1997
Brussels txt, 1997
Paul Robbrecht, Max Neuhaus, Yehuda Safran,
R
It is interesting to note that documenta initially was part of an enormous event in Germany which is the Kunst ... because each time it's based only ... ten or seven years ... And one fragment of this whole event ... and precisely that corner which is a quite interesting fifties building Max Neuhaus installed this particular work. And the corner volume of this building is a spiral staircase which is a very interesting piece of architecture of the fifties and I think it's also a building which is protected. So you can imagine the position of the work in the whole setting of the city there ... the AOK building which is an insurance company in Germany, the national insurance company, and its staircase is where Max Neuhaus has done this piece. For me the piece had a kind of position of a turning point ... ... much of our activity as architect during that documenta. So I was able to experience the piece and it was something for me that brought immediately some thoughts ... my profession as an architect and I had to think about because here was a piece of art ... you can't see anything ... at the same time so dense ... sound piece. ... I was thinking about the connection of art and architecture
... I was constructing down there, sixteen meters below this piece ... some elements that all of a sudden became very clear when the documenta was running and people were walking on the staircase, experiencing the work, and people were walking in the ... things in the work are articulated by moving people into a space, that all things are finally formed by the presence of people in a space and that I could understand the work finally at that moment when people were there. It was of course an important element that you could walk in ... a spiral staircase in a type of glass box that was overlooking the landscape
Another element that came to my mind was that the work that you made there made me see that architecture has this materiality in the world and that art is doing something different. I'm not talking about immaterial. I think it's towards the tectonic character of architecture ...
One of the big possibilities of art is that it can work with illusion, with something which is representing something. Then I have to distinguish with your work that your work is there; it's not visual, but it is there.
N
I've always thought of my work as immaterial because you can't touch it. On the other hand, I describe the process of making one as building a place and I treat it as a place. Even though I don't change a space visibly in any way, since the sound sources are never seen, what I finally realized is that my work is not immaterial at all. It's the place itself which becomes the material part of the work. For me the work only exists in the mind of each individual perceiver. That's partly because you can't photograph it, you can't publish it, you can't record it. It's manifested in the imaginations and perceptions of its visitors, and that's its only existence. One can talk about those things and move around them, but that's really all it is. But for me that's what we do as artists; we catalyze an experience, a train of thought, a voyage in a perceiver, whether it's eye or ear.
R
...
N
I use this word 'catalyst' because I'm fascinated by the variations, the fact that most people perceive these works completely differently. And it's not about projecting an image from my mind; it's about catalyzing a situation, catalyzing a process, the aesthetic process.
R
Another element that I thought about was the idea of movement. ...
N
It was an amazing space because it wasn't one glass box; it was really three glass boxes with this pathway in the center - three glass boxes connected by this spiral staircase. One thing that I realized almost immediately was that it was very strange in the way that people entered it. Because you entered each space on the stairway, your ears entered each level before your eyes. So instead of entering a space face first, you entered it ears first. The first ideas that I had about making a work there was to make three different layers of sound that you entered head first, so to speak.
It was a bit complicated acoustically because, even though visually it was three boxes, acoustically because of the big opening in the center it was one space. The final form and the whole name of the piece, Three to One, was about these three distinct layers that you heard distinctly when you first entered this space and, as you walked through it finding each layer, your memory of the past layer and the present layer formed one thing out of these three distinct parts. You could certainly stay on one floor for half an hour if you wanted to, but the experience of the piece was moving through it and your memory coming into play in the journey and its coalescing the experience into making the spaces into something else.
R
... you're dealing with something which is actually very static: architecture is about statics ... still the thought in the back of your mind of movement
N
and all the possible ways that people could go through this building
R
a lot of architecture suggests movement; the fifties staircase suggests a spiral movement. ... also in very contemporary issues of architecture, this architecture wants to suggest movement, change, differences of layers, and so on. Of course your work is supporting that possibility. ... feeling of differences and movement.
N
I had the feeling that the reason why you're ambiguous about that in architecture has to do with the difference between a kind of freedom and coercion, pushing people in a certain direction or allowing. But when you build a building you build something, and how the building looks is coupled with its physical shape. Where the hallways are, where the doors are, do set up a situation. Yes, there seems to be a movement in current architecture which is more about coercion than about freedom.
... something which is not static ...
Their shape, but also inside you didn't walk around the room. You had to walk through the room.
...
