1994
Excerpt from a conversation with Greg des Jardins, Summer 1994
des Jardins
Let's go on to talk about Hamburg. It looks like your first opportunity to have more than one space to work in. As it was the first of the Like Spaces, how had that idea become attractive?
Neuhaus
I have to admit that part of it was to get rid of the doubting Thomases. It's a very strong demonstration of the power of sound to transform place, and a lot of people had taken that as a kind of rhetoric. It was nice to say: OK, you think it's rhetoric, why is this room bigger than this one?
des Jardins Having the immediate comparison. Neuhaus
It's not immediate. It was more complex than that in this case because of this strong confrontation with all these plastic works, all this visual sculpture just outside this work. It was maybe sixty meters between these two wings through the rest of the exhibition, so it wasn't go from this room to this room. It was two completely different rooms.
des Jardins
It's worth emphasizing because in later cases like Three to One they are immediate. You have a sort of bridge of normality.
Neuhaus
I think the experience of the visitor in Hamburg was: come across this room, find it empty; if he was attentive, realize it was sound, listen and find it, and then go out, saying: OK, that's Neuhaus' sound work. And then start through the rest of the exhibition and maybe a half an hour later find the inverse of that room on the other side.
The contrast between the two spaces was huge. The sound on one side was a fluid; once you focused on it you were immersed up to here. And the other side, clicks - a dense texture of them, but sitting above your head, like a dropped ceiling just above your head. It wasn't two fluid textures that were very different, which I could have done. These had completely different natures.
I wanted to make sure that none of these sounds would go beyond the space. It wasn't easy because the space was divided from the rest of the exhibition with walls maybe three meters high, but the space was ten meters high. It's
one thing to get a click in a special place; it's another thing to get a big texture and stuff like that.
des Jardins And these were only things you heard when you were in each room? Neuhaus
I made a very narrow break as an entrance in the center of the wall that went across the front of these spaces, so you walked to this narrow break. There was a text in the form of a label just outside - the same form as the labels of the show - saying: when certain kinds of sound are very soft et cetera. And then you were in it.
des Jardins
This is for Harry Szeemann?
Neuhaus
Yeah. That was the opening of the Deichtorhallen as exhibition spaces, and he was hired to make this opening exhibition.
des Jardins
The two immediately following works are also Like Space works, and what's interesting about them is that the rooms aren't separated by something else in between but they communicate either with having the wall or having the two parts together.
Neuhaus Turin was really next in concept, I think. des Jardins Say something about the invitation for those two Like Spaces. Neuhaus
Well, I went up to Torino in the summer of '89 so this was even before my invitation for the Deichtorhallen came in something like August, and it had to happen fast. I'd already been to Torino and agreed to do a work for Giorgio and knew about the similarity of these rooms, so to speak, and I think it was then in my mind. Perhaps that could have been the first Like Space work. And then Deichtorhallen came in and bang and then, yes, right after making the Deichtorhallen work I went to make the piece in Dallas and went even further with the idea.
des Jardins
There in Dallas, you chose a room or were given a room. Neuhaus
I chose a room. I had some alternatives and I had thought about doing two rooms; but then this idea, since I had worked the concept already, to go to the extreme of making two sounds which sounded the same but created completely different feelings when you were inside them even though you couldn't hear the difference between them.
I really had to work on it. Well, the process has not too much to do with the result, as usual. But what I am doing when I build a work is comparing sounds. And the closer I'm getting to the sound I want, the more similar these sounds become. At one point I realized I had two sounds that I could barely hear the difference between, but something very different was happening in each. I already established that it would be one room with a divider.
des Jardins
How high was it?
Neuhaus
It went from floor to ceiling, room height, three meters or so dividing the room in half with another wall.
des Jardins
You must have seen this as a continuation of what you were undertaking in Hamburg.
Neuhaus
I was fascinated with how far I could go with this idea, and then bingo this thing happened with the two sounds sounding almost alike but having completely different natures.
des Jardins But then Turin is immediately after Dallas. Neuhaus But before Dallas was opened to the public. des Jardins
But in terms of working - the idea was even before Hamburg - in terms of working you come to Turin having worked with pairs of spaces. Now you have three.
Neuhaus
One interesting point is that both in Hamburg and in Dallas they're mirror images of themselves, but you don't notice that consciously.
