2004
EAR SCOPE
Dasha Dekleva
The most prolific body of sound works created by Max Neuhaus over the past four decades stirs our capacity to perceive and receive an alternate place; a new dimension of art sited on aural ground. Embracing the spatial and public characteristics of the place he selects along with the existing sound life that already permeates it, these invisible works build on the artist’s motto that our perception of space depends as much on what we hear as on what we see. The aesthetic of each work is both fundamentally experiential and inextricable from the places for and from which they are built. Sound, of course, is the primary medium; yet it stays apart from coded forms of music and language, as well as the literal sounds whose origins we recognize, like a ringing phone or a person’s footsteps. By circumventing such ready associations, Neuhaus opens up the vast field of aurality that ordinarily resides in the background of our everyday perception.
Neuhaus's longest-running sound work, situated in the ultimate public space of Times Square, provides an ideal case for these features. The unmarked work appropriates an aural wedge of space over a subway ventilation grating that spreads across a pedestrian island. The sonority spreading out above it introduces a rich yet unobtrusive resonance, bound as it is by urban din and the parameters of the subterranean chamber that houses its source. Neuhaus installed a large speaker within that emits an electronically generated and continuous sound, tuned to the resonances of the chamber that shape the sound’s undulating reflections. Despite its solid presence, the perception of the work remains indeterminate and depends on the passerby’s readiness to hear the difference when crossing the island. This phenomenon fits the artist’s intention to create discreet works that listeners discover on their own and through their own time and effort.
Once perceived, the overlaid aural field is distinct and vibrant, holding its own in relation to the Square’s sensory intensity. In contrast to the panorama of neon advertising glare that initially snatches universal attention, the work interrupts the commotion with a tranquilizing effect – forming a stabilizing audio offset to the overwhelming visual overload. The sonority’s peculiar filtering quality emerges in the listener's awareness, at times perforated by the rhythmic, rumbling comings and goings of the subway trains below. If you remain inside the vertical block of sound for a while, a subtler spatial reversal becomes apparent through this aural filtering. As the sonority firmly establishes itself in the aural foreground, the raucous symphony of other city sounds coalesces into a clarified background, from where they are easier to discern and are filtered consciously into one's ears. Conversely, other sounds cross over the sonority’s threshold and these, too, become distilled punctuations within the enveloping sound continuum. A parallel, non-visual sense of the place, in all its significant variety, takes hold.
The idea of creating artwork with a continuous sound was a pivotal step for Neuhaus. It allowed him to separate the work that followed his percussionist career from time parameters – framing not only music, but also our experience of listening to sounds in general. Once he figured out how to create a continuous sound – in the days before computer technology this required a measure of inventive engineering – and developed it to a viable level, he was able to shape the sound medium in a way analogous to sculptors using malleable material. In a phenomenological investigation of listening, Don Ihde talks about the “auditory field-shape” arising from our spatial experience of sounds in terms of “surroundability” and “directionality.”1 According to Ihde, we are at once immersed in an encompassing world of sound that is omnidirectional and penetrating, and are usually able to locate the sound's source or sense the direction from or to which a sound is traveling. He went on to show how these qualities disclose the essential liveliness of auditory experience – “the timefulness of sound,” whereby sounds well up, move, and fade out. For Ihde the temporal, transient presencing of sound events constituted a key experiential difference between our aural and visual perceptions, summed up roughly in the sentence “sound reveals time.” But Neuhaus took the reverse approach to demonstrate that sound reveals place. By bringing the two senses together on a spatial level, their intrinsic differences paradoxically emerge most vividly through their interdependency rather than incongruity. This means, in turn, that a new way of hearing a place is also a way of changing how we look at things.
