1990
A Conversation Between Max Neuhaus and Ulrich Loock
Milan, March 25, 1990
L. Consider the piece you just finished in the Persano Gallery, which is different from most pieces you've done previously but relates to the one you did in Paris.
N. I think the basic idea of an elusive source of sound separates it from a large body of my work. It's a phrase of click-like sounds which gradually rise in pitch and accelerate and decelerate. It forms an endless pattern. The source of the sound when you walk into the space appears from the back wall; as you move towards the wall it disappears. As you walk around the room, in many places you can't hear it at all. This idea of actively seeking the source in this piece and also in the Paris work, I think, is one of the major differences.
L. And the sound you are using for this piece, you describe it as a click-like sound. Do you have a specific reason for using this particular sound idea for this structure?
N. Although in some contexts this sound can relate to sounds which might be expected, in this context it's a completely abstract sound. It's not unnatural, it doesn't sound artificial; but it doesn't sound like anything definite either. You might say it sounds like a snap of your finger, but it's really free of literal connotations. In a practical sense it works very well in terms of projecting sound; in a technical sense it's useful.
L. So in this case you didn't take up sound from the environment, because that as I understand is another entrance or another starting point for sound installations you've done.
N. Yes. Here it's because it's a gallery; people are deliberately going in to hear the work. It is different than putting it anonymously in a public place; the idea of finding it is a different one. They already know there is a piece there. Beginning this game of hunting in a gallery or a museum is very much different than beginning it in the street.
L. I propose that we try to compare this idea and the experience of the work you describe by the term elusive sources to other works you have done recently, to try to situate it in the body of work you call sound installations or sound works, in order to find out what the different possibilities or means are that you've been using. There are three pieces you've developed recently which you call 'Like Spaces', each using several spaces which look similar but have different sounds.
N. Exactly. It's working with the idea that the rooms are visually or physically either identical or very much alike and transforming them into very different places by using sound.
The first one, Two Identical Rooms (1989), which was done in Hamburg, takes two wings of a very large exhibition space and treats them with sound textures which are opposite in nature. One on one side is like a fluid; it envelops you when you walk into the space. The other is a texture of very dense clicks which seems to be suspended over your head when you walk into the space. Both sounds are at levels which demand that you focus when you walk into the space. When you first enter these spaces, you see nothing and you hear nothing; after a few seconds through searching, your aural focus shifts and you realize you're in one of these textures. This work was in the context of the visual exhibition, two empty spaces adjoining other spaces which were highly charged with objects.
The next one of these works took the idea to its extreme. It was called Two Sides of the 'Same' Room (Dallas, 1990). I took one room, placed a wall down its center dividing it into two spaces and then placed different sounds on each side. These sounds sounded identical, though, quite unlike Hamburg where the sounds were clearly different. The difference between the two spaces happened only after you spent a little time in each; each side evoked a completely different frame of mind even though they sounded identical. One sound evoked a feeling of openness; the other a tight and constricted feeling - taking one room and using sound to turn it into two places which are opposite yet sounded the same. The third of these pieces is the permanent one in Giorgio Persano's Gallery in Torino. It takes three spaces which are visually similar, not absolutely identical, and makes them into three different spaces using only two sounds. The rooms are in a row with two connecting doorways; each of the rooms on the ends has only one sound, and the room in the middle has both those sounds mixed together. The mixture isn't separable into its two parts; it forms a third space. Here the sounds were not as soft as in Dallas or in Hamburg, but they still demanded a shift in focus.
L. It seems to me that these three pieces make very clear the difference between what you do to the space and what is spatially given in terms of a site. You have two identical spaces given, architectural givens. You alter them by putting in different sounds, creating different sound environments which make the experience in each indeed very different. On the other hand, one knows very clearly that the spaces are the same.
N. Yes. One of my premises is that although we perceive space visually we also perceive it through our ears; and even though we don't talk and think so much about how we perceive it aurally, it's a dimension which is as powerful as the visual but less conscious. Sound is my choice of a means of communication with people, with mind. It's free of cultural baggage, the overload of information that we have visually; it's almost a fresh territory.