In Turin they are just three similar spaces - the same high ceiling, same dimensions, two doors connecting them. It was another extreme of the Same Room because it was making three spaces out of two sounds; it was another way of going further. One is two sounds which sounded exactly the same; the other making three different spaces out of only two sounds by building one sound each for the two extreme rooms and combining those sounds in the center room - building them in such a way that when they combine, when I put both of them into the center room, we had a third sound. You didn't hear the sounds of the extreme rooms in the center room, though; you heard a different room - using the same components re-juxtaposed, creating something else.
des Jardins
Was the making of the work in Turin finding the two sounds for the extreme rooms?
Neuhaus
I don't remember how I did it, or which I found first, or even whether I came in with that concept, but at one point it clicked, this idea of changing the meaning of a sound with context.
At the doorways to the center rooms you can't find a line where the sound changes, but at one point you enter into both sounds and that's when this formation, this combination is evoked. It's also a lot going on in your own head. They're indicators for your imagination; that's what makes it happen.
The most common way of entering the work is into the middle room first. The entrance to the gallery goes into a hall which goes into the middle room, and then it goes to another room, and then there's a doorway into one of the extreme rooms. And the only way you can get to the smaller of the rooms is through the middle room; you can't go there first.
So the experience I'm describing of going from the extreme to the other was after you'd been in the piece for a little while. You've got both sounds in the middle room, and your ear is carrying both those sounds, and it enters a new room with only one of those sounds. The fact that it's gone has to register at one point.
des Jardins
What about the plausibility of the sounds? You described both the Hamburg and the Dallas sounds in terms of feeling.
Neuhaus
Dallas also had the diptych in the entrance to the space. Because of putting this horizontal wall to match the horizontal wall at the other end of the space I had a little hallway, and you walk in and then you either turned left into one side or turned right into the other side but to your side were these two things. But most people who came in were confronted with two openings - one on the right and one on the left - and went for the opening. So it was only after you'd been in the room and perhaps like nonplussed that you came out and you saw the image of the diptych or the text panel of the diptych. That was a beautiful way to use those things, not confronting them - read these before you go in - but go in, stretch, and then all of a sudden have this. No, it wasn't possible to get by yourself.
des Jardins What about Turin, was there a diptych? Neuhaus Yes, hung in another part of the gallery.
Giorgio reinstalled all the shutters which he'd taken out so the rooms could be made semi-dark, just enough so that any visual work became secondary. I envisaged it as a permanent work, so I had to deal with the fact that there was always going to be a visual exhibition in there.
The sounds are not as subtle as the other works. The work appears only when the room is semi-dark; when the shutters have been closed for a while, it appears. These are real healthy textures that you're hearing, that you're immersed in.
des Jardins In a way, Hamburg and Dallas form a pair. Neuhaus They're all different directions out of this idea.
In the case of the Dallas work, it's not that the sounds weren't very, very different but that you didn't hear it. I think the confusing thing about talking about this piece is that people don't understand how we hear, that we don't hear reality any more than we see reality. We build what we hear in our mind. And I'd found a way to have the mind build in its overt perception the same thing which in fact wasn't the same thing, and that was the key in Dallas.
des Jardins
Another thing that obviously differentiates Turin is the fact that there are the three, and that presented you with a problem of mixture.
Neuhaus
I was intrigued by the challenge of three instead of two. I am fascinated with this idea of juxtaposition. This was a step in another vector, away from this central idea of juxtaposition of just two.
des Jardins
The reason it's good to speak of all these as Like Spaces is the fact that 'spaces' are plural. In contrast to all previous works, you're dealing with more than one space. Whether those are two spaces or three is a new piece of exploration.
Neuhaus
Some people thought they were getting two installations for the price of one, which was fine with me, but it really is analogous to a two panel work; one part doesn't exist without the other. You could have a fine time just if you happened to go into one of those wings at the Deichtorhallen or in the other one. Bordeaux then becomes a trio because those stairways are absolutely identical. They're not mirrored in any way; they are the same.
des Jardins How did it happen? Neuhaus
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.
des Jardins
These are more like Hamburg than any of the others in that they don't communicate.
Neuhaus
Exactly. It's about the same distance between them, about sixty meters; they're completely identical. The lower floor is dark because it's an old warehouse; and it doesn't have any windows coming into the lower floor, so it's artificial light. But at the top of each of these stairways is a window with daylight and these vaulted ceilings. They're not labyrinthical like Southwest Stairwell; but if you didn't know your way around the museum, you could confuse one with the other because they're that identical. But the sounds here - one is warm and rich, the other is bright and hard; one is soft and rich, the other is cool and hard - both continuous textures. Really extreme contrast but within the same form, whereas the contrast with Hamburg was fluid versus points, a fluid in one space juxtaposed with these points of activity just over your head in the other. These are both fluids but of a completely different nature.