N
I use this word 'place' firstly to distinguish between the neutral term 'space', something which contains air. I use it in a special way; I usually capitalize it if I write it or put it in italics. It's another element on the physical element of a block of inside air; it's also its character.
This group of pieces that are in specific locations and always there, I call the form 'place' because it takes a space and makes a place out of it. The basic principle and the reason that I'm in the plastic arts and not in music is that we perceive space both with eye and ear. We're much more conscious about what we see than what we hear, but in fact the eye and the ear function as a very closely linked team, and if you change what either one is perceiving it changes the other. The best example I have is this experience that John Cage talks about but is very well known. If you walk into what's called an anechoic chamber, which is a room used by scientists to investigate sound itself - so it's completely quiet and there are no reflections - and the room is quite normal and plausible visually, but aurally it's completely implausible. And most people get very nervous in this room because half of the team is missing, since the eye and the ear constantly check with each other to see what's going on.
Traditionally people in the plastic arts have adjusted the way we experience a space visually. I having been focused on sound for all my life thought of changing this perception through the other sense of the ear. And the reason it's not music is because it's about space, but also these place works are completely out of time. Music is a form which is about events basically, and my idea was for the first time in history to pull sound out of time, make something with sound which had no time.
If we think about it, all of our sound world is just events. It's the event of my words happening here; it's the event of the squeak of the car outside; but it's something which occurs and stops or disappears or passes. An important element about all these pieces is that they're always there, so this fundamental dimension of sound - time - is gone. That also pulls them into the plastic arts because they're static in time.
S
I'm in a peculiar relationship to the other two speakers since they tend to speak about things that are not here, and I am here by virtue of being a critic who depends on what he can present at the time in which he presents it.
In that sense he enters into performance art, and indeed I think the great pleasure of Max's work is that it is always so contemporary and always so as it were ahead of its time precisely because it is a bit archaic: a work which is timeless, a work in which there are no events. It seems that almost every rubric, almost every category of his work suggests a work that is against most of the precepts of architecture and art plastique. In architecture the idea of event has become in fact the most dominant one. There is an important group of architects - not grouped as a group but understood to be subscribing precisely to such a concept of architectural construction as events.
The other difference that permeates my intervention is that I do not belong to either and belong to both, architecture and art, which have always made my own life a bit difficult. And therefore perhaps I am a little bit more qualified than others to speak on this occasion.
I thought that the best way to present my thoughts in the most coherent manner and succinctly is to read a few pages which were originally written apropos the work of Max, because you realize that since the work as I portrayed it rather goes against the grain in some sense it has been extremely difficult for Max even to find somebody who would address his drawings, for example, as drawings because they are unlike other drawings. They're not like technical drawings, they're not like architectural drawings, they're not drawings made by sculptors as preparatory drawings for their sculptures, they're not drawings of a painter. They are drawings of somebody who thinks with sound. In that sense it is something incredibly powerful which normally we ignore and that is that writings have exactly the same character.
For me the inspiring outside reference is the writing of Edmond Jabes who always felt that writing is a kind of mimicking the body, mimicking the life of that body, mimicking the life which could only be conceived not as a series of events but as an event tout court. So the first paragraph is from his poem 'Elle' where he says the inside and the outside are only the arbitrary ... of the division of an infinite time whose minutes always moving forward call the center constantly into question. So in the beginning there is transparency ... and we are all ears. In any event beginning means clearing away. Each work assumes the unmediated character of what we call a beginning. The moment our pencil draws them the voices are set free. They are the sound, mixture of sounds, remote, sign and inscription made some time after what was not written, no longer sound, a drawing not yet a sound.
Max said 'to change perception', but in fact it's not only to change perception. It's to make perception alive. And yet this kind of mark, writing, drawing acquires the unmediated character of a beginning, the peculiarity of a leap out of the unmediatable, which does not exclude but rather includes the fact that the beginning invisible as it is has prepared itself for a long duration and often inconspicuously.
That from which this art is made does not preexist the art but comes into being only when the art ... the material, and I think here for me the distinction between the material in one case or another it's not so great, it exists. The material in the world as it were does not speak as such but in every work of art whether it's a sound piece or architecture it's what I would call la material parlante. The material ... gives to speak to us in a way by virtue of attending to it; it's born at the point when the painter casts his gaze on the immense reality in movement or if you like in this case his ear for which we have no equivalent to the gaze of the ear or opening one's ear to this immense reality in movement and in doing so endows it with a form ... possibilities and impresses upon it as an artificial destination. The image and the material, the flesh and the soul, live off each other while they remain forever apart. The beginning of course contains the end within itself. The project of being in the beginning on the contrary always engages the undisclosed abundance of the unfamiliar and the extraordinary which means that it engages in and embraces the familiar and the ordinary.
