1994
Max Neuhaus: An Occasion for Listening
The route taken by Max Neuhaus through art and the exploration of sound finds its coherence when conceived in strict relation to the changing fortunes of -sensation+ - meaning all sense experience, including hearing - in the forms such experience has taken on since the sixties, through the dissolution of the conceptual closure of the arts that had allowed for the separate functioning of sculpture and painting, dance and theater, music and architecture. The breakdown of this closure led to a language system in which the parts mix and blend, always referring to the each other and interacting to create a new artistic topology. The fall of the centers produced an upheaval in which the activities and territories of the individual arts expanded and intermingled, establishing harmonic relations that instituted an -open-weave network+ without any privileged element to orient the experience and give it a single sense. Sculptors from Morris to De Maria and dancers from Rainer to Forti, painters like Johns and Rauschenberg and musicians like Tudor and Cage all met in this continuous interweave, where the performer-whether actor or spectator-could participate in the dialectic between the arts. The release from any center opened an infinite, unprecedented discourse, valorizing the ephemeral and the invisible, agitating the monotonous flow of differences, bringing on the rediscovery of -sensation+ in all its diversity. Indeed, from the sixties on forth, sensory participation has acquired a new dimension with respect to action and thought, according it greater power or at least a privileged place by comparison to the cognitive and practical fields.
The change can be confirmed today in the expenditure of aesthetic and aural energies that human beings must invest to absorb everything that happens around them. The expansion of sensory information, pressing 360í around the senses, designates the territory of the individual and the collectivity. Each person, directly or indirectly, lives a condition where the project of communicating revolves around a diffuse aesthetics, whose essential rapport with sensation and pleasure was demonstrated in the sixties by Marcuse.
An aesthetics understood as the philosophy of pleasure tends to underline the relation of sensory participation between beings and objects. A critical rapport is established between the two, assuming diverse forms depending on the characteristics attributed to the subject. Hearing, and perception in general, never escape the individual+s capacity for distinction. In 1966, with Listen, Max Neuhaus based his particular kind of music on a new relation of sensibility between sound and subject, engaging himself and his listeners in the search for an aesthetic dimension of the aural, based on a critical and pleasurable consideration of urban noises. He invited his listeners to the streets of Manhattan and set them free to take possession of their own hearing. The parameters of the operation were double: on one hand, it clearly demonstrated that the subject is the fulcrum for the existence of musical pleasure; on the other, it stressed that in the wake of musical events from Russolo to John Cage, music could acquire an anonymous, impersonal, socialized dimension, which demands only to be found and retraced. It+s a dialogue between hearing and the already heard, where human beings find themselves at the center of an aural pleasure or pain (and Manhattan in its richness presents both extremes) in which it is necessary to orient oneself, to find references that are either proportional to one+s own sensibility or that stretch toward the dissolution of one+s identity as a subject. In this sense Neuhaus+ work has from the very beginning been contrary to the neo-classical ideal of harmony, of conciliation of opposites and resolution of all conflicts. Rather it moves in the ambit of pleasure defined by the historic avant-gardes, the sphere of -difference+ and -confrontation,+ where the subject exists but disappears, such that pleasure prevails over reason. In this perspective, still in 1966, Neuhaus invited the public of WBAI to call the radio station and produce a sound of their choice:
Public Supply One.
The main thrust here is toward a limit of boundless but substantially indifferent musical pleasure, without the possibility of selection. This notion of -indifference+ means that the sound is not sentimental or expressionistic, but is built up without any personal selection. It discloses a dispossession of the author, as though Neuhaus organized his compositions around two virtual centers, one defined by his presence and the other by his absence. This creates a kind of musical mirror where everyone+s auditory system can intertwine, including Neuhaus+. Following this indifferent perspective, his music opens to all possibilities, internal and external. It overflows and expands, redoubled. It becomes an ellipse with two centers, capable of containing all the possible trajectories of the sounds. The extension of the sound contour eliminates the frontal position, attaining a lateral maximum in which everyone is inscribed. It accomplishes the transformation of the visual and aural whole that had been signaled by minimal art, where empty counts as much as full, where priorities disappear and a totality of art, music, dance, theater, architecture, and design is born. It is the birth or growth of a sound, wherever and of whatever sort; what matters is to produce a sound, to play anything, to attain the pleasure of indifference and indifference as the basis of all musical pleasure. Thus the object of music is no longer one contrived result or another, but rather its own operation, since, as Neuhaus maintains, -Music is not a product, it is an activity,+ and the role of the musician is no longer that of conveying -sonorous knowledge+ or -musical truth,+ but of being an instrument whereby music can -become a process of communication, a loop, rather than a one-way message sent from performer to audience.+1 Consequently, the treatment of an undifferentiated musical communication does not have any disciplinary boundaries. This is a story of ideas and facts, of events and places, an -unpredictable activity+ that possesses a global dimension, able to bring everything from geography and economics to logic and politics into question.
