1997
We have long since grown accustomed to thinking of the arts as distinct from one another, and we see them to correspond to the separate senses. We also attribute to two of the five senses—sight and hearing—a kind of primacy with respect to the others, owing to the fact that the quantities of information with which they supply us are a great deal larger than those which we find to be delivered by the other three. Touch, taste, and smell, moreover, deal only with the immediate environment, whereas the range of sight and hearing is much more ample. The range of the sense of sight, under certain conditions of light, presents itself indeed as virtually unlimited, and this lack of limitations has often been confused with an absolutely abstract idea of the infinite. Poetry and its natural extension, literature—whether oral or written here makes little difference—take on the task of reuniting sight and hearing with everything they exclude, and of furnishing a view of the whole, thus creating and completing a global aisthesis. Poetry and literature are entrusted with the task of construing our disparate sensory experiences back into a sensual unity. Art finds its focus in the senses in much the same way that language might be said to find its focus in the intellect: art expresses, whereas language communicates. The primary use of language is for purposes of communication: the signified comes first. In art, it’s the other way around: sense and sensation hold precedence over the signified.
In the most recent phase of the evolution of our culture—the phase in which the western model has defined and affirmed itself—linguistic structures seem ever more thoroughly to have occupied the field (of experience) and largely to the detriment of the elements of sensation and sensibility. The very concept of civilization implies the reduction of every object of experience to language: rather than simply excluded from the field of culture, everything that cannot be reduced to language is in fact considered to stand in opposition to everything that’s recognized as belonging to civilization. The concession of cultural legitimacy to certain modes of life, whether social or individual, which are not in conformity with its dominant and principal forms, can only take place in so far as their interior is discovered to contain a number of elements that obey a linguistic statute.
Literature and poetry are strictly connected with language, whereas music and the visual arts relate to language in ways which are mediated and indirect. Linguistic meaning is a secondary aspect of a piece of music or a work of art; the primary factor is the sphere of sensation that the work both incarnates and expresses.
This is a first and fundamental distinction that characterizes the culture to which we belong, and a number of others follow upon it. The distinctions drawn between the arts are the ones that here most interest us, and especially the distinctions that hold apart the art that focuses on sound, the art that focuses on sight, and the art that focuses on the word.
These distinctions presented themselves at quite an early date in the course of the evolution of western culture, and its lengthy history has insisted upon and reconfirmed them: "So and so is a painter, a musician, a poet". It’s true that there was once a time, up until the seventeenth century, in which these figures counted nearly as servants or ancillaries to a broader ideal that lived in the minds of a guiding or ruling class, but the start of the eighteenth century already witnessed the establishment of a whole series of principles of autonomy that drew the various components of culture and society into a well-fixed scheme, defining their limits and prerogatives. The painter, the musician, and the poet turned into figures that stood on a par with those of the noble, the merchant, the soldier, the scientist, and even of the priest (the incarnation of the maximum level of respect for constituted values) no less than of the criminal (the figure who embodied the least respect for that same set of values).
Literature, and especially narrative, pays the most ample heed to these distinctions—whole throngs of writers, poets, artists, and musicians are at large in novels, just as the ancient mythologies were peopled by gods and heroes—and they established themselves so rigidly as to set up a definitive discontinuity that allowed these practices to exalt their respective separateness. Music finds its materials and instruments in sound, for specifically musical uses; the visual arts are specifically visual, and deal entirely with images; poetry and literature turn their attention to the word and its potential articulations.
The poets don’t ignore the artists, just as the writers don’t ignore the musicians, but they are nonetheless set off from one another by the different means to which they turn for the composition of their respective works. Even in the case of collaborations for the realization of a single work, the participants’ rights to their specializations are fully respected, and some one of these specialized fields is in any case destined to impose its sway on the others. Even the cinema—a new and specifically twentieth-century art in which the work is the fruit of an elaborate collective effort (visual, musical, literary, thespian, and economic)—insists on the presence of a key figure who assumes the role of the author of the work, and who is usually the director. A whole new kind of artist has thus loomed into view—the last, in chronological terms, to have found a full-blown definition, and there’s no point here in mentioning others who may now be on the waiting list: we’ll wait for time to tell. And I haven’t overlooked either theater or dance, both of which started out as aggregations of various modes of expression and of various social rituals, but which then went on to establish their own particular forms of autonomy.
This distance between the arts—their existence as separate entities—has frequently led, in the course of this century, to forms of dialogue (a widely-used term) among the arts, where each makes its own particular statement in its own particular language (or in what by now might better be termed its own particular code) and the resultant act of expression assumes an additional level of meaning, thus amplifying itself.