Another very important aspect of Max's work is that the sound is not as it were special except in being there in a particular relation, but in itself it is a sound electronically produced just as most of the sounds that you are most of the time exposed to.
And in brackets I would like to say that we have not yet realized what a shock it has been for us to be in this world as it is now in terms of sound. This shock in my view permeates much of twentieth century art; it's an attempt to accommodate, to mediate, to make it possible to live with this barrage of sounds and of course from a visual point of view just as well. The machine images are not only dealing with the machine as an image; they are also dealing with a new kind of sound with which we have not yet come to terms.
And in fact paradoxically precisely the outcome of this immense technological leap that means that the sound is in our heads, something which it has never been before. If it remains the sound like the red flowers of Mondrian or the sound of a country bell our drawing and our unrealized project had to assume the unmediated character of what we call a beginning, as if we could only speak through the silence of the spaces left empty by their difference. The basic incompatibility between man and his world, between man and his sound, something that keeps them apart, condemned to live off each other and yet at a distance. So much in the world is seen as a visual reflection of this symmetrical creature, the only mute creature who is condemned to sound.
The plurality and multiplicity of intervals are solidified in dreams of space which are these places. A certain sound's constellations which disappear as soon as they become audible, as if in order to be heard they need to take off their appearance. There is another incredibly important aspect in this work which of course we cannot experience now, the fact that in order to be heard they need to take off their appearances. Drawings like notes are like a book whose words we need to cancel to let it return to its quiet plurality, that's Jabes. Words we need to cancel, notes, signs, in order to return to its plurality. The hand draws and writes between places. The lines are either before the sound in anticipation of sound, memory and so forth, or after the sound, an elaboration between seeing and hearing.
The memory in back of our memory is hearing with eyes in despair, noise, sound, images, silence. Likewise drawings or the sound pieces before the drawing as if we were here to discover the ... between one point and another no matter how distant and limited our ability to perceive them. Is this perhaps true living knowledge?
And again a passage from Jabes: all this ruin necessary for the rise of the spirit, a point beats in your breast - your heart, a point beats for your hand - your pulse, a point beats in space - listen. One of Max's first works was called 'listen' which meant simply that people were gathering at one point or another in New York where each one received a kind of paper which said 'listen' and they were led by Max on a prearranged itinerary in which all they had to do was to listen, though of course with his ears, guided by his ears.
If the body masters our attachment then we are condemned to writing, to a graphic representation within its four walls and margins ... which the eyes convert into a subversive knowledge, knowledge of things which are not. Infinite digressions carved in space between the place under the authority of seeing and the place under the authority of hearing. To listen to a voice, to attend to a reading, is to accept it a priori. We follow an advice; we obey a command. So these works are born of and exist as the only ... of certain sound configurations which are intimately connected with and could not exist without certain spatial configurations - language which exists in the absence of a language.
A terribly important aspect which I don't think has been touched sufficiently so far and perhaps will never be completely understood is the idea that the work is actually conceived in relation to a particular spatial configuration and could not exist otherwise. Hence the refusal which is sometimes frustrating and makes things much more 'complicated' but it is inevitable, the refusal of Max to reproduce any of the sounds which frustrates almost every novice on his or her first encounter with his work as a sound of a certain character and yet you cannot hear it, he won't let you hear it, except where it is.
N
Yes, but it's really because the sound isn't the work. This is such a strange idea for an artist to work with a medium where the medium isn't the work, and it's much more strange to work with sound where we only have this example of music where sound is the only thing of the work. I use sound to transform a perception of a place. The analogy would be to say that the only thing that a painting was was the paint; therefore we could take it off the canvas and we put it in the box and we have the painting. To take the sound of a work of mine and put it in another place makes no sense. I'm using it to build a place. It loses its spatial configuration in the same way that a painting loses its.
S
Our innermost being refines sounds, tunes our voices to renew the pact with the world we build in our mind. We make marks in which sound is closer to sound and a groove yet barely a trace, and if the mark is the threshold of a line, of a line casting its shadow as sound. At each turn of the street we are made to make a point of taking our hearing. We draw to circumscribe what is invisible, what we cannot circumscribe, where there is nothing. All is intact; only fragments can be grasped, says Jabes.
