Moment works introduce a degree of communal interaction somewhat reminiscent to the effect generated by traditional sound signals like public clocks or church bells. Except that Neuhaus’s works “utilize the disappearance of sound instead, to form a moment of stillness.”[xviii] Because the perception of periodical sound cessation briefly suspends the hearer’s own time flow, it brings attention to the region across which the phenomenon occurs and where coincidental listeners take part in a joint moment of aural and spatial re-cognition.
Recognition of our visual habits in the process adds insight to the kind of transformations taking place that can change the character of our seeing through listening. Levin illuminated multiple angles regarding vision in another book where he returns to Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. The relevant chapter considers afresh the figure-ground structure of Gestalt that features dominantly in our perception and how we construct our field of vision specifically. Introducing the stakes at play, he writes:
Ordinary vision empties the contextual field of meaning: for ordinary perception, the ground is not significant. Although the ground is the source of the figures we see – as we are wont to say – “against” it, ordinary vision regards it as not sufficiently interesting and it tends therefore to cut off the ground from the figures, which engage its attention, thereby inhibiting a freely flowing interplay between them in a disfigurement that affects them both.[xix]
Levin’s text is about reversing this Gestalt, “not the differentiation of figure and ground as such, but rather the way in which this differentiation is constructed and maintained….”[xx] The statement echoes his earlier discussion about seeing and listening. Even though Levin’s writing this time concerns vision, the perception of figure and ground is clearly applicable to the experience of listening and hearing. Many sound works Neuhaus creates encourage precisely a foreground and background sonic exchange, as in Times Square. This interplay demands an amount of letting go, evident in the futility of trying to identify his sounds, or impose definitive associations upon them. Doing so is akin to pulling them out of their context, the aural ground they arise from. A mode of receptivity is at play, stimulated first with the ambiguity of the sound source and furthermore with the ambiguous character of the sound that only makes sense in relation to how we hear it in the context. In that way, the process of differentiation becomes more integrative – a rich interplay among all audible sounds.
A double reading seems equally appropriate since the two perceptions have a common interstice: space. The kind of reversal between our visual and aural intake that Neuhaus’s sound works incite is itself a changed way of perceiving space and a shift in the ordinary character of our vision. A shift through which the eye may observe how the ear engages with the world of aurality, how the ear becomes consciously responsive to a “freely flowing interplay” unleashed between background and foreground, expanding and deepening the spatiality of the world around us, as well as the vast range of sounds we are capable of perceiving.
Perhaps best indicators that such a transformation is taking root are chance moments of aural recognition, or a remembered acoustic overlap, that follow an experience with Neuhaus’s sound work. They sneak up here and there, indefinitely, in other places altogether, and quite irrelevant of your listening mode. These aural encounters act like reminders of sort, yet they are really just discovered cues that continue to carry aware everyday listening to the fore.
[i] Don Ihde, Listening and Voice: A Phenomenology of Sound. Athens (Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1976).
[ii] Jean-Christophe Ammann, “Notes on Max Neuhaus” in Max Neuhaus, Sound Installation, trans. Catherine Schelbert (Kunsthalle Basel), 14.
[iii] Max Neuhaus, “Sound Installation, 1983, Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris (ARC)” in Max Neuhaus, Sound Installation (Kunsthalle Basel), 22.
[iv] Max Neuhaus, “Conversation with Ulrich Loock” in Max Neuhaus: Inscription, Sound Works, volume I (Ostfildern: Cantz Verlag, 1994), 127.
[v] Ulrich Loock, “A Conversation Between Max Neuhaus and Ulrich Loock” in Max Neuhaus: Elusive Sources and “Like” Spaces (Turin: Giorgio Persano, 1990), 49.
[vi] Max Neuhaus, “Lecture at the Seibu Museum Tokyo: Talk and question period” in Max Neuhaus: Inscription, Sound Works, volume I, 60.
[vii] Ibid.
[viii] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (Great Britain: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1962; New York: Routledge, 1999).
[ix] Max Neuhaus, in conversation with Colin Fournier at the Bartlett School of Architecture, London, February 24, 2004. Audio recording courtesy of the artist.
[x] Carter Ratcliff, “Space, Time and Silence: Max Neuhaus’ Sound Installations” in Max Neuhaus, Sound Installation (Kunsthalle Basel), 8.
[xi] Doris von Drathen, in Max Neuhaus: Inscription, Sound Works, volume I, 110. Originally published as “Max Neuhaus: Invisible sculpture, molded sound,” Parkett #35/1993. Translated from German by Michael Hulse.
[xii] Max Neuhaus, in conversation with Colin Fournier.
[xiii] David Michael Levin, ed., “Decline and Fall: Ocularcentrism in Heidegger’s Reading of the History of Metaphysics” in Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 201.
[xiv] Ibid., 202.
[xv] Ibid., 205.
[xvi] Carter Ratcliff, “Space, Time and Silence,” 11.
[xvii] Ulrich Loock, “Time Piece Kunsthalle Bern” in Max Neuhaus, Two Sound Works 1989 (Bern: Kunsthalle Bern and Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, 1989), 13.
[xviii] Max Neuhaus, text excerpted from Time Piece Graz drawing (2003).
[xix] David Michael Levin, “The Field of Vision: Intersections of the Visible and the Invisible in Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty” in The Philosopher’s Gaze: Modernity in the Shadows of Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 181.
[xx] Ibid., 177.