They're continuous in that as you go up or down either of the stairs it doesn't differ. No, they do not have topographies.
des Jardins So was this in the show or not, Harry's show? Neuhaus
Yes, it was part. It was inaugurated with this exhibition and stayed; and that's become a very good way to do works for me, because they aren't exhibitionable really. I mean, the real meaning of these works comes after you know them for a while and you have to get to know them. These are perfect in that you can walk through either space without hearing anything, and many people do. In fact, I make sure that some people can walk through my works without noticing them before I finish one. They need the time of being in a collection, but no matter how long they are there they remain discoverable.
I didn't want it to enter the downstairs space because that's the main exhibition space. It wasn't that hard to contain it because there's a smaller arch where you enter the stairway and at the top also a little smaller arch, so they are rooms kind of. I had the architecture helping me confine it to these two places. Entering these works is not about walking across a line as in Sound Line or Times Square. You enter the zone; it is sudden but I didn't use that, in a way. It's not how you find it. You find it by knowing that it might be there and going to look for one of these stairways and going in it and stopping for a second to focus and then, bang, it comes.
des Jardins
I'd like to do Three to One at this point - how did that happen? Neuhaus
They called me. I was one of the first artists chosen, I'm not sure why. Actually I remember being at a dinner in Pistoia, big dinner for a Mario Merz opening or something, and Jan Hoet being there and in the middle of the dinner in his outspoken way brought me up to the table and saying: Neuhaus, I'm Jan Hoet; you're in it, you're in it! But also I was lucky that Denys Zacharopoulos was part of the committee and knew my work and knew how long it took to make a work and knew that I'd refuse if they called me only six months beforehand.
des Jardins How long had he been part of the committee? Neuhaus
He was part of the team from the beginning - I guess, I don't know. Hoet always talked about the piece being central to his documenta, and he called it the elbow.
des Jardins You were given the site? Neuhaus
No, it wasn't that. I could have been in documenta in another place, and I went looking for my tree of 1977 and walked up from the park, and I realized it was indeed perfect: all that glass to work with, these rooms on the vertical rather than the horizontal, this juxtaposition in the center. One of the first realizations about the spaces I made - I'm not sure when, maybe at the point that I was agreeing with this fascinating thing that these were the only spaces I'd ever worked in where you enter by the top of your head and your ears go in first and you hear them from the bottom up because you're coming up. The work begins on the first floor in the European sense, so the first space you enter is up the stairway and the top of your head comes in, so it's ears go into this space first and you gradually raise the level in the space as you come up the stairway and walk around, then walk up the stairway, ears first into the next level, and the same with the other.
des Jardins So it's a very different way of entering spaces. Neuhaus
Yes. The building had been transformed. It was a landmark building, one of the first buildings - Kassel was flat after 1945 - so it was one of the first
buildings built there in this fifties style, I guess. But it was also very clean once we cleaned it up. Everything except this space had been transformed in the building quite radically with dropped ceilings and computer platform floors. The employees of the building tried to defeat this space in a way by putting rubber plants in it, and they put a carpet on the floor; originally it was very sparse. They had changed the color of the walls. The architect had chosen these pastel, light colors - a very deliberate color choice for different floors. So Hoet insisted that they restore the stairway; what they had done to it was so ludicrous because it was clear that they were fighting this space, especially with the plants.
I realized that if I had the carpet it would have been a lot easier because each floor would have absorbed its sound, but I was game. It was a big fight; documenta had to pay for the new floor, had to store the carpet. They had to take all these rubber plants out and all during documenta store them somewhere and water them.
When I came in May of 1991 with all my equipment trying to figure out where to put the sound sources: whoops, this thing is made out of reinforced concrete - God help me!
These working drawings show the progression of the idea. This first one is called Entry, and it shows this head coming up above the floor. The second one is called Path, which just shows this path. And then there's a series of three or four that show different parts, finally realizing that if I threw the sound on the glass I had it because the source would unconsciously seem to be the glass and therefore be outside because that was the only logical place. And then I was lucky that this heating system was near the glass , but it was too small to fit any kind of conventional speaker in. I knew that from the heating system I could get it on the glass.
I found a speaker-box designer who was obsessed with the base reflex box, which is one small area of speaker design, and I said: I want you to design me a speaker box that has this frequency response but the maximum dimension on the width can only be five centimeters. Silence. It's against all the rules. I have two of the prototypes upstairs. You'll see they're long tubes, and that's the last thing you want to do with a speaker box. But he did a very nice job and we built them, installed them. I insisted that they be insulated from the heating system. He said: but no, documenta is only in the summer, the heating system won't be on. I said: no, I think we'd better be sure, there could be an accident, who knows what could happen here? Then I went away all summer and, like I was saying yesterday, prepared the palette.