Since 1966 his activity, following certain situationist and minimalist trends, has been turned toward the search for musical occasions: unique contextual events permitting the realization of a sonority that extends its field to a public and intersubjective process, analogous to the process-nature of other activities. What seems to interest Neuhaus, then, is not so much consensus or dissent as participation, the establishment of closer connections between music and architecture, between communication and politics (this last word originating from polis, or city). To speak of -occasions+ here means leaving behind the rigidly prescriptive territory of music and hunting for unknown and unpredictable situations where the sounds can rise up and come to life, proliferate and die. The occasion is a mental opening, outside the schemata of music+s traditional horizons. This is like an artist who finds a ready-made and manipulates it, provoking an incandescence of meaning that makes the object crackle under the gaze. Neuhaus does the same when he when he draws sound and and its surroundings out from obscurity and silence. He sharpens one+s vision of an underground space no less than its aural perception; he provokes an opening in the circle of sensation. Thus -occasion+ does not mean casual chance, but the determined search for a target that presents itself to sight and hearing, as a sudden and unexpected clarity.
This identification of music as an activity or operation only achieves conceptual coherence when it is related to a notion that was shared at the time by Sol Le Witt and Dan Flavin: the notion of repetition, of passage from self to self, carried out in a direct relation to reality. Here, then, are Neuhaus+ coordinates: occasion, repetition and reality.
The occasion denies the interchangeability of situations. Neuhaus projects and adapts himself in relation to the unrepeatability of each space and time, just as it is found or offered. Invited by the Albright-Knox Gallery of Buffalo in 1967, he took as the basis of his work Drive-in-Music the virtual -corridor+ beginning at the entrance of the museum and developing over approximately one-half mile along Lincoln Parkway. The work consisted of a number of radio transmitters placed along the entire stretch of road and perceptible to the drivers, who could change their perception by altering the speed of their vehicles. The subject here is a passage: either of sound emerging from nowhere, or of an aural tunnel causing a musical architecture to appear as an extension from the real building (the museum), or of the driver/passengers who effect an interchange, or of the celebration of a circumstance or an occasion, which passes and disappears.
The occasional sound is seductive because it is connected to a perceptual surprise-in the literal sense of something that grips you suddenly, without warning-and a temporary intoxication. It is almost a subtle nervous jolt coursing through the body, an overload of perception that runs from the ear to the nervous system. The pleasure or trauma of shock or discovery and the exceptional qualities this implies were sought by Neuhaus in his -underwater works,+ a series begun in 1971. Here the upsurge of the exceptional in the linear process of silence and music was confided to the listeners, who were invited to immerse themselves and actually swim in a pool brimful with water, at New York University. Discovered through the immersion in the pool, the unexpected character of the sound from Water Whistle broke through the everyday context with a marvelous event, something seductive and magical: -The whistle completely surrounded you with sound. Because of the way the forehead transmits sound waves to the ears underwater, you almost felt as if the sources were inside you. It was an all-encompassing sensation.+2 The aural structure was based on a grid of sound sources around a limited perimeter, each swimmer being invited to seek out his or her own musical pattern without any pre-established schema.