In reversing the notion of sound as an elusive temporal event and instead employing it as a shaping substance, Neuhaus begins his creative process by selecting a place that, already gathered, then guides how the rest of the process unfolds. The architectural or natural elements of the place, ranging from acoustics to installation options, establish the physical context, with added sound sources always carefully concealed. Its function, location, users and passersby, history, ambience, and sound life bring in and narrate the social context. Once the place is decided on, Neuhaus walks around it, listens, observes. He then proceeds to work with what he calls a sound palette. He uses this palette to build and adjust his sounds by ear, while paying attention to the existing aural makeup. Relying on both intuition, and upon his direct experiences with audience reactions that he gained during his performing years, he shapes the sounds' character and plausibility – a process that culminates once these qualities establish a desired correlation with the specific environment. The degree of plausibility leads his otherwise improbable sound continuums into a decisive relationship with the hearer. Without an identifiable source, Neuhaus's sounds remain ambiguous even once they are perceived; yet this very ambiguity directs attention to all other audible sounds with which the ear wants to identify the peculiarity. The sound character therefore has to maintain a plausible or implausible integration with the present aural environment in order to appropriately incite and inspire the hearer.
Another tactic that Neuhaus can rely on almost by default, is the Western need for the eye to see what the ear hears. Because this vision-centered paradigm is so dominant in our culture, he can create situations where undermining the ear-eye dialogue jump- starts the listener's awareness. He describes this with the term "liftoff." Liftoff essentially depends on the observer switching from visual to aural perception, and that is the moment when the observer-turned-listener finds the entrance into the sound work.
When restricted to indoor settings, such as galleries or museums, Neuhaus has likewise devised methods that explore and convey his basic premises. Since the visitors in these settings predictably anticipate seeing something, he often chooses transitional locations like gardens or stairwells, where the visitors' visual attention is more relaxed. At other times, when the sound work occupies a traditional exhibition space, it teases out a relationship that departs from the perspective with which the visitors normally approach that space. For instance, in Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris (1983), he utilized the gallery’s existing ambient sound textures, which were generated mainly by the running air-conditioning system. The bare room offered nothing else sight-wise to settle the visitor’s perplexity – caused by unfulfilled visual expectations. Neuhaus modified the system’s humming by adding another layer of sound pulses, which resembled “a low steady wind.” Although the sound was implausible in that context, the contradiction was not consciously noticeable. The result was a congruent intensification of aural and visual perceptions “that were channeled into each other simultaneously and on the same level,” as the eyes wandered in search of a clue, balancing a perception of details such as the peaked glass roof and overall stillness with a subtly amplified awareness of the ongoing sound.2 The contradiction between the two sound textures, though imperceptible, nonetheless induced a tangible sense of place within the space.
A permanent work, Three ‘Similar’ Rooms at Galleria Giorgio Persano (Turin, 1990 – present) deals less explicitly with plausibility. It is more concerned with orientation through sound "color." Each room is saturated with perfectly audible sounds. One encounters the transition fluidly when passing through doorways. The three sonorities are in fact made of two – one for each side room, then combined in the middle, though it is impossible to separate the two from the mixture. A visual analogy might be that of painting each room entirely yellow, blue, and green respectively. But here, the dimensional qualities are extended with sound, not image. The physical likeness and continuity between rooms get undermined with each passage into a differently colored aural space. Over time, the traversals accentuate a nuanced dialogue with external sounds, such as the street noises seeping through the shared windowed wall.
The works described above involve comparison and movement through fixed sound topographies. Two versions of Infinite Lines From Elusive Sources (Paris, 1988-90; Milan, 1990-93) presented gallery situations where the visitor was induced to seek out the source of dynamic and shifting sound topographies. In the first version, the clicking sound switched location as one approached it; in the second, the sound appeared and disappeared indeterminately as one moved around. Instead of an enveloping sonority stabilizing the place, “the sound is always putting you in a position of seeking it;...., it removes you the most from the place.”4 As Ulrich Loock observed, “What is elusive is not really the sound source but the shape of the sound space.”5 With a sense of orientation being constantly challenged, the gallery space itself became destabilized.
