Sound Work Location: Locmine, France, Dimensions: 120 x 200 meters, Proposed: 1985
Image: Max Neuhaus Drawing, Domaine de Kerguehennec, 1986 - Ink and colored pencil on paper -96 x 96 cm. Collection: The Estate of Max Neuhaus
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Domaine de Kerguehennec
'Walking/ between/ moving/ water/ and/ still./ Meeting/ a quiet/ body of sound/ shifting on the still/ water/ surface./ Enclosed by/ a lucent/ sheen'.
This verbal evocation of a sound work to be maintained until 1998 at the Domaine de Kerguehennec in France is accompanied on one side by shivery lines in greens and blues and on the other by more irregular marks like reflections on water. Edge is offset by surface, and both directionality and extent are interpreted in early Modernist terms, as a parallel between ripples and sound waves (though far from diagrammatic, the drawings still impart information about texture and extent). At the same time, as Neuhaus has remarked, they become part of the process of perception of his sounds. Neuhaus has strong views about that process. Objecting to decoration with sound the arbitrariness of the choice of music in public places he aims at specificity, a heightening and clarification of existing possibilities, in this case natural. The effect is to stress elements which are partly directional, partly indicative of extent, but also partly descriptive. Choice of size, colour and application is crucial, and as a reminder of that, several first drafts of drawings are shown in order to indicate the number and type of decisions that arose in the course of their making.
BY STUART MORGAN IN REVIEWS | 11 SEP 95
Image: Photo Max Neuhaus in situ,
Domaine de Kerguehennec. Collection: The Estate of Max Neuhaus
Photo© The Estate of Max Neuhaus
Ph. Unknow
Books published on the occasion of the inauguration of a sound work:
Max Neuhaus [French, English] (Locmine, France: Edition du Centre d'Art, Domaine de Kerguéhennec, 1987).
Created within the park of a Brittany estate, the Kerguéhennec work inscribes a place within the place of a lake, like a centre of gravity to the landscape, a cross-section of experience and environment. Four sound sources horizontally activate the water surface and project their acoustic image in a persistent, rapid and changing movement - a fluctuating hum, moving as if given to particular moods, like a water spirit or the essence of its expanse and surface. At the same time, like an invisible reflection echoing the marsh's depth and immobility and defining a maximum height, another high-pitched sound, insistent and unwavering, brings together the centre that is the sky and the vertical, upwards movement of head and eyes at the limit of aural perception. Set at the farthest point of sound, it is inaccessible, like the transparent, sightless mirror of the tangible, a faint yet crystalline intensity, the very substance of being, the soul of depth.
To the diagonal or X-shaped movement set up by the four sound sources answers the perpendicular criss-cross movement of the listener's ears and eyes. To the circular movement of the pathway around the marsh answers the spiral movement marking the listener's immobility and instant of perception. An oblique and multifaceted being seems to shimmer and echo through a double depth - that of the lake and that of our listening - through the double height of refracted light and of the air as it becomes sky and open space. The event before us becomes the event that contains us. What is inside extends to what surrounds us. The secret geometry of movements disappears without vanishing or merging with the surrounding world. It becomes structure and architecture in a place where nothing is constructed, nothing but the possibility of full presence in and to that place. To the site's serene silence comes the bustling response of nature. Passive contemplation of the landscape becomes active perception of beings present to themselves and to the world.
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denys-zacharopoulos, "Max Neuhaus," in Max Neuhaus [French, English] (Locminé: Edition du Centre d'Art, Domaine de Kerguéhennec, 1987)
