1983
in Max Neuhaus: Sound Installation [German, English] (Basel: Kunsthalle Basel, 1983) -then in Max Neuhaus, Sound Works, Volume I, Inscription (Ostfildern-Stuttgart: Cantz, 1994)
Carter Ratcliff
Max Neuhaus began his career as a musician, a percussionist. He continues to use sound as his medium. Why, then, do we find his works in the world of art, in places dedicated to seeing, not to listening? Why, in other words, does so much of his work appear on sites, indoors and out, where we would expect to find painting and sculpture? I think answers to these general questions about Neuhaus' entire oeuvre must precede the attempt to say anything in particular about specific pieces. We must account for what appears to be an immense, overarching anomaly before taking up the puzzles presented in turn by each of Neuhaus' various works.
In trying to figure out why Neuhaus is considered an artist, not some variant on a musician or composer, it might help to note that every sound has two aspects _ one temporal, the other spatial. A sound lasts for a certain amount of time and is audible in a certain portion of space. Both aspects of sound are important to music, but not to the same degree. Tempo, interval, duration _ all these are among the formal resources, one might say the 'materials', of music; they count in the same way that the elements of harmony count. Time is fundamental to a definition of music as an esthetic enterprise, whereas spatial matters _ the questions that surround the transmission of a musical intention from performer to listener _ are mechanical; important, naturally, but not central to the nature of music. To take up music's relationship to space is to move from the musician's concerns to those of the engineer, from esthetics to acoustics.
As I said, when Neuhaus was a musician (a role he gave up in the late 1960s) he played percussive instruments. Tympani, xylophones and all the rest are capable of melody, or at least of accenting harmonic structures, yet their chief concern is with tempo. Neuhaus still displays a virtuoso's command of time and the internals into which it can be divided, yet space is his primary interest. By emphasizing the spatial aspects of sound at the expense of its temporal aspects, he moves far from the world of music and close to the sculptor's domain. That is why we find his works in spaces designed for the exhibition of visual artworks, not in the concert hall _ though it may be a bit distorting to imply that his art sacrifices temporality to spatiality; rather, he puts his command of time, of rhythmic interval, at the service of his spatial concerns, while those in the world of music do the opposite.
Neuhaus wants to define space, not duration. This desire is so powerful that even when he draws the temporal flow into the heart of a work _ as he did with his recent Time Piece at the Whitney Museum of American Art _ the ultimate effect is a heightened sense of placement, a feeling that one grasps one's location with a greater degree of clarity than usual. Thus the Whitney Time Piece emphasizes a tendency in Neuhaus' art that has been present, it seems to me, from the outset of his postmusical career.
His 1978 sound installation in the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, was the first of his artworks that I ever saw. I mean, of course, the first I ever heard _ the spatial impact of Neuhaus' art is so strong that one tends to speak of it in terms usually reserved for the visual arts, especially sculpture. At any rate, much seeing went into my experience of his untitled work at the Modern. Neuhaus had placed an immense speaker beneath a grill in the garden's pavement. A variety of rumbling sounds emanated from this source, their mix seeming to shift as one moved about the space. After a while, certain pitches associated themselves with certain points _ the ear found aural equivalents for the landmarks (works of sculpture, trees and shrubs, a fountain) by which the eye had already charted the garden. So one's visible map was augmented and in subtle ways changed by this new one, which was audible.
After spending some time within the ambit of a Neuhaus installation, one begins to imagine something very like a chart of the space filled by the sounds of his electronic equipment. This chart hovers somewhere between an image for the eye and one for the ear. Ultimately, I think, it could not be translated into visual terms. Neuhaus makes drawings of his installations, but these concern themselves chiefly with the engineering aspects of his work; they are, in effect, blueprints with a few very general indications of the way the work's mix of pitches, its tonal repertoire, flows through the space. To know that mix in detail one must experience it directly. In the course of doing so, certain aural 'landmarks' begin to establish themselves, yet a map of the work's sound patterns never comes into focus. Ear and eye interact as one moves through the installation, achieving something very like an equality. That's why it is impossible to translate the aural aspects of these works into terms exclusively visual. They cannot be mapped, so my remarks on maps and mapping are metaphorical and not to be taken literally.