A somewhat similar approach with sound dispersion, but in a non-urban outdoor setting, produced a distinctly opposite effect. The untitled contribution for the1977 Documenta 6 in Kassel was situated in a clearing, where stood a tree. Hidden in the tree were eight highly directional speakers emitting clicking sounds that seemed to spring from the grass by way of sound reflection. The clicks were reminiscent of “the sounds of stepping on a twig, or a drop of water falling from a leaf.”6 They might have gone unnoticed as part of the naturally occurring acoustic phenomena, but their persistent bouncing from one spot to another provided an adequate threshold to trigger attentiveness by the visitor. “The clicks were separated by a second or two of silence, and also had physical space between them. This pointed out, emphasized, directed attention around the clearing in a way that created the sense of this place.”7
It is largely due to departing from our everyday visual perception and assumptions that Neuhaus’s sound works can function effectively and deliver an alternative experience through the ears. The spatial quality of these works varies considerably, yet they all invariably engage our primal propensity for orientation. The turnabout occurs when the ears become the prime orienting instrument with which we now establish the place, and our place and activity in it. Maurice Merlaeu-Ponty asserts that although each of our senses is specialized to obtain sensations from an autonomous field unknown to the other senses, the sensations nonetheless affect and convene in the same, singular body. Conversely, while each specialized sense provides access to a particular aspect of space, all senses must at the same time “open on the same space” if the communication with other beings and the world itself is to have meaning for us.8
A Large Small Room (Cologne, 1989-92) compactly revealed this sensorial interplay. Neuhaus created a sound piece in a small room – the gallery kitchenette – adjacent to the large exhibition space. He simply added a system that created sound reflections typically heard in a large room, but here heard inside the small room: “...when you walked into the space, of course, your ear said it was very big, but the eye dominated and said, no, look, this is a very small kitchen.... But when you walked out of the space into the larger room with normal reflections, the ear came in and said, no, this space is very small. Because it rescaled itself according to the eye’s dimension.”9 The ear got to lead the visitor's internal discussion for a while.
An earlier work, in the sculpture garden at the New York Museum of Modern Art (1978), amplified visual orientation through space in yet another way. Here Neuhaus installed a subsonic loudspeaker in a grille-covered chamber beneath the pavement. The sonority remained inaudible, but its specific subsonic frequency affected the sounds normally heard in the garden. The effect was stronger in particular spots, so that a visitor would start noticing aural “landmarks” while moving about. Carter Ratcliff described the experience:
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...., 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....10
Neuhaus supplements the visual field with sound again inside an office building in Kassel. His permanent work Three to One (1992-present) infuses three glass-walled rooms with distinct but very soft sound textures. These become subtly apparent when one ascends the spiral stairway that connects the floors; the sounds begin to intermingle between levels. Doris von Drathen described the gradual recognition with which the ear begins to discern the extrinsic sounds as if increasingly filling the space, landing by landing: “On the stairs to the third level, our ear is now so practiced that we can indeed distinguish an acoustic threshold. The topmost space seems to expand as the two notes [second and third level sounds] converge, seeming to become a whole open landscape of a space.”11 Neuhaus compared the process to the iris expanding in a dark room.12 The combination of three sounds commingling in some areas – along with an aural memory or recognition of the aural experience that forms once the listener descends – ultimately brings the piece together into a single differentiated entity. What the stairway contributes to the stacked interior structurally and visually, for instance, is tangibly enhanced with this new aural image. Conversely, when standing close to the glass walls, the sounds seem to emanate or shimmer forth from them, again challenging the eye to accept an apparent impossibility that furthermore conceals the true location of reflected sound sources.
David Michael Levin’s reading of Martin Heidegger, the 20th century philosopher who brought attention to listening, is pertinent to a broad-based discussion of sound in the field of visual art. Starting with the premise that modernity was founded on and promoted a vision-oriented paradigm – which has had significant consequences in all spheres of Western thought, culture, and social relations – Levin discerned an underlying criticism in Heidegger’s philosophical discourse. This criticism was aimed at destabilizing the ocularcentric dichotomy steeped in subject–object relationships. For instance, Heidegger pointed out that our everyday concerns with things, for the most part, revolve around their presence and use value. Things that present themselves to the vision consequently “become an object to be beheld...or to be acted upon.”13 Levin proceeded to show how Heidegger traced our habitual visual experience – limited to these immediate concerns, everyday commerce, surface perception, and a corresponding tendency “to fixate whatever our eyes behold”14 – to metaphysical discourse. In essence, this contributes to the transformation of the original understanding of truth as unconcealment into truth as correctness. The presence of being that is disclosed to us through vision, or “the power that emerges” into unconcealment, was in the process reduced to the presence of an object. This relation engenders a very instrumental exchange that obscures other forms of interaction and receptivity. By embracing listening as an alternative and parallel existential model, Heidegger in fact presented a counterbalance to the existing hegemony of vision that has fed a kind of grasping, predatory spirit in our culture. “Heidegger’s critique is not, therefore, an attack on vision as such. Rather, it is intended to facilitate the recognition and development of the great potential inherent in vision.”15 Levin observed an opportunity for creating an entirely different and necessary new paradigm that would encourage that potential. The model of listening opens up to this challenge precisely because it operates through receptivity and partaking, the existential modalities that were forgotten or displaced through our accustomed visual attitudes.