II
L. Your sound works in general cannot be experienced outside of the space where they exist. They cannot be recorded; they're not only aural experience, they are connected to a certain given space. But on the other hand I think they are not site specific. This is an interesting contradiction in a way, don't you think so?
N. I do, yes. People's first assumption usually is that they are some kind of new form of music. In fact they differ in two principal ways from music. One is that they're not a succession of sound events in time, which is one of the basic definitions of music: a series of sound events that progress from one to the other, and that draws a line in time.
The other difference is that the sound is not the work; the sound is the material that I make the place out of, that I transform the space into a place with. So recording this material is as silly as taking the paint off the canvas and thinking it's still the painting.
L. So these works are not about the experience of the space or of the architecture itself; they are not about, say, any institutional or cultural implications of the space you're using and which they're not to be divided from. But what they are doing is forming a place of their own.
N. Indeed. The social context, the physical context, the architectural context, the acoustical context are my building blocks; they're my bricks and mortar. That isn't to say they determine what I build, but they are what I build with. They're the foundation I build something on.
L. Maybe we can even say that what happens to a perceiver of a work of yours is a certain change of perception. I think back to the Hamburg work. As you said, you walk into an empty space, and it's in the context of a visual art show; and you're in the section of, say, the minimalist and site-specific artists who are in the same show. The space of Rabinowitch, for instance, looked almost as empty as your space; and then you detect the circles that have been cut into the plaster of the walls. They change the whole spatial situation; they kind of dislocate your body in relation to the walls and so on and so forth. I think they're strongly about a bodily experience.
And entering one of your rooms you might expect a similar work; but then I think the idea is very important that your work is hardly audible at all, at first at least. Then you are concentrating so much on the sound texture, on the auditive given, that your perception changes from a visual perception to an aural one, which means that the place that is created by perceiving your work takes you in a way out of the actual architectural space you're entering.
N. Most of us are visually oriented, so that shift from visual to aural in itself is a removal; it's a mover.
L. It's a mover to another level of experience, to another type of experience, because the experience is not just the spiritual experience; it's definitely a perceptual experience in your work.
N. But my goal, I think, as an artist is communication with the spirit; and what we are talking about is my means in 1990 of managing to do this. We live in a time where it's harder to make this communication; the routes are overused, the paths more disguised.
III
L. Let's try to talk about the different notions of the experience of place your works are proposing, because I think that in the different works you've done the notion of the form or shape of the place you're creating is quite different. If we go back to earlier sound installations, I think the idea of a topography is prominent.
N. Yes, the idea of an aural topography.
L. Aural topography which means a defining of points or marks like landmarks or ...
N. ... a terrain ...
L. ... a terrain, or what is superimposed on a given extension of terrain or superimposed on a space that is given. So these earlier works create places by defining certain points or areas ...
N. ... or features ...
L. ... features where this sound is audible ...
N. ... or where different kinds of sounds are next to other kinds of sounds. The idea of sound having a physical shape is not something we experience in our everyday life. We are used to sound being uniformly dispersed. You can even hear it around the corner. Discovering that a sound can have a shape in a room is already a step into this other dimension. But these three works we've talked about are spaces without terrain; they are spaces which are consistent throughout.
L. Yes, that's a different type of work. I was referring to earlier works like already the very earliest ones, likeDrive-in Music .
N. Yes, that was the first definition of an aural topography.
L. But then other works, like the one you did for Documenta in 1977 or the one you did for MoMA in 1978, all of them work with the idea of creating certain aural spaces, even cutting them out of a spatial continuum.
N. Documenta in a different way. But very much so in the case of the MoMA work where the sound itself was inaudible; what was audible was its effect on other sounds. It was a terrain of an inaudible sound which modified all the existing audible sounds.
L. So your work there would emphasize or recolor or highlight certain sounds.
N. Yes, recolor the everyday sounds in these invisible, almost physical pockets.
L. I just want to emphasize the point that these works are places, patches, pockets, and changes in physical sounds that are superimposed on a larger space. I think this type of work can be differentiated from other works where the sound would completely fill the space, where you don't have this kind of punctuation which exists in the earlier works.
N. In the non-topological works, it's making a smooth texture, a fluid which envelops one in the space. It's not about differentiating parts of the space; it's about building a uniform space.