Such a sound quest thrives on the occasion provided by the architectonic territory - the pool - as well as on the occasion and chances of the swimmer+s movements. And since the chance effect comes to life through unknown and accidental incidents, the existence of the latter can only remain constant through recourse to a calculation or a repetitive structure. To create occasions, Neuhaus+ musical apparatus must therefore be based on a reiterative system of sound, a -jet+ of music, constant or variable, which is available for the listeners+ use and enjoyment, whether direct or indirect, accidental or intentional. The reiteration of the sound creates the occasion, or better, the circumstance for a musical perception. But to be unpredictable or surprising, it must not be discovered or found in an abstract and neutral territory, the auditorium or the concert hall, but in a real one, a city or a street, a pool or a subway. All Neuhaus+ work is as elaborately formed as it is extremely occasional, because it presupposes the reality and diversity of beings and things: -Underwater listening isn+t supposed to be stationary and yet it+s not athletic. Swimming temperature is lower than listening temperature, so the pool had to warmer than normal. There was the effort of getting undressed and putting on a bathing suit, which is a nuisance, though a clear sign that you weren+t going to a concert.+3
The definition of Neuhaus+ music seems to satisfy the demand for an art that is less culturally solemn and less haloed by tradition, an art that has the expository and spectacular dimensions of a culture of channel-hopping or -zapping,+ which makes it so easy to enter or exit a source of information, in an all-pervading and yet democratic process. Such an art is founded on a dialogue that leaves the listener free to move or have adventures within a terrain, but also to exit or dissolve it. One can plunge into it or emerge from it, open a dialogue with it or remain outside. What counts, then, is movement, coming and going, which creates the experience and the consciousness of sound. Thus for Neuhaus music is passing through sound to dissolve it or empty it of all metaphysical significance, in the attempt to bring music to the dimension of a real language that speaks with us and through us.
But if this music issues forth from architecture or from the city, it appears unexpectedly, in such a way as to make the passerby+s senses gravitate toward its existence. In 1977 Neuhaus constructed his first permanent piece of sonic architecture. In the middle of Times Square in New York, he built a sound volume defined by sonic walls bordering the ventilation grillwork of the subway. Though immaterial, the construction aimed at permanence, seeking to create an aural space cut out from the noise generated by the traffic. With its constructive idea, the work is meant to face and overcome the challenge posed by the destructive aspect of the city. It fights on the same terrain, but produces -difference,+ cutting through the chaotic transmission of urban sounds with a carefully designed and elaborated sound that can be received by any city dweller. More than a decor, Neuhaus+ work is a ceremony. The music or the complex of sounds does not resonate distinctly in the ear, it does not shine or excel, press up or jump free, in order to mark a distinction from other sounds. Instead these sounds simply exist, they adapt and relate to the others, they are only an occasion for listening. In fact they are deduced from the environment, built through the use of a computer controlled sound palette, an instrument that Neuhaus employs to model the physical structure of real sound, to modify and develop it such that his sound is finally different from the real one. Thus the computer is not used to generate new sounds, but to mould reality, which nonetheless remains similar to itself.
Sound continued to radiate forth, from the garden of the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1978 and in the stairway of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 1979. In both works the sonic pattern acquired volume, quality and intensity of timbre according to the position of the listener in the garden or on the various levels of the stairway. At times the integration of sound and place reached a point of maximum identity between space and volume, level and surface, such that a continuous sound texture could construct a wall or define a passageway.
In other cases, the anti-metaphysical approach leads to a sound that is -fitting+ to the social dimension; a musical design results in a -true+ sound, one that serves society, adjusting to it and becoming a usable novelty or innovation, beyond its aesthetic and sensory quality. Still in 1979, Neuhaus adjusted the alarm clock to the sensibility of the sleeper who wants to wake up at a certain time. He designed a sound that does not disturb sleep, but whose disappearance and subliminal absence strike the sleeper and bring about awakening. What counts here is not the form or presence of the sound, but its efficacy.
The work is not a decor, but a ceremony (from carimonia, which in turn comes from careo = to lack, be deprived). It is a way of differing from the tradition. Not fullness of sound, then, but lack or movement in the interval between fullness and emptiness. The first in the series of Time Pieces, realized in 1983 on the occasion of the Whitney Biennial in New York, operated precisely on the discovery of the sound work in its absence.