Further, since the sounds of these installations are so intimately joined to the places they are heard, they cannot be recorded in any satisfactory manner. Present-day technology permits a tape or a disc to take up only an extremely limited number of vantage points, while a grasp of Neuhaus' art requires the ear to canvass a space thoroughly, crossing and recrossing it, innumerable times, until one grasps the entire weave of its audio-spatial texture. As a consequence, he refuses to make recordings of his installations. He might be compared in this respect to a photographer who refuses to publish photographic reproductions of his images.
During 1977, the year before the sculpture-garden piece at the Museum of Modern Art, Neuhaus installed a similar work beneath the grill of a traffic island in Times Square. Named after its midtown-Manhattan location, this piece is still in place, still blending its tonalities with those of a very busy intersection. The Modern's sculpture garden is a haven from an incessant urban racket, and so Neuhaus responded there with a delicate _ though far-reaching _ play of sounds. With Times Square, he had to be more aggressive. From the grillwork in a small concrete island set between complex currents of traffic an equally complex set of tonalities flows. It is adjusted to compete with the harshness of the aural environment _ that is, to make itself heard _ and at the same time to comment on its setting, to accent the sound of traffic, to question it, and to shift the nature of its comments as one moves about in the vicinity of the piece.
As at the Modern, so in the midst of Times Square _ what one sees and hears of the city is overlaid by an audible pattern, as an artist's intention engages a hectic corner of Manhattan. This sort of engagement takes us very far from the realms of music, even those regions of the music world where traditional melody and harmonics are no longer heard. There are, indeed, works of electronic music which sound a bit like Neuhaus' sound installations but such resemblances are misleading if taken seriously. Music, by definition, has no permanent relationship to the place where it is heard, any more than a book is tied to the place where one reads it. On the other hand, Neuhaus' works are completely integrated into the sites where one encounters them. In fact, he doesn't begin to compose the sonorities of a piece (the phrase is his) until he has made a thorough investigation of the setting where it will be installed.
Neuhaus first considers the shape of the space with which he has to deal, then the substances and surfaces which define the space, and finally the sounds the space generates of its own accord _ whether the sound of traffic or of museum-goers seeking a refuge from this particular variety of noise. At the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago Neuhaus set up a column of thirty loudspeakers in a stairwell of the Museum's new wing. They are not visible and the sounds they emit strike one at first as the sort of gratuitous noise that buildings often create _ the unintended side-effects of some necessity (perhaps a ventilation unit), noticeable but not distracting for more than an instant. Surely some who make their way through this stairwell never hear Neuhaus' Chicago piece as a work of art. Likewise, we sometimes walk by a work of sculpture in corten steel or aluminium without quite focusing on the fact that it is the product of an esthetic intention, not the by-product of architecture or engineering.
Yet the ear need only be partially open to its environment to notice that the sounds in the stairwell at Chicago have an untoward liveliness to them _ they shift as one's position shifts, encouraging an unusual degree of alertness to a rather mundane setting. The sounds of the thirty speakers seem to follow the listener along the stairs. It's tempting to follow them, in return _ that is, to trace and retrace the path of the site's three staircases in an attempt to pin down the interactions of the speakers' various pitches. As usual, the audible and the visible begin to interact. The stairwell's landmarks _ its walls, turnings and platforms, and so on _ link up with aural equivalents, those points in the sound-pattern where particularly notable shifts take place. Usually the ear is passive, waiting to be addressed. In the vicinity of Neuhaus' works, aural facilities become as active as their visual counterparts. The ear joins with the eye as a full partner in the ceaseless attempt to grasp the shape of space, to establish one's position in the world.
I don't think the ear immediately forgets this experience of aural 'mapping'. It's likely that a full immersion in Neuhaus' sound installations carries over to one's experience of the ordinary world, leaving the faculties of hearing more alert than usual. Neuhaus teaches the ear to stay awake, to proceed through space more consciously than usual, less inclined to doze off in a trance of ambient sound from which only the human voice or the screech of brakes is able to awake it.
In talking about his art, Neuhaus always makes the point that its audience is never assured. When we go to an art museum, we are determined to see art (and, as it happens, we very often go with our minds made up about the attitudes we will take toward the art we encounter). By contrast, most of the people who cross the traffic island which houses the Times Square installation have no intention of seeing, hearing or having anything to do with a work of art. They can choose whether or not to notice the piece at all. The fact that such a choice is unconscious makes it no less deliberate, in its way, than the choice to visit a museum or not. Say a pedestrian does notice the pattern of sounds emitted by Times Square, and is drawn into it. There is still the possibility, a rather large one, that this passerby will not recognize the pattern as the form of a work of art.