In ... universe we are experimenting with writing; our attempt to approach it will have failed. One language may provide us with a much larger vocabulary for hearing than another, but it is not necessarily nearer sound.
And yet the reality of art is made by individuals who do not fit into the world conceived collectively, who have a certain conception of the world other than given in the games people play. What these individuals don't always realize is that even with the complete dedication of their lives the most they can achieve is a small change in the rules by which these communal games of mankind are played. We are after all above everything by a deliberate choice, a careful selection, of unique experiences which we choose from the most secret recesses of our inner selves.
Immense empty spaces are thus discarded from life because they have left no trace. We are concerned with the most difficult and exacting of impressions. The memory which rejects the dispersion of the actual world and which derives from the treasures of the lingering sound, the secret of a new and ancient universe. We undertake the task of recreating our experiences and in doing so we demonstrate in the face of the passing time that the past would be regained at the end of time, now in the form of an imperishable present, both truer and richer than it was at the beginning.
Painters eliminate as much as they include. We isolate our subject both in time and space if our action is not to be lost in another action. Thus we arrive at the point of equilibrium. The painters give the impression that the ... is the only ... they can place, that your own movement has arrested its movement. In this respect it's completely comparable with most classical examples long after ... Breugel's Icarus falls into the sea ... the same sun continues to melt his temporary wings.
How strange a thing it is, painting which beguiles us by the resemblance of objects which do not please us at all. ... These objects do not please us at all because we do not see them. They are obscured and negated by a perpetual process of change and purpose. We hear the prose of the world each day of our lives, but we neglect it. But we see and hear it represented, transfigured by the incessant movement of intelligence and the free exercise of rationality which is our equivalent for the passionate agony of Christ. Again and again we are drawn into either metaphysical conceptions as Mach described Newton's notion of absolute time which is independent of change, nonobservable, a pure mental construct that cannot be produced in experience, and an absolute space which exists without relation to anything external. Our laboratory cannot be considered insulated ... by matter in a remote part of the universe. Indeed Mach instructed his reader not to forget that all things in the world are connected with one another and depend on one another and that we ourselves and all our thoughts are also part of nature.
According to the author of ... a cabbalistic text ... the vessel to contain the divine light broke in the primeval act of cosmic drama and the light of the divinity became scattered throughout the world. To lift up the scattered sparks of light and to restore them to the place they were intended to occupy had not catastrophe intervened. This is the essential task of a man in the process of repair - it's called ... in cabbalistic language. There is a kind of redemption which can take place in every man in every time, and it does not require messianic redemption. Discovering much of ourselves in distant landscapes and language we turn out to be exiles out of our own time as if there is no epoch. Only green grass, ash trees declaim objects, dragonflies over ponds, but no epoch. ... That from Adam Jagowitski, apropos the fact that these works claim their time as it were as given, not as changing.
N
I have to take exception with what you said a few minutes ago, about the fact that the sound isn't special, partly because I spend a great deal of time and energy making the sound. On the other hand, you're quite right because in each of the sound works I have to make the sound fit in the space, and so I work at the same time towards making something extraordinary happen, but in order for that to happen the sound indeed has to be not special or plausible within its context. But 'not special' is not true, Yehuda.
S
Not special in its origin, it's special in its destination.
N
Its origin is my imagination, or am I mistaking what you're saying?
S
The sound comes from the sound that's there, in some sense.
N
No. I synthesize it just as a painter synthesizes a color. But I make it by ear, by applying it to a space, listening to it, comparing it with another sound, changing it in some way, gradually evolving it until it embeds itself perceptually in a given context. It's not something which is casual at all; it's a process which usually takes ten days or so before it finally gells and finally works.
Q
For the piece in documenta did you try different sounds or did you have the right sound from the first?
N
It's not so much trying sounds. Our reference is, yes, we have a collection of records and we play them. But for me I go into a space and try the first sound, and I work with a kind of palette of sounds - the same relationship as a palette has for a painter. It's a starting point for a particular sound, but I actually shape the sound by ear in space. No, the first sound never works. It's not choosing the right sound; it's gradually forming the right sound in the space.
It was complicated by having to make three layers, three sounds next to each other which sounded different at first - at the same time a very complex puzzle to put together because they all had to sound different at one point but even though (so?) they all had elements which were heard in all three places. So it's a process really of building by ear - trying something, trying something else, saying 'well, what if you try this and that'. But in this case it was kind of like three dimensional chess compared to just two.