L. Yes, and I think that this already triggers an experience which is very different from the one of different points in a space or of different patches or pockets.
Here you are more of an observer, while in the other works that fill the space or recolor all of the auditive environment you're immersed in this space. You're enveloped; you're not in front of the piece in the same way.
N. Exactly. But in the three works we talked about earlier we have more than one space; so although you're enveloped in each part of it, you're still an observer in that you can go from one part to the other. You juxtapose the two, you see the difference, you examine, you compare.
L. What about the piece you did at the ARC in Paris?
N. That's a good point. The conception of that work came from my feeling, a physical feeling in that space before I started to work, that it demanded a fine screen of almost inaudible sound throughout it.
L. All through the space.
N. Yes, this mesh of sound that shouldn't be different, that should be fine and even.
L. It seems to me that the most recent work you did here in Milano connects to a piece like the one at the ARC at least in the sense that you're enveloped.
N. No, in ARC you're immersed in an almost inaudible sound.
L. But at least in Milano there are not clearly defined sound events taking place in the space.
N. Or sound features. Yes and no. I think it's a different category of idea, that the source is elusive instead of enveloping; it evades you. The sound is always putting you in a position of seeking it; it's not surrounding you.
You don't walk into it; it's the opposite in a way. By putting you in the mode of seeking it, it removes you the most from the place. Your attention becomes focused on following your ear, and the walls just become points where you can't move any further. It removes you from the space more than any other form.
IV
L. You've brought up the idea of elusive sources; we've also talked about a notion of elusive terrains in relation to this work. And it seems to me that the major difference to other works is that the topography of this work isn't static but seems to be shifting or dynamic. You're not able to identify clearly certain places in a space, sound places in a space.
N. You can't find them, can't go back to them.
L. You're moving around without ever mapping out the thing it is. What is elusive is not really the sound source; that is not so interesting. But the definite shape of the sound place is elusive.
N. Exactly. The terrain is shifting.
L. So this is the work. It seems to me that it's most radical in dissolving the urge to identify features of a place. It's most demanding by taking away the possibility of definite orientation, of having fixed points.
N. It puts you up in the air. It destroys the stability of the space even though it's in a room made out of stone. You're off the ground.
L. One cannot even say it blurs contours; that wouldn't be right. It shifts contours; it continuously shifts points of orientation. Put differently, this is a piece that makes you walk around trying to find specific points which might be the source, the sound source; and you do not find it. So it's not about blurring the contours, but it's about being involved in a space that is without the possibility of finding a standpoint. There is nothing firm, and what is perceptually shifting continuously are the points of reference.
N. Yes.
L. And would you agree that this makes a difference in relation to earlier works?
N. I guess so. But, you know, being the maker is a very different perspective than being the perceiver. You're standing on the other side of the mirror; everything is the opposite.
It's difficult for me to look back at the works and see them as a whole. I see them as individual entities which keep jumping out of any structure. I find that as soon as I put a structure on it the next work I make is, almost by definition, outside of the structure which I have defined. The elusive source idea came after I started articulating a lot about topographies.
V
L. Usually your works are produced and perceived in the context of the visual arts, so I'd like to talk in a more general way about the implications of switching from the visual to the aural.
N. Most people assume we perceive the plastic arts with our eyes, and what I'm saying is we perceive space with our ears as well; and in fact they are my chosen channel.
We live in a world that demands that I function in some existing category, and the one that relates most directly to these works is plastic art.
L. Still I should like to ask you if you have any specific ideas about essential differences between visual perception and visual orientation in the world and aural perception and aural orientation in the world.
N. I personally perceive the world aurally rather than visually. I recognize voices before faces; I can know who's on the phone before I know them face to face, and many times I don't recognize people face to face until I hear the voice.
We know that the aural and the visual are complementary perceptual systems. Ear is complementary to eye; each one fills in the holes of the other. People say that since the invention of the printing press we've become more and more visually oriented. Before that, history was aural. If we go back to very early man, survival depended in many cases more on the aural than the visual; in a forest we could hear danger further than we could see it. We've turned ourselves over in some way; still our ear/mind is by no means in a state of atrophy.