But there have also been moments of something other than dialogue, moments in which the arts have effectively suspended or diminished their separateness.
One of the most significant of the moments of such a kind began at the end of the 1950s and continued throughout the whole of the 1960s. This period is frequently identified with the resurgence of the avantgarde, or with the birth of the neo-avantgardes.
The general system of production has by now taken possession of the various forms of art, using them as tools of persuasion for ends of its own. And when seen from such a point of view, the goal of the work of art no longer lies in an ability to assert the existence of particular truths. It lies instead in the ability to convince, by way of seduction, fascination and evocation, fully heedless, moreover, of the nature of the axiom which those to whom the message is addressed are finally to accept as their own. The awareness, from the very start, that the efficacy of the message has nothing to do with its content leads those who elaborate the message to the perception and acceptance of a gap not so much between sign and signified (a gap to which cultural theoreticians give ample attention) as between sign and sensation, or sign and sense, where sense is also synonymous with meaning.
What finds itself conveyed can, yes, be understood to lack all signifieds for those who see that sphere as an hierarchical order of articulated judgments of value; but what’s missing most of all is sense: sense as meaning, or sense as the sum and synthesis of the collective and individual experience of the world.
This loss of meaning, this gap between life and those who live it, between the reality of the world and their vision of the world, isn’t to be seen as a subject on which the artists of our epoch primarily or simply interrogate themselves. This gap is a place in which they act, the place in which they establish the field of action that counts most truly as their own. If we find ourselves faced on the one hand with a kind of refusal to produce new forms and models, the reason doesn’t finally lie in any true exhaustion of combinatory possibilities; it primarily lies in the fact that all such roads have ceased to make sense. What Duchamp formulated by way of the Ready-made no longer counts as a possible strategy; the shift in the conditions for the production of art has turned it today into a necessary strategy. This strategy which ranked at the time of Duchamp as only one of a number of possible options has now become the principal option. But whereas Duchamp was committed to a recuperation of the signified by way of the use of pre-constituted forms, and finally aspired to the achievement of meaning by way of the interaction of various levels of signifieds, John Cage, in as early as the very first years of the 1940s, proposed a series of operations for more directly finding access to the sense of meaning that the disciplinary codes of the various arts had made ever more remote, concealing it, to the point that it had finally got lost within them.
This is the moment—while looking towards Duchamp and Cage, or perhaps not regarding them at all, but in any case sharing their intentions and sensibilities—in which the arts reconsidered and suspended their separateness. One witnessed a clear attempt to draw the eye and the ear into states of interdependence that recuperated that overall sense of meaning which had progressively succumbed to the process of creating divisions between various modes of expression, assigning them each to a separate linguistic category.
The first artists to work in such ways are to be found in the Fluxus movement, which returned to strategies and formulas which had been typical of Dada in the 1920s, while at the same time effectively banalizing them, immersing them into the senselessness of daily life. Whereas Dada had been scandalous and shocking, Fluxus was banal and relaxed. Fluxus enjoyed the contributions of a significant number of musicians, and also of poets. Art history was later to view the movement as primarily having belonged to the field of the visual arts, seeing music and poetry again to have gone their separate ways. For music and poetry, Fluxus counts only as an incident that happened along the way, and effected no true compromise of their separateness. Futurism, in the 1910s, had already witnessed a similar situation.
Independently of Fluxus, where these needs quite clearly defined themselves and came quite clearly to manifestation, this period also saw the development of a sensibility that found one of its fundamental points of reference in modern music.
Another element of this general shift is to be found in the overall situation of American culture, with particular reference to literature and music, and as well, even if to a lesser degree, to the visual arts—to Abstract
Expressionism—and finally to the vista and mythology of the Land from Sea to Sea. At the end of the epoch of the heroic primacy of form, and in the wake of the first affirmation, at the very highest level, of American art in the period immediately after the war, a fundamental materialism had begun to come into view; and its expression was less to be found in the exaltation of productivity and the logic of the marketplace than in the practice of a form of daily life that was utterly free of those great myths and solid, visceral attachments to history and tradition of which the bonds are a kind of stranglehold on persons who live in Europe. Europeans thus came to see America as a route of flight and salvation from the constrictions and obligations of history, or as a territory that lay wide open to imagination and desire.
These three factors—the return to Dada critique, the concreteness of the experience of sound, as formulated by the practices of modern music, and finally American materialism—constitute a triad of causes that revealed their effects in the provocation of the birth of a new sensibility.
