1987
Text published in: Max Neuhaus [French, English] (Locminé: Edition du Centre d'Art, Domaine de Kerguéhennec, 1987
I
Refusing any identification with pre-established genres or artistic categories, the work of Max Neuhaus is an attempt to redefine both the essence of art and its function. Of course, Neuhaus is neither the first nor the only artist to pursue such a goal. But Neuhaus is one of the few artists to formulate a project that is both structured and complex, imaginative and complete. From its beginnings in music, his work has developed into a singular conjunction of sound and space in which each work creates a definition of place founded on the aural experience of individuals in a given environment. In most societies, art has usually constituted a form of relationship to the world specifying men's sensory experience and appropriating places, functions, and customs. In contrast, the significance of Neuhaus' work lies precisely in its ability to confront us with our physiological limits and ideological habits.
Neuhaus sculpts sounds and traces aural passages. He uses noise and confusion not to imitate a given environment, but to express the nature of sound and place. His work involves many kinds of spatial arrangements of sound, such as we find them in the world about us and in the means available to us to discern, designate, and transform them and - with them - reality itself. It uses all kinds of natural and mechanical sounds, both emitted and reflected, in both rural and urban environments.
Place in Neuhaus' work is never pre-defined by some abstract principle: it is always and only place in the present. Active experience of this present-ness itself generates new possibilities for transformation - a parameter which measures nothing if not itself. In this sense, the work consists of place becoming event. Differences between one place and another are never confined to, or given by, history. They do not correspond to pre-established categories of place (country/city; house/public space; open/closed; museum/factory). The characteristics and functions of each place are defined uniquely by the individual's experience of them. The place we perceive in Neuhaus' work is nearly always a place within the place, another place that specific experience and active perception define as being there and nowhere else. It is a place where reality and sensation connect and merge, where things are neither translated nor represented. Here, things return to and become part of the site, becoming not that 'other place' of music or painting, but the place itself, as it was before and as it is, in itself and for whoever experiences it.
If we wanted to find historical antecedents for such work, we would have to look elsewhere than among the works that embellish the neutrality of our artistic and cultural institutions. Its true dimension cannot be deduced from paintings and museums, compositions performed in concert halls or texts published in books.
To approach it, we would need to look in the area of oral poetry, at the Homeric, Indian, tribal, or popular tales that accompanied people's lives in different periods; at the bell towers of medieval villages, the stained glass windows and the organization of light in a Gothic cathedral along a pilgrimage route; at the shadow cast on the desert by an Egyptian pyramid, at the Zen gardens of Japan or the fountains and waterfalls in baroque gardens and palaces; at trompe l'oeil architecture, anamorphoses, halls of mirrors and panoramas; at Tibetan or Byzantine monasteries, at Mongol chants, at the interplay of tom-toms in Africa or at the arcades of nineteenth-century Paris.
But, however long, this inventory cannot provide us with a context similar to that of Neuhaus' sound works. Discovering these has nothing to do with listening to what the artist has composed or inserted into the landscape or site. It has to do with discovering our own ability to listen and be involved, to experience the sound and substance of this landscape, to measure the volume of our own presence there. This can be done only through the concrete experience of place. In this sense, Neuhaus' intervention represents only the first in an infinite series of possibilities. Similarly, the work exists simply to set things in motion. It is a catalyst, a medium through which the subject enters or exists in the space, through which he becomes aware of place. The sound itself is just one example, organically linked to the infinite parameters of the place. This sound is generated electronically, not as a final autonomous achievement but as another threshold - to extend the limits of sound possibilities. It exemplifies active memory and the mechanisms of the mind, mechanisms of the mental abstraction of space, within which a place takes form as it fulfils its conditions of possibility.
II
It took over a quarter of a century for Neuhaus to transform his work into the place within contemporary art that it has now become. He started his career as an innovative percussionist, thus gaining a sense of timbre, sound colour and duration which would stand him in good stead later. But even in those early days Neuhaus eschewed the kind of frontality that characterized the pianist's relation to his instrument, and the demonstrative technique associated with the violin virtuoso. He rebelled against the mechanism of repetition, calling into question the role of the interpreter and the canons of performance.
Speaking of this period, Neuhaus has said: 'I began my career as a musician working in a sphere of music where distinctions between composer and performer were beginning to disappear. I became interested in going further and moving into an area where composer and performer would not exist. In the early 1960s, I used acoustic feedback in my stage performances. The room itself would generate the sound; it was always outside of my direct control. I gradually adjusted the levels of the amplifier channels until things began to move, but I had no direct control whatsoever over the sounds and their movements. Finally, I made a mass-produced box [the Max-Feed] which could be placed near home hi-fi systems to produce this same type of feedback. It no longer seemed necessary for me to do it on stage. I began to understand that I wasn't interested in making musical 'products' but instead I wanted to be a catalyst for sound activity'.
While Max-Feed was the first tool born of the performer's convictions and the creator's intuition, it was with Drive-in Music (1967) that Neuhaus first set up the effective structure of his sound installations or sound topographies as we know them today. Taking a long stretch of road, he installed seven broadcasting sound sources in the trees beside the road. Each vehicle driving along this section of road received sound signals varying according to its crossing time, position and speed, and on the listener's choice when operating his radio set. No two drivers heard the same thing. The drivers moved within a space whose aural and acoustic conditions were specific and, above all, specified. The drivers thus participated in the act of specification as listeners recognizing the limits of the space, actively experiencing their movement within a space. Such were the themes and effect of this founding work.