The fact that we speak and understand language, and understand not only language but a tonal language superimposed on the verbal one, not only this tonal language but that we can distinguish the difference in origin of a person from the way he speaks - these are levels of nuance that still can't be analyzed by computer science; we can't measure them. We can hear the difference between two people who come from two towns which are forty miles apart. This is an incredibly fine facility. It is largely unconscious.
We think about our eyes, we think about what we see; but most of us while listening to someone talk don't realize we're hearing.
L. Right. And I'm quite sure that you're using sound, without meaning it in a pejorative way, you're using something which is below the level of linguistic articulation.
N. Outside of that level.
L. I think the visual sense has much more to do with identifying things, with making things worthwhile or grasping things, while hearing doesn't identify in the same way. It is not so much about objects; it seems more about events. It doesn't seem to work in the same way towards identification.
N. Working with sound by definition makes what I do intangible, which is a good place to start if one is trying to talk to the spirit.
L. I think that is a very important point. The visual has a tendency to make things tangible. And probably this shift of the visual, this historic shift of the visual, has to do with the development of society, with the development of means of production. The aural is not as useful at manipulating things, objects, goods.
N. It can change things radically even though it's immaterial.
L. You can hear things you cannot see.
N. You can grasp the thing that is making the sound, but you cannot grasp the sound.
L. And so already our senses are different. For instance, you can move your eyes; you can focus very easily.
N. Physically you can focus your eye; you focus your ear with your mind.
L. In a way you focus; but for instance you cannot close your ears, not in the same way you can close your eyes. You cannot open your ears in the same way you can open your eyes. So the ear seems to be a medium, a sensual medium, which has to do more with situations, with being somewhere, with being in a situation and not so much with selecting, with grasping and making things tangible.
N. It's also a more direct channel to the unconscious, I think.
L. And then there is another thing which you pointed to before - the aural is culturally not as loaded as the visual. The aural seems to be freer of cultural baggage, of cultural definitions.
N. I think it is. Cultures develop this very codified sound language called music. We also develop spoken language, this means of articulating ideas, which uses the ear but it has other dimensions. Once you move outside these two aural areas, there is a huge expanse of free territory.
Also what goes in the ear is never fixed; if we write it down on paper it is fixed. What goes in the ear is constantly influenced by its past, its future, its current need.
VI
L. Maybe at this point it is possible to talk about the difference of your artistic practice to music. You come from the field of music; and probably your work has developed in relation to things we all know about, John Cage's works, say, which most of the time are situated in the context of music. You don't situate yourself in this context. So what would be the difference of your sound work in relation to music?
N. I think there are these two points I mentioned earlier. One, I don't make sound events in time; I don't make a series of sound events in time, which progress in time. You don't come to a sound work of mine at the beginning and leave at the end; that is a basic definition of music.
But the most important point is that in music the sound is the work and in what I do the sound is the means of making the work, the means of transforming space into place.
L. Think of this famous piece of Cage's, this silence where he invited the public for a performance and opened the window and didn't perform at all.
N. There are a couple of pieces. In one, 4' 33", the pianist comes in, opens up the cover of the keyboard, sits for four minutes and thirty three seconds without playing, and then closes the cover. I feel it's about the sounds of the concert hall itself and its audience. But there are other works of Cage's which are about bringing the outside sound into the context of the concert hall. As a performer I discovered Cage when I started going to the conservatory, when I was nineteen. And I felt that the idea or the result of having a concert audience sitting in a hall and bringing sounds from the outside in fact didn't open up their ears.
Contemporary music society only saw these works as a scandalous thing to do, esthetically scandalous. And this wasn't my interest; my interest was to refocus and I think Cage's original interest too was to refocus attention on sounds that we live with everyday. I felt that perhaps the way to do this was not to bring the sounds in but to take the people out.
I began this series of works where I stamped the word 'Listen' on people's palms and took them for a walk, focusing my own attention so intensively on what I was hearing that it became contagious. People caught this disease of mine and in fact did change the way they heard.