Constructed in a sunken plaza in front of the Whitney Museum, the piece consisted of a subtle -crescendo+ of live urban sounds and noises, filtered once again through the computer controlled sound palette: moving automobiles, horns, squealing brakes, motors revving up and accelerating, in short an ensemble of sonic information from Madison Avenue, the street that fronts the museum. The crescendo dispersed into the real sounds, but when it disappeared it revealed its presence, offering new occasions to perceive the city.
Neuhaus+ aural ceremonies designate a ritual of sound, a vision of the outside as a mode of being, able to produce spaces and moments that can be integrated into the fabric of city life, but that are completely different from it, wholly other.
His work is a convergence between the plastic arts, musical reality and the everyday environment, based on action rather than on the rites of music. Because it is not founded on any belief or myth of Music, it does not accept the musical cult, but professes it on the contrary as pure ceremony: which means an extremely precise and scrupulous repetition (there are 17 versions of -underwater music+) that opens the way to a form of non-sentimental and non-intimate sensibility, no less articulated and complex for all that. The term -repetition+ also means specularity, where the sound reflects on itself, refers back to and changes itself. There exists a continuous displacement in such repetition, because it always comes out differently, extemporaneously, according to the occasion. Even delirium is repetitive, but it resounds differently. It is a fixed image linked to certain unlimited drives. Therefore this kind of repetition is a search for discontinuity and difference, since the same sound has different resonances in different sites and spaces. It depends on architectural interferences (the stairways are not the same in Chicago and Kassel), it is associated with the differing fluids of air and water. Repeating certain elements in a symbiosis with the contexts (the occasions of architecture and exhibition) is therefore a way of regenerating the sound - like using words in different poetic texts. Neuhaus+ research is radial: it begins from a single nucleus and spreads out toward the nearby area. It is betrayed (or -translated+-the words have the same root in Italian) by architecture or the context. Thus music as an activity of change and interchange, of solidarity or dissension with the context, comes to mean the capacity to move freely through changes from positive to negative, in step with urban architecture or infrastructure. In 1988, at the Parc de la Villette in Paris, Neuhaus proposed -a sound to create a silence. La Villette is noisy. The periphÄrique, Paris+ beltway, runs nearby, so this time the piece will have to be quite loud before it shuts off. But I want to timbre it to soften it as volume grows, which means that, in a way, the sound will be getting louder and quieter at the same time.+ Of course the capacity for an encounter/confrontation consists in an ability to harmonize with the opportunities offered by the environment. This sometimes means moving in relation to the rhythms of bureaucratic ceremony, as in the case of the project for a sonic redefinition of two hundred meters of the Montparnasse-Bienvenue station of the Paris metro, based on a dialogue from 1973 to 1987 with the RÄgie Autonome des Transports Parisiens (RATP). Another such case: the 1978-1989 project of a new siren for police cars.
If one intertwines the ceremony undergone by Neuhaus and the ceremony undergone by the members of the public who circulate within the aural installations, it can then be confirmed that both operations are instruments of initiation, an almost hermeneutic proposal in which the author and the listeners are called upon to modify or transform themselves. With his work on sound, Neuhaus attempts a transition from one condition to another, excluding competition or imposition in favor of a perceptual opening for himself and others. The musician is both initiated and initiator, and both lose and rediscover themselves in the process. Thus the installations often take the form of a tunnel or of ascending levels, like Sound Line (1988) at the Magasin de Grenoble, which consisted in the creation of a 2 x 60 meter sonic space, crossed by natural sounds so as to almost form part of the forest; or like Three to one (1992) at Documenta IX in Kassel, where the empty interior of an office building with its system of stairways was filled with three different tonalities of sound. The strict determination of the sonic spaces and of their diverse perceptions introduces another level of reading, giving the impetus to a musical mentality that renders all the determinations fluid, ambiguous and uncertain. Thus Neuhaus succeeds in uniting a definite rule with the most pragmatic and sensory interpretation. Intertwining the absolute and the indeterminate, he constructs a veritable labyrinth, rich and suggestive, where everyone can lose themselves, let themselves be charmed, and open their own path to initiation. It is an intermediate sound or music which you pass through, to hear and sense yourself.