We hear this undermining of the visual hegemony, including its grip over place, in all Neuhaus’s works. The constant concealment-unconcealment interplay of the perceived world is played up with various tactics of visual or aural suspension. Among these arose yet another supple idea of delivering sounds by way of silence – or rather, by way of subtraction, a kind of aural slippage that Neuhaus makes palpable with his Moment works. Their predecessor was his silent alarm clock that awoke the sleeper at the moment the gradually increasing high-pitched tone, to which one’s ear-mind was subconsciously attuned, stopped. The invention led to Time Piece ‘Archetype’ at the 1983 Whitney Biennial, installed in the sunken sculpture garden in front of the museum. The piece hinged on the prevailing sounds coming from Madison Avenue, which Neuhaus piped into the garden through a device that slightly altered their timbre so that the real-time acoustic events were doubled, a bit shifted and minutely delayed. The added relay began inaudibly and increased very gradually over twenty minutes until it matched the volume intensity of actual street sounds. At that moment, the relay suddenly ended. Inaudibly, a new cycle started – yet for most hearers, it was the cycle’s cessation that first made them aware of the swelling electronic reflections. As Ratcliff described it: “With half one’s aural environment deleted...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...., an earlier version of which we’ve encountered in the Times Square installation.”16
The Whitney archetype was a small realization of a Moment work that Neuhaus envisioned on a communal scale. Such an opportunity arrived with Time Piece (1989-93) that covered a larger area around Kunsthalle Bern. Neuhaus built a sonority that resembled “the noise of aeroplanes as well as the after-ring of bells, without, however, really imitating these noises” and with a third component that was “a hidden melodic line, a vibration to be sensed rather than to be heard in the aural complex.”17 Projected from four loudspeakers that carried it across diverse ambients of the nearby park, a highly trafficked bridge, a wooded area sloping toward the Aare river, as well as inside the Kunsthalle, the sonority increased audibly for several minutes and ceased with clocklike regularity on the hour and half-hour. More recently, Neuhaus realized the first permanent work in this series. Time Piece Graz (2003-present) functions in one-hour intervals with a sonority characteristically shaped to encircle, immerse, or merge with local sounds as in the Bern precedent. It covers 300 x 500 meters around the Kunsthaus Graz to whose walls it appears to give a voice. Moment works introduce a degree of communal interaction somewhat reminiscent to the effect generated by traditional sound signals, like public clocks or church bells. The difference is that Neuhaus’s works “utilize the disappearance of sound instead, to form a moment of stillness.”18 Because the perception of periodical sound cessation briefly suspends the hearer’s own time flow, it brings attention to the region across which the phenomenon occurs; coincidental listeners take part in a joint moment of aural and spatial re-cognition.