Since then, Max Neuhaus has worked with cities (1974, 1977) and subway stations (1972-1984), stairways (1968,1979, 1980, 1992), swimming pools (1971-1978), church spires (1980, 1988), woods (1983) and lakes (1986), tunnels (1985) and darkrooms (1984, 1988, 1990), automobiles and airports (1985, 1989), alarm clocks and sirens (1978-1991), telephone and radio networks (1966-1978), and crossroads (1977), roadways (1967-1968) and parks. His work may take place wherever a human being can pass by and stop, wherever an aural experience or the particular situation of a space allows us to take hold of ourselves, to discover the reality of a place. And if no category or inventory can ever account for the types of environments used in Neuhaus' work, this is because all places are possible places. Similarly, any strong presence in a place ends up leaving its mark on it; and every event - in this case, the work - is in fact an agent that activates a place and defines it.
When, between 1969 and 1978, Max Neuhaus used a volume of water to shape sound topographies, the water element was both a source (whistle) and a carrier of sound (within the swimming pool). These works could be heard only from within the water. They defined another aspect of a place, that of a compact and enclosed body of water, moving within the infinite contiguity of its parts.
Neuhaus' finely attuned response to the specificity of place can best be illustrated by taking two contrasting installations, Domaine de KerguÈhennec and Times Square. For if these works appear to be exact opposites, it is not because Max Neuhaus contradicts himself, but because of a fundamental difference in their place and conditions of possibility.
The first is a work in depth, catching the intensity of a place, concentric and overwhelming. The second is expansive, ec-centric and discreet. Yet both are equally unexpected, unimaginable and pregnant. Both examples demonstrate the freedom at the heart of Neuhaus' work, not through statements and signatures but through their use of the natural constraints of a given environment.
Created within the park of a Brittany estate, the Kerguéhennec work inscribes a place within the place of a lake, like a centre of gravity to the landscape, a cross-section of experience and environment. Four sound sources horizontally activate the water surface and project their acoustic image in a persistent, rapid and changing movement - a fluctuating hum, moving as if given to particular moods, like a water spirit or the essence of its expanse and surface. At the same time, like an invisible reflection echoing the marsh's depth and immobility and defining a maximum height, another high-pitched sound, insistent and unwavering, brings together the centre that is the sky and the vertical, upwards movement of head and eyes at the limit of aural perception. Set at the farthest point of sound, it is inaccessible, like the transparent, sightless mirror of the tangible, a faint yet crystalline intensity, the very substance of being, the soul of depth.
To the diagonal or X-shaped movement set up by the four sound sources answers the perpendicular criss-cross movement of the listener's ears and eyes. To the circular movement of the pathway around the marsh answers the spiral movement marking the listener's immobility and instant of perception. An oblique and multifaceted being seems to shimmer and echo through a double depth - that of the lake and that of our listening - through the double height of refracted light and of the air as it becomes sky and open space. The event before us becomes the event that contains us. What is inside extends to what surrounds us. The secret geometry of movements disappears without vanishing or merging with the surrounding world. It becomes structure and architecture in a place where nothing is constructed, nothing but the possibility of full presence in and to that place. To the site's serene silence comes the bustling response of nature. Passive contemplation of the landscape becomes active perception of beings present to themselves and to the world.
In Times Square, the earth seems to move under one's feet when one unsuspectingly crosses this narrow strip of sidewalk in the middle of one of the city's busiest crossroads. And yet this underground sound, which seems to emanate from some great force to assert an absolute verticality, is as complementary in relation to its environment as the horizontal ripples that project from the surface of the water at KerguÈhennec to the most subtle reaches of our senses. Leading us down to the depths from which it rises, this vertical line of noise is like an answer to the hubbub of the street, its chaotic traffic and everyday confusion. This vertical axis marks the common origin of all those who cross it, in their active, upright posture, their sovereign erectness as they awaken to themselves and their senses on the site. There is a barely perceptible discrepancy between meaning and event, between sound and auditive experience, a discrepancy denoting, surely, the existence of another place within the place, a place which is no doubt within each individual and in the place that unites them.
III
If Max Neuhaus' work is more accomplished than others, it is not because it deals with place, but because on each occasion its theme is the difference, the diversity and specificity of each place. At the same time, the identity of the work lies in the event and reality of an individual achieving a state of self-awareness and appropriating the place for him or herself, becoming conscious as a self within the world.
A place marked by an event, a place enabling the event - a reality occupied by a presence that a presence appropriates as history, a history not ready-made but ready to make, the history each one of us makes by appropriating a place through an active experience of the world.
This is probably what historian Paul Veyne had in mind when he said: 'It is the place that creates history'. This sense of history runs through all Neuhaus' work, whether we are standing on Times Square or walking around a Brittany estate. In the former case, we discover our static, upright selfhood; in the latter, we bask in the sensations created by the shimmering light of the water.
Such is the meaning of an art that establishes our freedom and respect for the environment, an art that does not comment on historical facts but creates them and lets them take place through the definition of our senses and of place. Neither pedagogical nor anarchistic, it lies outside the genres of art; it is sui generis. Yet it achieves a specific essence, a possible sense and function for art in the world today. Neither ornament nor comment, Max Neuhaus' work creates a reality within which we can come to terms with our own self-awareness. This process is our own responsibility; all the work does is to provide a place that our presence and only our presence can activate. This is the event of the work.
Denys Zacharopoulos