Many have heard Times Square without experiencing it as an artwork. Neuhaus is not disturbed by this, for it is very important to him that his art not assert itself aggressively. Traditional artforms _ painting and sculpture, in particular _ demand attention simply by taking on the shapes, appealing to the authoritative traditions, that they do. Neuhaus has no desire to exercise authority of that sort, so he has sought a way to define space that is an imposition neither on the site nor on those who wander into it.
At the Modern in New York and at Chicago's Contemporary Art Museum, he of course entered the precincts of well-established aesthetic authority. But he did so in a manner that does not actively support, and may perhaps question, the power such institutions exercise over our experience. Art museums tend to reinforce the notion that art provides a realm of experience apart from - and, naturally, elevated above _ ordinary life. Neuhaus has stated time and time again his desire to make works of art that blend with the ebb and flow of our daily lives. So he deliberately takes the chance that their patterns will be lost in the shuffle, the noise, of their sites _ or, if heard, that they will not be heard as works of art. Whenever he accepts a museum as a site for an installation, he tries to remove some portion of the space from its privileged condition. Neuhaus at work in a museum is like a sceptic fixing up a portion of an abbey or a church as ordinary living quarters.
One of his most recent sound installations, completed in the summer of 1983, is at the Villa Celle, near a small Tuscan city called Pistoia. It is an outdoor work. Dense shrubbery hides sound-generating equipment that Neuhaus actually tucks away beneath metal grills or behind the walls of buildings. Yet the grounds of the Villa Celle are not as different from an urban sculpture garden as they look at first glance. The Villa's glades and lawns provide sites to a number of works by contemporary sculptors; further, this is a picturesque garden laid out in the 19th century with the intention of turning a stretch of terrain into a work of art. Setting aside its physical form for a moment, in order to consider the garden as an art-world institution, one could say that its relationship to the sculpture it contains is much like that of a museum building to the works it exhibits. As a consequence, Neuhaus proceeded much as he often has before.
The first step was to find a site; the next, to note its patterns of ambient sounds; then, to devise sonorities that both blend with the ambience and also, if one listens attentively, set themselves apart. The piece is situated on a gently sloping hillside, shady thanks to an abundant leafiness, where the sound of cicadas and other chirping, buzzing insects provides most of the noise _ or song, if one likes. When breezes occur, they provide a counterpoint, though of course a musical term of that sort must be taken figuratively. Entering an environment of pleasant, exceedingly familiar summer sounds, Neuhaus responded with sonorities just as high-pitched as the cicadas' but not as rhythmic. Sounds from two speakers rise and fall against the output of two more, whose flow of unchanging tones set the boundaries of the piece.
The moment one begins to hear a persistent upper-register drone, one has, so to speak, found one's way into the work. Soon the play of its variable pitches becomes audible. Along certain paths of approach, one hears the shifting patterns of the piece first. Directional differences of this kind orient the ear to the work, the work to its site, and oneself to one's location _ one's contingent place in the world _ at the moment of hearing.
The Villa Celle provided Neuhaus with an important opportunity to engage 'nature' _ that is, nature with a capital 'N'. Granted, a 19th-century Italian garden laid out on principles established for those of 18th century England is not the most Natural place imaginable. In certain ways, it is as artificial as any site in the middle of Manhattan. Nonetheless, the Villa Celle project offered Neuhaus a challenge he usually doesn't have to face _ that of designing a range of sonorities to play off against an ambience created by insects, rustling leaves and the occasional bird. He was far from Times Square, far from any urban buzz of the kind that has done so much to form his ideas about environment, population, and the ways in which works of art can mediate between the two.
As at the Villa Celle, so in Times Square _ Neuhaus responds to sites on their own terms. The effect in the Manhattan piece is to turn the urban din back on itself, producing an island of gentle, smoothed-out clarity. Here one can attend pleasurably to urban sonorities, instead of trying to block them out in the usual manner. The Villa Celle installation offers a variation on this effect of calm. No matter how intent one may be on responding to the carefully designed attractiveness of a picturesque garden, cicadas and dappled leaves tend to slip to the edges of attention. Neuhaus' piece puts one on the alert, the aural lookout, for sounds that go unheard because they are so soothing, not because they are so harsh that the ear denies them. One takes up a contemplative stance toward elusive noises, not the aggressive kind, as in Times Square.