Q
One of the essential properties is the difference, the difference between one sound and another.
N
Yes, these pieces where I take identical spaces and make two different spaces out of them. They're physically identical, but I can make contradictory spaces out of them by the sound that I build in each one. I've started articulating what I do. I started just doing it.
What I work with is what I've come to call sound character. Sound character is the nature of the sound itself. We all have a highly developed sense of sound character even though we don't think about it. We use it when we're speaking by inflecting our speech, by changing the emphasis, the tone of voice. It's a language that we superimpose on verbal language, on the words themselves, that tells the listener how to interpret those words, and often it's really what people listen for. We listen to it completely unconsciously, but its meaning is very profound and very direct. It's very refined. If we think about that most of us in our native language can listen to another speaker and through only sound character, the difference in the way that he pronounces his words, pinpoint where he was born - so we have this unconscious facility that we use and that we perceive.
In music this idea of sound character came through orchestration - that the sound and not just melody and harmony had an aesthetic meaning. So as music progressed from Wagner into Edgar Varese - with Wagner you could still play a lot of the music on the piano and know which piece it is but it's very much different, there's a lot missing, if the orchestra isn't there, if the sound character isn't there. As music goes further into Stockhausen there is no melody and harmony, so if you don't have the sound character you don't have the work.
Still it's only part of the meaning in music, and what I do when I build, when I shape, when I form, when I evolve a sound for a particular space is distil this element, this parameter of sound character, and build only with that. It's a very nice material to work with as an artist because it's pan-cultural.
Our normal daily sound world exists in two broad categories, I think. One is literal, that is to say, the sounds of things, that identify those things - the sound of a dog, a cat, a car, a bang. Those are all literal meanings of sound; they tell us something about the event that happened. And we have another part of our sound world which is codified, which is the sound world that I'm using right now with language. The meaning of the word doesn't have anything to do with the sound. The word 'sound' doesn't give you a meaning because it sounds a certain way; it gives you a meaning because you know this particular sound means something, so it's codified.
But sound character is on top of both those things. It's not literal, and it's not codified, which means that it can pass between cultures. Anyone from any culture can perceive a work of mine because it's not part of their culture and it uses this very fundamental carrier of meaning, this idea of sound character.
It's also completely unarticulated. I'm the first person to try to articulate it, which means that it's free of a lot of baggage and rhetoric. I'm building its rhetoric right now.
Q
Do you accept the space as it is? Do you listen for some kind of particular space, or do you want ...
N
I don't know, really. In the case of Three to One, the piece in Kassel, I was offered that space, and I had the choice of either accepting it or proposing another space. But it was carefully offered, so the fact of three vertically juxtaposed spaces was a wonderful foundation.
But there is a series of my works which exist anonymously in cities, and in those cases finding the place is vital. I can't start to conceive a work without the place I'm going to build with. It's like trying to build a building without a brick.
Often those selections are intuitive. I can't find a practical reason why I made a piece in a hole in the ground in the middle of Times Square. I just knew that that was the place. I guess I have to feel that I can come to an agreement with it, that I can in some way do what I do with it. But I don't really know why.
Q
...
N
No, it has to work. Something has to be there. I have to know I can get it to click. I'm usually commissioned by an institution or a city, and the first thing that happens is that I visit and I know that I have a range of places where I could do a work. I look at it and then I talk to the people who are there, because I can see it physically and I can see it acoustically but they can tell me what its meaning is socially in this particular context. And with that information I usually propose several locations and come to an agreement about a site. But if someone said 'you have to do it on this street corner', I couldn't. A good site flashes, and I can get five or six flashes out of a given area. But if it doesn't flash it's not going to fly.
Q
...
N
Yes, one group of my works is this idea of place. There is another group of works, which are less known because I've made fewer of them, which are about this idea of moment. They are sounds which occur over a whole city or a large area of a city very regularly, but they have a contradictory nature. They arrive very, very gradually, so you don't know that they're arriving. And they suddenly disappear, and it's their disappearance which you notice, which creates this moment. They're connected to a tradition of sound signals in a city and completely opposite of the place because they're not always there. They create a moment, and the place works create a place.
On the other hand the place works make a place, but it's a place where people exist in their own time. And the moment works make a moment, but because they're in many different places at the same time they create a sense of place at that moment. It's one of my favorite contradictions between these two forms. I hope to start doing more of these moment works, but because they're so large scale and involve many people they're a little more difficult to do.