Self-awareness of our visual habits during the process adds insight to the kind of transformations taking place and how they can change the character of our seeing, through listening. Levin illuminated multiple angles regarding vision in another book where he returns to Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. The relevant chapter considers anew the figure-ground structure of Gestalt that features prominently in our perception and how we construct our field of vision specifically. Introducing the stakes at play, he writes:
Ordinary vision empties the contextual field of meaning: for ordinary perception, the ground is not significant. Although the ground is the source of the figures we see – as we are wont to say – “against” it, ordinary vision regards it as not sufficiently interesting and it tends therefore to cut off the ground from the figures, which engage its attention, thereby inhibiting a freely flowing interplay between them in a disfigurement that affects them both.19
Levin’s text is about reversing this Gestalt, “not the differentiation of figure and ground as such, but rather the way in which this differentiation is constructed and maintained....”20 The statement echoes his earlier discussion about seeing and listening. Even though Levin’s writing this time around is concerned with vision, the perception of figure and ground is nevertheless clearly applicable to the experience of listening. Many of Neuhaus's works encourage precisely that – a foreground and background sonic exchange, as in Times Square. This interplay demands a certain degree of letting go by the listener. That is evident in the futility of trying to identify his sounds or to impose definitive associations upon them. Doing so is akin to pulling them out of their context, the aural ground they arise from. A mode of receptivity is at play, stimulated first with the ambiguity of the sound source and further with the ambiguous character of the sound, which only makes sense in relation to how we hear it in that context. In this way, the process of differentiation becomes more integrative – a rich interplay among all audible sounds.
A double reading seems equally appropriate since the two perceptions have a common interstice: space. The kind of reversal between our visual and aural intake that Neuhaus’s sound works incite is itself a changed way of perceiving space and a shift in the ordinary character of our vision. It is a shift through which the eye may observe how the ear engages with the world of aurality, how the ear becomes consciously responsive to a “freely flowing interplay” unleashed between background and foreground, expanding and deepening the spatiality of the world around us – as well as the vast range of sounds we are capable of apprehending.
Perhaps the best indicators that such a transformation is taking root are chance moments of aural recognition, or a remembered acoustic overlap, that follow an experience with Neuhaus’s sound work. They sneak up here and there, indefinitely, in other places altogether, and are quite irrelevant of your listening mode. These aural encounters act as reminders of a sort, yet they are really just discovered cues that continue to carry everyday listening to the forefront of our senses.
1 Don Ihde, Listening and Voice: A Phenomenology of Sound. (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1976). 2 Jean-Christophe Ammann, “Notes on Max Neuhaus” in Max Neuhaus: Sound Installation, trans. Catherine Schelbert (Kunsthalle
Basel, 1983), 14. 3 Max Neuhaus, “Sound Installation, 1983, Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris (ARC)” in Max Neuhaus: Sound Installation, 22.
4 Max Neuhaus, “Conversation with Ulrich Loock” in Max Neuhaus: Sound Works, vol. I, Inscription, (Ostfildern: Cantz Verlag, 1994), 127.
5 Ulrich Loock, “A Conversation Between Max Neuhaus and Ulrich Loock” in Max Neuhaus: Elusive Sources and 'Like' Spaces (Turin: Giorgio Persano, 1990), 49.
6 Max Neuhaus, “Lecture at the Seibu Museum Tokyo: Talk and question period” in Max Neuhaus: Sound Works, vol. I, 60. 7 Ibid.
8 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (Great Britain: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1962; New York: Routledge, 1999), 217.
9 Max Neuhaus, in conversation with Colin Fournier at the Bartlett School of Architecture, London, February 24, 2004. Audio recording courtesy of the artist.
10 Carter Ratcliff, “Space, Time and Silence: Max Neuhaus’ Sound Installations” in Max Neuhaus: Sound Installation, 8. 11 Doris von Drathen, in Max Neuhaus: Sound Works, vol. I, 110. Originally published as “Max Neuhaus: Invisible sculpture, molded
sound,” Parkett 35, 1993. Translated from German by Michael Hulse. 12 Max Neuhaus, in conversation with Colin Fournier.
13 David Michael Levin, ed., “Decline and Fall: Ocularcentrism in Heidegger’s Reading of the History of Metaphysics” in Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 201.
14 Ibid., 202.
15 Ibid., 205.
16 Carter Ratcliff, “Space, Time and Silence,” 11.
17 Ulrich Loock, “Time Piece Kunsthalle Bern” in Max Neuhaus: Two Sound Works 1989 (Bern: Kunsthalle Bern and Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, 1989), 13.
18 Max Neuhaus, text excerpted from Time Piece Graz drawing (2003). 19 David Michael Levin, “The Field of Vision: Intersections of the Visible and the Invisible in Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty” in The
Philosopher’s Gaze: Modernity in the Shadows of Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 181. 20 Ibid., 177.
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