Neuhaus always establishes a remarkable degree of consonance between the sounds he finds in a place and the ones he adds to it, but here _ especially when the drift of cicada-song through foliage faded, then returned again in electronic echoes of the artist's devising _ the relationship seemed uncannily close. The closeness is basic to Neuhaus' conception of the Time Piece, and is a feature of his installation at the Museum of Modern Art, where he grappled with a very different sort of garden. Among the sonorities with which he filled the site at the Modern, one was not a sonority at all _ it was a subsonic resonance, a sound too deep to hear. Neuhaus included it, nonetheless, because he found that it affected all the resonances at the site, and thus helped bind the work together. The Time Piece, too, makes use of 'inaudible sound'.
And I think it would be helpful to recall once again the Times Square installation, for the suggestions it makes about the Time Piece the artist realized at this year's Whitney Biennial, in New York. Of particular relevance is the fact, noted just above, that the overall effect of Times Square is to provide a zone of calm in the midst of an extremely noisy, hectic neighbourhood. The piece belongs fully to its site _ its sounds are those of the traffic island, translated into electronic terms _ yet it offers a way to experience the place in a reflective state. Thus Neuhaus encourages immersion and, at the same, a contemplative detachment.
Calm clarity, sometimes generated by subsonic resonances, sometimes by a consonance between the sounds of a site and the sounds the artist adds to it _ all of Neuhaus' major sound installations present these features. For the Whitney Time Piece he deployed them once again, and profoundly changed them, too. First, this matter of consonance. Usually it is a matter of adjusting and readjusting electronic sound-sources until the tonalities of a work begin to sound as though they belong to the site where they are heard. As I've suggested, this is not a matter of mimicry. At the Villa Celle, Neuhaus didn't try to reproduce the sound of cicadas _ though that would have been hard enough. He did something more difficult still, which was to design a pattern of tones that is clearly the result of human, not natural intentions, yet never clashes with its setting. He found a way to make electronic sound feel at home in a bosky grove.
At the Whitney, his Time Piece was even more thoroughly at home in its Madison Avenue site, and more securely too, for Neuhaus drew sounds directly from the street. Microphones embedded in the facade of the Whitney Museum gathered in the noise of buses, automobiles and so on, then a computerized complex of circuitry 'piped' this raw aural material to speakers installed above museum's small, sunken sculpture court. Since this court is on the front _ or street-side _ of the building, it was possible to hear the sounds of Madison Avenue arrive directly from the pavement while hearing them again through electronic channels established by the artist. Thus he achieved an automatic consonance between work and site. His need, then, was to establish a difference _ not a telling similarity _ between the sounds of the piece and the sounds of its place.
Neuhaus did this first by changing the pitch of the noises he drew from the street, and next by delaying their transmission for an instant. An automobile's honk, for example, would be heard, then heard again, almost immediately, in an electronic echo. Where many of the earlier sound installations established a close sympathy between artwork and site, one now heard a very precise connection _ that of cause and effect. The Whitney Time Piece provided a short stretch of Madision Avenue with an aural reflection of itself. When the street produced a sound, so did the Time Piece. When the street was silent, so was the work. Of course Madison Avenue, one of the main thoroughfares of Manhattan, is rarely, if ever, completely silent. Even when the Avenue sounds quiet to a New Yorker's ears, it generates a surprisingly high level of noise. As a result, the Time Piece was always active, always kept on the alert by its close relationship with its site.
Just as the urban ear learns a certain deafness to the persistent buzz of the city, so one could visit the Whitney's sculpture court and not hear Neuhaus' work. We've already looked at his reluctance to intrude his artworks upon their potential audiences. The unobtrusiveness of the Time Piece is very much in keeping with Neuhaus' style, and that provides a perfectly plausible explanation for this aspect of the work. Yet, as I've suggested, the quietness of the Time Piece appears to have a precise point of origin in a particular work _ the sound installation at the Museum of Modern Art's sculpture garden. There is a resemblance between the elusive subsonic resonance of the work at the Modern and the Time Piece at those moments when it has slipped away from consciousness, usually in concert with the sounds of Madison Avenue. The ear often creates such silences, for it simply cannot give its undivided attention for a very long time. Furthermore, and this seems to provide a direct link to the installation at the Modern, the Time Piece produced its sounds on a twenty-minute cycle that began below the threshold of hearing and increased in volume only very, very slowly. At the end of the cycle, the sounds of the work were equal in volume to the ones they reflected; when the cycle began, the Time Piece was inaudible.
