Sound Work Location: AOK Building, Friedrichplatz 14, Kassel, Germany Dimensions: 7 x 16 x 3 meters; 7 x 16 x 3 meters; 7 x 16 x 3 meters Documenta, Accessible from 8 am to 4 pm, Monday through Friday
Image: Photo Max Neuhaus, Kassel 1992
(Foto: Schwerdtle)
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REOPENING OF MAX NEUHAUS' RESTORED ARTWORK, 2007
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.
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.
MNE-NOTES Archive Three To One
AOK-HAUS, Treppe darf weiter klingen, Kassel, 2007
Photo Courtesy Lawrence Markey Gallery TX, 2002
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'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.'
MNE Archive
MNE-DRAW Three To One, Documenta 9 Kassel.pdf
MNE-DRAW Exhibition Three To One .pdf