Q
...
N
I'm most happy when I don't know my audience, when I don't know who my audience is.
I began as a solo performer. I think most people think that a musical performance is one way; the performer is projecting something on an audience. But if you're a solo performer you know that it's not - it's a conversation - that every gesture you make you feel something from this many-headed animal because an audience is an organism within itself.
So when I was a solo performer it was a dialogue between this many-headed beast and myself. And when I stopped being a performer one of the things I liked about it was not having to talk directly to the beast, not knowing who the beast was, letting the beast be free.
Q
...
N
Those are two very interesting points. Hearing something and seeing something are two opposites. You're immersed in a sound like you are in a liquid, even if the sound is very subtle like the sounds in this work. They still surround you, and you perceive them by their actually touching you; whereas visually we're standing back from it, we're judging its distance by light reflections. So I think these are fundamental differences.
Each piece is different, and each sound is different, but the sounds of these three layers aren't static. They're moving. The sounds are what I call the sound texture, so it's a constant color, but within this color there's movement, there's activity. Maybe this also contributes to the idea of liquidity.
The other point you're bringing up is one of the nicest aspects of these pieces. It's really a kind of afterimage; your mind remembers this sound. And because I make sounds which aren't literal but are plausible - they're near literal - after you've heard a work of mine, often you can walk out of it and when you hear a sound that's close to that sound you remember the sound and recreate the sound as an afterimage in your own mind. These are all things which we usually don't think about because we don't in daily life deal with sound this way. We only deal with it as language or as the literal, and I provoke another kind of sound life, I hope.
Q
...
N
No, I remember them as places. I know the sounds because I've made them all, and I can go back and find one and say 'this is the sound'. But it's not something that brings the piece back, listening to the sound. It's the place that brings the piece back, because it's the place that I've used sound to build.
Of course if I spend ten days building a sound I never forget it. It's like a color a painter makes on a palette; it's special, he knows it intimately, it's certainly very much different sitting there than it is there. It's a good analogy. People talk about the influence of new technology on art and tend to think of people who work with new media as working in a different way. I think artists fundamentally work in the same way, always have, always will. We take a given material, we work it until it works. And the only thing you need to know about being an artist is knowing when it works.
Q
Parlez-vous francais? ...
N
I think that the best answer to that is that it's within yourself. But if we talk more technically - indeed, because there is no time in a place work, there is no silence - the work is a continuum.
The moment works are about this silence that's created when you notice the sound has disappeared. You never hear the sound of a moment work; you only hear its silence. But these are very big words 'silence' and 'void'. They have a multitude of meanings in many different senses, so we can play with them for quite a while.
It's always the hardest part, waiting for the questions.
Q
... lack of specificity
N
How do I face the non-specificness? The flash that I get from a possible site is the opposite. I may not know what I'm going to do to make it non-specific, but it's the point where something jumps out of and becomes specific. And making the piece is realizing this specific thing from my imagination, letting it grow in that place, making it non-specific.
Q
I ask this question because maybe places are ...
N
I think the medium I work with helps us a lot. The only codified areas we have in sound are music and speech, and I don't work with those when I make a sound work. Essentially when I take on a space to make a sound work in it, I work with its acoustic givens.
The piece in Kassel is right next to a street with a traffic light, so every three minutes or so there's the sound of all the cars stopping and then all starting again. I mean, people in the field of music spend billions of dollars isolating a concert hall, putting it on rubber feet, putting it underground. For me this is part of that space, the fact that every three minutes this sound occurs. I built with it in fact.
When you take two sounds and put them together - if you take sound A and sound B and put them together you don't get sound AB; you get sound C. In other words, one sound transforms the other. So this traffic starting up on this street every three minutes when you're inside this piece is not something I want to exclude. It's part of what I'm building with. I suppose it's transforming the given, both visually and acoustically, even though I don't change it visually. I try not to.
S
I think there is a parallel here. It's not unlike a successful measured building. A measured building does not change the entire environment, but it provides a certain kind of figure in the mind with which everything else is being perceived. I think that the question of distance is very important. Max made this observation that in the case of the visual world we can turn our eyes away; we can as it were not see. With sound to some extent we can do the same thing, especially with sound which is as it were familiar not familiar; for example a foreign tongue. It's easier not to hear than a language that you know well; it's more difficult not to hear. So there's something about distance that we can change. The most difficult thing I think is to appreciate that whatever distance it is - whether it is one or the other - it is something in the mind rather than in the thing. The advantage of the more familiar kind of sound which we describe as musical or sound which we describe as language is that it is completely determined by that which is as it were invisible, by an order which we imbibe, which we have in our mind. When we listen to a symphony we hear a symphony precisely because in our mind is already a kind of symphony form. If we did not have this symphony form in our mind, it would be a cacophony.