L. I think it can be said that this practice of Cage's is basically a practice of transfiguration of the commonplace, of taking everyday sounds and transposing them into another context, and changing the perception of the sound. And indeed, I think your works that come after Listen are different. You are using sounds to create a place that is then completely, almost absolutely separated from the everyday experience. It's not so much a transfiguration of the common, but creating a completely different experience of being somewhere.
N. Indeed.
L. Your basic definition of music was that it was a putting in line, a phrasing of a number of tones, sounds, and sound events. And now the sound structure of your most recent piece at the Persano Gallery in Milano does in fact use a certain phrasing of sound events. So how does that still distinguish your work from music?
N. It's another nice contradiction, but again we go back to saying that this series of sound events in time is not the work. It's the chase of this series of clicks in time. Also the nature of its phrase - I've defined it by writing the program which produces it, which causes it to develop endlessly, never to repeat itself, continually to change, to evolve. So it's a written statement of idea but it's also embodied in a dynamic way, because these written phrases which tell the computer what to do make it real. A dynamic embodiment of idea rather than a paper embodiment, although it's still done on a typewriter. But what is contradictory to music -which is finite, which has a beginning and development, many times a recapitulation, and an end - is that this line is endless. You think it's gone as far as it can go, and it just keeps going.
L. And that of course helps the intention of creating an experience of place, of a very elusive place.
N. It's the current that leads you though this place.
VII
L. In the case of the presentation of the work you did in the Persano Gallery in Torino, you showed alongside the work two drawings outlining the structure of this aural work. Isn't it contradictory on the one hand to propose an experience of place that you can only have by being in this space and having the aural experience, and on the other hand to show drawings which give you definitions of this sound work?
N. Well, first of all it's not two drawings; it's a diptych which consists of an image and a text, two panels. The text and the image function together; sometimes the text talks about the image, and sometimes the image talks about the text.
One of the ideas about the text is to place people at a point where they can find their way into the work, to make it clear to them that they're not going to listen to a piece of music, that they don't have to get there at a certain time, that there are sounds which they may not hear at first. In Hamburg I used the text as a label for the work: without it, most people coming into that exhibition would have walked into my spaces and thought it was a conceptual work about an empty room; so the text has an important role in that respect. Ironically, it's only within a cultural context that this problem exists; it's not important when you find a piece on the street like Times Square , because there are no expectations, no preconceptions of what it will be.
There is also a discrepancy in discrimination between the aural and the visual in the art context, which has to be overcome. I was struck by the fact that in the same exhibition in Hamburg there were fifteen or twenty paintings by Bob Ryman; and it never occurred to anybody that one would have to point out to a public that these were paintings, not blank canvases.
Besides, I think that life is not quite so simple. We not only experience things, but it is inevitable that we think about them, we talk about them; and the discussion, the intellectual dimension of something, the articulatable dimension of something, doesn't necessarily preclude the experiential dimension. (strike the following underlined)For if someone experiences the work and knows how it was made that doesn't change it after a certain point.
The drawings are never shown inside the work; they're always outside of it. If people's curiosity or their way of approaching things is through a publication, there is nothing to stop that. It's making another dimension of the work available for people.
L. So it's more about the level of reflection, like now we are trying to reflect on your work and taking it to the level of linguistic consciousness. It would be a key to that.
N. Yes. It's also another articulation of the idea. The work itself is experiential; but the idea can be articulated in other terms, it shows other sides. There are things I want to say; and in a way I'm very lucky because the work itself can't be captured, it can't be reproduced, it can't be photographed. I'm free of many of the dilemmas of the visual artist.
By choosing the language of drawing as another means of articulating the idea, I go into another territory, separate from the experiential part of the work. There are also other kinds of drawings. In the process of making a work there are many times where, in order to explain what's going on in the space, to keep track of elements or features which I'm manipulating when I'm making a work, much of this ends up on paper; and those papers form some of the history of the process.
At other times I draw to propose a large scale work. Because the works are intangible, they can't be modeled and are also free of the market a model makes. On one hand I'm free of it; on the other hand I have a burden of delivering an idea in a form that can be grasped by people who make decisions about large sums of money. It's much more powerful to make a visual statement about that idea, to use the language of drawing not to try to make a model out of the idea, but to articulate it in some other way which doesn't contaminate the idea.
