1992
Three to One, 1992,

Image: Photo Max Neuhaus, Kassel 1992
(Foto: Schwerdtle)

The artist Max Neuhaus, whose artistic work “Three to One” was installed in the AOK building on Friedrichsplatz for documenta 9, coined the term “sound installation” around 1967. The two-day event initiated by the documenta forum looks at the history and present of this art form at documenta.

dirk-schwarze-auf-dem-weg-zur-documenta-ix-05-02-1992

Sound as a Medium, Three to One: Max Neuhaus (Brussels: La Léttre Volée, 1997) 

* * *

Neuhaus supplements the visual field with sound again inside an office building in Kassel. His permanent work Three to One infuses three glass-walled rooms with distinct but very soft sound textures.  These become subtly apparent when one ascends the spiral stairway that connects the floors; the sounds begin to 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.”  Neuhaus compared the process to the iris expanding in a dark room. The combination of three sounds commingling in some areas – along with an aural memory or recognition of the aural experience that forms once the listener descends – ultimately brings the piece together into a single differentiated entity. What the stairway contributes to the stacked interior structurally and visually, for instance, is tangibly enhanced with this new aural image. Conversely, when standing close to the glass walls, the sounds seem to emanate or shimmer forth from them, again challenging the eye to accept an apparent impossibility that furthermore conceals the true location of reflected sound sources.

Image: Invite Three To One

'The diptychs of text and drawing sometimes operate as a kind of foreword: in advance, they preclude crass misunderstanding and, in restrained descriptive terms, prepare us for the experience - as at documenta IX, for instance, where the text accompanying Three to One drew attention to three distinct acoustic tonalities that could be heard in the stairwell of Kassel's AOK health insurance building. But of course the texts are merely tangential to the essential, inexplicable, immeasurable core of the work: the mystery of a relative space.'

Doris von Drathen, "Max Neuhaus: Invisible Sculpture - Molded Sound", Parkett #35/1993

* * * 

Grundlage und Anlaß für die Neuhaus-Ausstellung war die Tatsache, daß die zur documenta 9 geschaffene Installation des Amerikaners auf Dauer in Kassel bleibt. Jan Hoet hatte bei seiner Ausstellungsplanung frühzeitig das aus den 50er Jahren stammende Verwaltungsgebäude der AOK am Rande des Friedrichsplatzes als „Scharnier“ seines Raumkonzeptes entdeckt, da aus dem gläsernen Treppenhaus der Sichtkontakt zu allen Ausstellungsorten hergestellt werden konnte. In Max Neuhaus fand er jenen Künstler, der das Treppenhaus wohl füllen konnte, ohne es zu verstellen: Neuhaus, von der Musik herkommend, färbt einzelne Räume mit Klängen ein. So wie jedem Raum eigene Grundgeräusche und Halleffekte zuzuordnen sind, so nimmt er diese Eigenheiten auf und verstärkt sie durch fein gewebte…

 'Max Neuhaus und Karel Malich'  by Dirk Schwarze

Kasseler Kunstverein, 12.2. – 23.3.1995 Museum Fridericianum, Kassel, 19.1. – 23.4.1995

Three to One, Documenta Stadt

documenta 9