When the sources had been installed, I went in for two weeks to try and get this thing to happen. Acoustically it's one room because of the huge opening in the center, even though you perceive it visually as three. So it's like making a layer cake. I worked until I got it to work, this gradual finding the path, finding sounds that worked without spreading.
After I'd finished I started to try and analyze how I got it to work. This is one of a pair of drawings which is what I called Spatial Interlock because between each of the floors the three colors represent each of the sounds here, the
sound on each floor and the space they occupy on the floor in the hearing zone, but each one spilled to its adjacent floor. And this is the images of the spill - the middle one gets the spill of the red and the blue; these can only get the spread of the purple. So this showed me where the interaction was. There's another drawing which is the spectrum of the three sounds, and in there I found that there were - I'd have to look at the drawing - a total of three common frequencies in the spectrum of these three sounds. There's one frequency, I think, that goes through all three; and there are several others which go between adjoining ones.
You know what we hear as timbre is the spectrum of the sound - which frequency components it has and the relative shape of the amplitudes. Our voices don't sound the same even though we're both men and have the same frequency range. What the difference is, that even though we may have many of the same pitches or close pitches because we are both male humans, it's the relative amplitudes of those common frequencies that determines how we read the timbre and the fact that I can tell the difference between your voice and mine. It's a shape. If you make a graph with frequency on the horizontal axis and amplitude on the vertical, each frequency of the timbre becomes a vertical line. The height of the line represents its loudness. If you look at the tops of the lines you see a shape. Like this. That's really what we're hearing; that's what the brain has decoded. Because the sounds were completely different on each floor, these common frequencies in the work had different meanings on each floor because they were in the context of a different spectral shape on each floor. In fact, what I had done was take the things that spread and give them completely new meanings in each of the three places.
The title came months after I actually finished the piece. I had to add a balancing system so that no matter how many people were in there the level balance was always constant. And during that phase I noticed myself that after a while - I mean, the first time it happened I was terrified because I thought something had changed - the distinctions disappear because your mind learns what's going on, it learns the structure, and then the work gels into one space, it becomes a terrain. So it starts off as three separate layers or textures and, as your experience grows with it it becomes a terrain.
Many people walk in the ground floor where there is no sound and hear the piece, hear that there is a sound work there, probably people that have heard works of mine before; they sense that something is there. And other people go up the stairs, go into the first layer and hear nothing, because here the sounds really are almost plausible as a room sound. Many people, I can see them struggling - they know there has to be a sound there, but all they can hear is the room. Then when they go to the second floor the difference between what they thought was the room sound and the sound on the second floor, all of a sudden they go into it, it becomes clear.
des Jardins
One of the things I'm curious about is why you - it must be perhaps the nature of the space - used three sounds rather than mixed two as in Turin.
Neuhaus
Well, it was hard enough to do with three. In Torino I had separate rooms with only a door opening connecting them; here I had one room to make into three spaces.
des Jardins
I suppose what gave me the idea is this about spillage or interlock. Was there a possibility - even though you had three levels - to make two?
Neuhaus In fact, I did that but on a much more complex level; I did it in spectrum. des Jardins What about the feeling one had in the piece? Neuhaus We can talk in the present about this work.
It was this dilemma, knowing myself that it would be a permanent work and also knowing that it would be exposed for the first time as part of an exhibition and within the crowd context. I dealt with it by translating the text panel into six languages and placing them on the ground floor to bring people away from the visual context. Many people didn't read them, of course. Those were the ones that came down and said: there's nothing here.
I had to find a way that it would work when people were in the exhibition mode, but also that would work as a permanent work and still remain discoverable. I removed the texts after documenta, of course.
Once you reach the point of hearing the work, you realize these sounds are not plausible at all there, once you hear them. They have a strong harmonic structure that musicians sense immediately; they have a harmonic relationship that's very clear. Not everybody realizes it; but anybody who has been trained in music and thinks that way, it hits them. But I think that was my way of, in a way, distracting them. It was an attempt finally to get musicians to be able to hear one of my pieces - not by making music for them, of course, but that harmonic relationship was a way of distracting those people, distracting them with something familiar so that the real nature of the piece would work for them. They were too good listeners, so I gave the too good listeners something to listen to to distract them, make them less self conscious, so that the piece could work for them too.