N
Exactly. That's why musics of foreign cultures sound that way. It's what I call the codified. I've asked you this before: is it the right word?
S
I think what we have here is a sound piece which does not rely on that kind of preordained grammar and therefore it can also deal with other sounds in a way which other sound pieces cannot. Precisely in this way it's almost as if it washes our preconceived ideas of sound. I can't speak for others, but from one's own experience one knows very well that each sound that impresses you not only lingers on but actually gives you a different perception. Some people find this different perception welcome, and some people find it unwelcome. For example, if you subject yourself to the Ring cycle of Wagner and you go there night after night, then when you come out the world does look different. Some people object to it.
N
Well, they don't have to go and listen to Wagner. But the function I think of what we do as artists is indeed to open up another way of looking at everything if it's a good work. As I said before, the works that I do in Identical Spaces change the way those spaces look. They change the perceived dimensions. I can make a space look small even though it's exactly the same size. The thing that's interesting about a landscape painting is not how accurately it represents a landscape; it's how it changes your way of looking at landscapes for the rest of your life. And I think that is the commonality between all kinds of art.
The sounds I make are not the sounds of real life; they are never recordings of real sounds. They may sound like ... and of course automatically when you hear a sound if your eye doesn't see it your ear is trying to tell you what's going on, so you say it sounds like ....
These sound areas of our daily life are really only a miniscule part of the spectrum of sound, and I can work completely around the sounds of speech, music, events, dogs, cars, cats. There's a huge space around that. They're small points within this big space. But I can also work in between them and close to them. But wherever I work I'm free of your everyday sound world, or the sounds are free of your everyday sound world, I hope.
Q
Didn't I once see a show in Bern in the Kunsthalle where you worked with other artists?
N
No, but because that piece was there and it was one of these moment pieces - so it was there for three years - and you heard it within the Kunsthalle as well as a kilometer around it, it was in a way a group show. But none of these sound works fit into an exhibition in fact. I'm an artist in the plastic arts who's unexhibitionable, except for the drawings which are in a traditional form. It is kind of strange to limit artists' activities to an exhibition. It's a very special thing; it's a focusing of attention on something in a very special way. But it's certainly not the only avenue for us to approach a viewer, a perceiver; and working outside it offers in fact an escape from preconceptions.
But usually when I'm in a group show I insist that the work is commissioned like this work was commissioned for documenta 9, but in the following spring it was inaugurated as a permanent work, so for me a group show can function as an inauguration of a work which stays.
But also I'm not very happy with the idea of a group show in general. Traditionally it's been a curatorial statement, about comparing artists and the science of the curator. More recently it's become a marketing exercise, and that's another story.
But neither of these two things has so much to do with the aesthetic experience. I think it's very hard to have a serious aesthetic experience packed in with a room full of people. I get nervous when I go into museums just because there's too much. I think this communion between a work and a person is very fragile. Usually a group show or an exhibition is surrounded with propaganda too which I think obfuscates the aesthetic experience. I think the aesthetic experience is natural although fragile. We are born with the ability; we don't need to learn it.
Q
I remember that ...
N
A codified group of sound is very limited. It's limited to the codified meanings usually of a small group of people, a particular culture. The codified meaning of French is limited to the French speakers of the world.
Working outside the codified is also a means of freedom; it's a means of being universal, not limited only to the people who know the code. But also when you jump out of the codified you jump out of the preconceptions. If you want to say something new, it's much easier if you're in a territory where there isn't a preconception.
I also make things which are close to the codified (?) - rarely do I make things close to the codified language of music, but I often make things that are close to the literal meaning of a sound, the sound of something. But that's a means of making it fit, making it plausible. I think the zone where artists work is a very minute shift in a reality. A landscape painting still looks like a landscape; its differences for a lay person are impossible to analyze perhaps. It's only the artist that knows that this color is a little different than reality, and that's what makes it a painting rather than a photograph. That is the catalyst, and that's the thing which creates the aesthetic experience.