For many years the phenomenological description of the entire process, based on an osmosis between the real world and the sonic one, relied only on the preliminary sketches and on an account of the listener+s experience. But around 1974, Neuhaus made the decision to confide a -de-monstration+ of the work to drawing. The hypothesis was that of attempting an exhibition or visual explication of the interpretation, from one language to another. The action of making visible, which has a hermeneutic aim, has also become a proof of an -already activated+ operativity or effectiveness; it is the a posteriori assertion of an experience. Indeed, operating on the discovery of a sonic theme or an aural contextuality which always has to be found in situ because it always depends on the place or the environment, Neuhaus cannot design - and therefore cannot draw - a priori. The drawings are a non-verbal materialization of an aural installation which has already taken place, or which in other cases has been thoroughly explored but not realized. In contrast to the direct sensation of the work, these drawings go beyond immediate perception, reintroducing the metaphysical aspect. But the drawings are of different natures. The rougher, hand-worked variety serve to -announce+ the aural installation or construction, in the sense that they define a potential topography for the sound-paths; they are aformal jottings, almost sketches or notes, which record developments in technique without actually defining the piece. The most detailed and constructed drawings, however, are those constructed a posteriori, after the work has been put into place. Instead of being turned toward the technical and operative dimension, the interpretative effort is here directed to the communicative dimension. It operates through a complex semanticization of signs, which are distinguished by the colors, the tracing in lead pencil, the trajectories and undulations of the lines, setting up a visual exchange between image, sound and architecture. Being an instrument for the -disclosure+ of the project, the drawings emphasize the two primary components or mainstays of Neuhaus+ approach: architecture and the experience of sound. The first is conveyed through the medium of a traditional technical drawing, an architectural study, and serves - as in the drawings Walkthrough (1971), Times Square (1973) and untitled (1983) - to introduce the context in a cold and impersonal manner. The second, on the contrary, is often -narrated,+ translated into words, written in Neuhaus+ own hand. Halfway between the two is the sound or the sonic topography. This constitutes the essence of the work, but translated into drawing; it is made manifest with color, from black pencil to yellow, blue and red pastels, the primary colors. In the drawings Walkthrough (which recalls the piece in Manhattan at the Jay Street subway station) and Times Square (the work bounded by Broadway and Seventh Avenue, 45th and 46th Streets), the sonic construction, forming a block, is defined by the solar sign of yellow, while the reverberation, which touches the urban structure, becomes red. In this sense, color functions as an architectonic code, serving to construct the unreal city (the one in color) in its distinction from the real city (sketched in black). Sometimes the drawing is a landscape, excluding architecture and plunging into the green of parks. It traces trees and meadows, to define and unveil a sequence of clicks, as in the drawings untitled (Kassel, 1977) and River Grove (Aspen, 1988), which create a second forest of sound. Elsewhere, when the space is an art gallery, as in the drawing untitled (Bell Gallery, Rhode Island, 1983), the walls are markedly empty, to evidence the absence whereby the sound/void cuts into the walls and forms a moving sonic band. Faced with the need to disclose the complexity of the three sound sources in the work for the Basel Kunsthalle, the drawing untitled (1983) operates by a plenitude of color: the noises coming from above through the skylight, like water, are indicated in blue, while those from the heating unit are in red, and those from the unjointed flooring are yellow. Neuhaus filters all these and adds another level of sound, whereby the aural reality of the museum space -resounds+ by itself.
The drawings concern a rediscovered sound, they are Proustian pages of sonorous memory. They redirect to the eye what was or will be for the ears. They aspire to bring back an intoxication of which there is no record, except in the account of its author. They are paper leaves plucked from history, with the aim of constructing a topography of events and tales, sometimes absolute and rational, sometimes romantic and programmatic, speaking of the decline of the great cities and the evanescence of all things. They take on the significance of a voyage in the style of Walter Benjamin or Thomas Mann, where words are replaced by sound. Following their lines and perceiving their masses of color, one is pulled into a vortex of events forming a sonic constellation,indispensable for understanding the history of an interweaving of contemporary music and the plastic arts.
Germano Celant
1, 2, 3) Max Neuhaus, quoted by Carter Ratcliff, -Aural Spaces,+ in Art in
America, New York, October 1987.
Translated from the Italian by Brian Holmes