1993
CAPC Bordeaux, 1993

Interview, Excerpt from a conversation with Greg des Jardins, Summer 1994

'After documenta Harry was building a show for Bordeaux but it's actually a longer story than that because the director, Jean-Louis Froment, came to see me in my studio in New York before I started working in Europe. We talked and I took him to Times Square. It's strange, I remember what happened at the time. He was being very French and I had no idea what being very French was at that time, of course, and he had to bring up the question of money. I can see what happened now, but then I was completely mystified. I'd taken him to Times Square and he said: well then how much could possibly, should, would, might such a work of yours somewhere in the world cost? I was obsessed at that time with raising the money for the siren project, so I said: you know, I'm working on this siren project and it's got a budget of five hundred thousand dollars. He kept talking but left, and I never heard from him again. In the early eighties, half a million dollars for one of my sound works was unheard of. My first lesson in the French conditional.

Harry wanted to include me in this show that he was doing there, and I said: no, I'm not going to do any more works in exhibitions because it means they are destroyed. And he said: but you have to be in this show. I said: no way, Jose. Then he said: OK, I'll talk to Jean-Louis. So they talked and the whole connection of ten, fifteen years before pushed it through. I went down to Bordeaux, spent a day looking. The stairways I chose are the only symmetrical ones there. There's a very interesting staircase on the other side which is completely different. It's spiral, and I was really torn between whether to do that stairway. I wasn't looking for a place to do another Like Space work; in fact I almost chose this other stairway, the single stairway.

But those two were finally what clicked.'

Max Neuhaus, 1994