So far, I've offered the possibility that the Time Piece develops two themes from earlier in Neuhaus' career _ first of all, that of consonance between work and site, and then the theme of inaudibility. While the inaudible resonance of the Modern's sculpture-garden installation was static _ a steady, all-enveloping rumble to be felt rather than heard _ the Time Piece makes inaudibility the starting point for a shifting pattern of sound. Inaudibility forms an introduction to the Time Piece, giving way as the work's relationship to its site makes itself clear. Then, all of a sudden, inaudibility _ or, more simply, silence _ reasserts itself. Time Piece's twenty-minute cycle comes to an end. The work stops recycling street sounds. There is a sudden absence of electronic echo. An aural setting that had steadily grown more and more complex is drastically simplified all of a sudden.
With half one's aural environment deleted _ that is, with Neuhaus' electronic reflection removed and only the avenue's primary buzz remaining _ the site seems astonishingly clear. Din no longer sounds like mere din, but a rich aural texture instead. And with this clarity comes a calm. Even if, and Neuhaus often finds this is the case, the hearer hasn't been conscious of the Time Piece's building sonorities, their sudden cessation catches the attention. In such instances, inaudibility follows inaudibility, for absence of sound comes after sounds produced but unheard. In any case, the end of the cycle creates a pool of tranquillity, an earlier version of which we've encountered in the Times Square installation.
The Time Piece is remarkable, then, for sustaining well-established themes and also for transforming them profoundly. Calm, silence and consonance between work and site are all static in the artist's earlier installations. The Time Piece turns them dynamic. With this dynamism comes a deeper immersion in the world, as the cycles of Neuhaus' work enmesh themselves in the cycles of ordinary life. He sees in the Time Piece something similar, at least potentially, to public clocks, with their widely heard chimes, or church bells calling a congregation to worship. Not that a Time Piece heard throughout an entire community would simply tell time or have any part to play in church services. Neuhaus' intentions are resolutely secular. Nonetheless, he wants the Time Pieces to create cyclical, widely-experienced events, and the chimes of bells and clocks provide the only ready-to-hand comparisons.
The purpose of the Time Pieces is that of his other installations _ to inspire an intensified sense of one's place in the world. Every individual within the ambit of the piece would experience it differently, of course, yet there might well be a unifying effect to be had from a work of art that addresses itself simultaneously to an entire population caught up in its usual activities. To a sense of one's place in the world would be joined an understanding that, to some extent at least, one shares that place with others. Neuhaus has built a small version of the Time Piece, not an environmental installation but an alarm clock. It addresses its cycle of sound to members of the community one by one, as they sleep, not to an entire population in the course of its daily life. In this manifestation of the concept it's certain that the sound pattern goes largely unheard, for the cycle's sudden cessation is what wakes the sleeper. Instead of an alarm to prod one awake, this personal version of the Time Piece brings wakefulness by means of a reversal in the aural environment. Instead of noise, silence.
With his alarm clock, Neuhaus puts his title-phrase _ Time Piece _ in line with ordinary usage; the phrase refers, after all, to clocks. And clocks measure time. So, in a way, does any version of Neuhaus' Time Piece. Its cycles are of fixed length; they recur at regular intervals. If a Time Piece were to be installed so that its cycles reached an entire community, their climactic silences would no doubt be heard day in and day out at the same hour, much like the fire sirens tested regularly at noon in American towns. Thus any Time Piece could serve in the usual sense of the phrase as a time piece _ a clock. Yet I said at the outset that Neuhaus is interested more in space than in time.
When he engages time, as he always must, it is in order to clarify spatial matters. This intention guides all his work, but especially the Time Piece, which seems to draw on all his abiding concerns and tendencies with a view to intensifying them. As the piece builds to its highest volume then ceases, a certain moment is marked so decisively it seems to break off from the flow of time and precipitate one into a state of preternaturally intense thereness. Nothing of the sort happens literally, I know. Duration, time, is not breachable in that manner, yet the Time Piece seems almost to suggest that it is, that if one's grasp of place is sufficiently powerful, space absorbs time. Simplified all at once to an astonishing clarity, the flow of the world's sound suddenly feels as though it has been completely suspended. Then the Time Piece inaugurates a new cycle, space abandons its embrace of time, and the world continues on in its usual way.