L. In your work there are two levels in a way. One is one of experience; and the other one is to think about this experience or to make this experience into something which is conscious and not just overwhelming. So I think on this level the drawings also have their function as well as a talk or a writing in relation to your work.
On the other hand it is true that in your work there exists a strong notion of anonymity and of proposing an aural experience which is not to be identified. I am referring to some public works which are not labeled at all or just very marginally; for instance, the Times Square piece which has been anonymous and unexplained at the site at least for more than ten years now.
N. Fourteen. Most people don't realize that I had to fight to keep the Times Square piece anonymous. The people who sponsored it just thought it was an eccentric artistic whim that I didn't want a brass plaque embedded in the sidewalk. They certainly did. Whether or not I make a work anonymous has to do with the context. I mean, not all my works are anonymous. In this case it has to do with keeping the piece as much of an anomaly in that place now as it was in 1977. We mentioned this idea of doorway before. Its anonymity is one of the main doorways, the entrance to this work, the dilemma of having no way to explain this sound. At first thinking it almost could be an accident, but it doesn't sound like an accident, but there is no other explanation.
L. Right. I also think it keeps the work as far as possible away from cultural appropriation; at least it keeps it clear of a too fast cultural appropriation, this uncertainty about whether it is a work or is it maybe some technical occurrence that comes from the subway, or something that has been installed deliberately to make a difference.
N. Most of the people who don't know what it is take it as a beautiful anomaly in the city that they found, like they found the special window in a building that at a certain time of day happens to reflect light in a certain way, something which is inadvertent which they take as their own. I think the best way of putting it is that by not claiming it myself I allow them to claim it. And that's what I was trying to do. Because it's their experience, it's not mine; they should claim it.
VIII
L. Let's talk about concepts of public art works.
N. I think the demand on the artist to be site specific is not something new. Traditional art forms are specific to the very uniform site of the museum or the sculpture garden. Not that museums aren't different, but the paintings are usually hung on white walls and sculpture is most commonly shown on grass. But when we move to another site, it demands that we develop new forms. Unless we have the idea that we want to make the whole world into a sculpture garden and unless we plant grass in a lot of places that can't stand it, we are making a mistake. The forms have to deal with the fact that the place is a public domain.
L. Well, of course ideas about public art and public sculpture are not quite as conservative as you seem to think. We have to take the most advanced examples to place your work at the position where it is supposed to be; and there I think that almost all public art which is site-specifically placed in a cityscape, in the middle of a urban context, starts from assumptions about a public, starts from assumptions about a problematic situation. It starts from assumptions of the necessity of criticism towards a given situation; it starts from assumptions of a set of givens.
It seems to me that works like the Times Square piece and the Time Piece in Bern are not assuming givens as public art does. It can either be perceived or not; you leave it open if somebody is prepared to be willing and attentive enough, and you even give the chance to somebody who perceives the work not to want to perceive it. In your work there is no idea of confrontation; there is no idea of forcing people to change their consciousness. It seems to be something which is so discreet that it can be easily ignored; and if you don't want to ignore it you can hear it, you can listen to it, you can make use of it.
And I think that is a viable mode of doing public art now since nobody knows what it really is, a public, or since the notion of public seems very feeble, since maybe there doesn't exist anything like a public nowadays.
N. But there are people walking in the street.
L. Yes, there are people walking in the street. But who has the right to put a sculpture as advanced as it may be in front of these people?
N. The first works that I did were about that public. They were about taking myself out of the confined public of contemporary music and moving to a broader public, a deep belief that I could deal in a complex way with people in their everyday lives, not making a simple piece for a simple people but making something very special accessible to anyone of those people who were ready to hear it, but not confronting them with it. It's making something which they can find, making the work in such a way that it leads to discovery, that you discover it rather than having it imposed upon you.
L. And it becomes a feature in the environment, a modification of the environment but not an effect of this specific artistic consciousness, of this artistic ego.
Max Neuhaus and Ulrich Loock, "A Conversation Between Max Neuhaus and Ulrich Loock: Milan, March 25, 1990", Max Neuhaus: Elusive Sources and 'Like' Spaces [Italian, English] (Turin: Galleria Giorgio Persano, 1990)