S
One can say something more about it. It's very close to what Bertrand Russell said when he said that if you could speak a language that nobody could understand you could say what you want. In some sense I believe that every artist aspires to this condition knowingly or unknowingly.
N
But I'm saying that sound character is a language that everyone understands, practically from birth. So I'm putting myself in much more jeopardy than just working with a codified area.
S
That's a kind of thinking that not everybody would necessarily subscribe to. There have been many poets, painters or otherwise who have invented something comparable. For example, Klebnikov invented what he called 'zaum' which was all the sounds in the language which had no meaning which he claimed could have a meaning in a poem, which they did. There are many examples of people who invented comparable 'arbitrary' ... ultimately the more you know yourself what it is that you have done, the less it is serviceable for you. Then you will have to be forced to change. Once I know my style, then I am in trouble. So I have to invent it again.
N
But these pieces don't have a style.
S
Of course not. If they did, you could not go on doing them.
N
Also they have to work. I can't just claim that this sound is one thing or the other. They function. I have to get people off the ground, and if I'm lying they don't fly.
Q
So in fact you ....
N
It's not so much that I have to make something new. I've worked in this field for thirty years. Yes, one doesn't want to make the same painting over and over again.
Q (same person)
...
N
We come back to your original question of codification. The fact that this language of sound character is universal - it's not something I made up, it's something I know. It's something I learned about through being a musician, specifically through being a percussionist which is the world of sound timbre, it's the world of sound character. And having a communion for ten years as a soloist with an audience, I know the meaning of sound character, and it's what I use. I believe it's universal because my works work universally; they work as well for a Japanese as for an American.
It's a strange thing to talk about because indeed there's no scientific discipline that deals with sound character. A lot of it is immeasurable. If you saw the analysis of the speech of a person from one section of France and another section of France and gave that to an acoustician to analyze the differences, he would find none. But as a French speaker you have no problem whatsoever knowing that that person was born there. You can point out gross differences - an 'a' is an 'ahh' - but what you really place that person with is this sense of sound character, which is incredibly refined. And for me as a practitioner, to have that as a vehicle is marvellous; that's what I do. (long pause) Who gets to sum it up?
S
Paul should say a few words.
R
I would just like to hear a little bit more ...
N
There is of course at the same time no time and only time because the place itself doesn't change; it's always the same. But the work is the experience of the perceivers, and for them the place puts them in their own time. So in a way the place pieces are only about time even though they have no time. Is that too convoluted an answer? As you walk up this stairway, you create a journey in time for yourself. In music the sounds are placed in time. Here you place them in your own time.
R
... circular
N
Certainly in Three to One you go up and you come down the staircase. But often I've made place works in the form of a large space which has a topography that's completely irregular. Some of them turn out to be symmetrical just because of the way things work. No, I don't think it's inherent, the circular idea. It's about terrain: either a simple terrain of three layers or a complex terrain. But Yehuda, you should sum up; you're the critic.
S
I think it's difficult to sum up. First of all, I would like to thank Caroline David for the invitation. I think it's not an ordinary occasion to speak publicly about the work of Max, especially when they are so inaccessible in the practical sense, in the sense that not everybody has the chance to travel here and there and to hear the pieces. On top of that, some of the pieces had ceased to function for one reason or another, contrary to Max's aesthetics and contrary to the desire of some of the citizens of New York, for example, where the Times Square piece is always there and never there, or the piece at the MoMA or the piece in Chicago which has been turned off and dismantled without much ado and so on.
This is one of the difficulties, and the other difficulty is of course conceptual in the sense that this work obviously stands apart from any other as it were identifiable group, and indeed even among the so-called sound artists or whatever it's very difficult to find anything comparable and at the same time luckily or unluckily there are no epigones - those who come after the heroic ones. In a certain sense the development of these pieces owes something to what did happen in music earlier in our time - the music of ..., of Varese, of Cage - and this music itself has remained as it were only an important margin of the sound culture in which we live. And on the whole we are still dominated by forever Mozart. So now is a time where, especially in France for example the attack on contemporary art is so vehement and so comprehensive, the fact that we do have such an occasion to discuss this kind of work is remarkable, and I want to thank the Foundation again for making it possible. I think that discussion between artists and architects is just as rare, and indeed it is exceptional that there is such an institution in which these two sides of the same coin can come together.
N
You should also thank the partner of the Foundation, Encore Bruxelles.
S
And the partner of the Foundation, yes, of course. So I think that is what I have to say. Thank you again.