This new sensibility found its manifestation as a passionate search for a sense of meaning that lies beyond the codes that regulate the practice of the various forms of artistic expression. The givens of experience—of direct experience, free to the highest possible degree of the mediation of fixed keys of interpretation—became the constitutive base for the work of art, and for working in the field of art. In the light of such goals, music was a source of ample possibilities of investigation, whereas the visual arts were much more ensnared in a process of evolution that led to always successive and always contrasting canons of style, and much more conditioned by the quality of their results (novelty, efficacy, pertinence) than by the validity of their processes.
Max Neuhaus was born in 1939 into a family of German origin (his grandfather’s grandfather constructed the Hamburgher Bahnhof in Berlin, now the contemporary wing of the National Gallery), grew up in southern Texas and New York State, and attended music school in Manhattan; and the co-ordinates described immediately above constituted the context in which his artistic personality developed.
All of his work—starting in the early 1960s, when he was a solo percussionist of modern music (and continued to be so up until 1968) finds its origins and fundamental basis in this cultural context. And this impulse which time and fashion have since overwhelmed with a succession of canons of style, circumscribed at times by the very moment in which they appeared, was something that Neuhaus, on the other hand, was able to adopt as a constant model of approach: a model that permits him to find his way through various epochs, without closing himself up into any of them; a model that instead is a constant source of new and different possibilities, of ever-developing modes of operation. He himself couldn’t be said to return to his former operations, just as others couldn’t be said to exploit them and divulge them; they seem instead to effect their own rediscovery when conditions of social and technological development allow production in general to give material form to things that for Neuhaus were simply the fruit of individual intuition.
Neuhaus, in other words, is an artist who defines himself as such by refusing to subject his various operations to conditions of realizability that remain subordinate to the potential of the means and structures which control production, or to the variables which determine the possibilities of economic exchange. His operations always and only spring from his personal experience of the world.
So he started out as an executor (esecutore), or better ‘performer’, according to English terminology which in music opposes composer (compositore) to performer (esecutore), while standing at the threshold of maturity. And his work as a performer took place in the field of modern music, in that area of music which was searching for ways in which sound could offer a sense of meaning while freeing itself from the codes which had formerly controlled the evolution of music. In its freedom from the kinds of semantic values that lie at the basis of the shaping of the visual arts, modern music is directly in touch with the problem of the sense of meaning, and with the loss of the sense of meaning. The young Neuhaus was thrust toward the heart of the problem by the concrete quality of the experience of sound, by the provisory quality of the historical codes for endowing it with structure, and thus of their modes of application, no less than by the way in which sound is a fact of direct contact with those who hear it, and thus far less susceptible (as compared with the materials of the visual arts) to functionalistic manipulations of its own particular substance. The acceptance of a confrontation with John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Morton Feldman, Earl Brown, and even with the Sylvano Bussotti of the early 1960s, meant directly to enter the fray—without literary, stylistic, or ideological mediations—of his own modes of operation, and of whatever possibilities they offered.
The substance of music—as these composers had finally shown—is sound, not as a vehicle for signifieds, nor as sense material with which a determined compositional structure can excite an emotional reply that some previous project has identified, but as sound quite entirely on its own, in and of itself, as a primary font of experience.
I might here be imagined to allude to sound in a state of absolute purity, unencumbered by everything which is not sound, but which nonetheless lies at its origins and likewise determines its effects. But there’s nothing of that in Neuhaus’ work, and his concerns move indeed in the opposite direction: sound in modern music, ever since John Cage, is experienced and dealt with as concrete fact, and this includes the concrete ways in which it comes into existence. This implies the recognition of the fact that it finds its source in a whole series of conditions and circumstances that lie beyond the project in which it functions as a tool; and they are finally understood to make it what it appears to be in the moment in which it presents itself as experienced, perceptual reality.
Time, as moment and duration, and place, as the concrete space in which it finds its manifestation, are among the most important of these conditions and circumstances.
Neuhaus’ work consists of a constant presence of sound, aura-like, as he himself construes and controls it, from the source of the sound (the instruments that emit it) to its occupation of space and time. This presence is not abstract, in no way lifted out into its own essential nudity (as happens in certain scientific experiments in which a determined element or area of phenomenological experience is isolated for purposes of more precise observation), in no way relieved of the contingencies in which it finds its manifestation. It’s in the company of these contingencies that it finds its manifestation—there indeed is no alternative—since this is the only way in which it can be what in fact it is, and not what we would want it to be, or imagine that it might be.
In 1966, with his first Public Supply, Neuhaus linked a radio station with the network of telephone lines, and the area of transmission and reception which he thus created had a diameter of twenty miles. Anyone within that area could contribute to the work by telephone, sending in sounds or signals of their own. This was more than a question of public "participation", since the public supplied the work with its very substance. One might speak instead of public "substantiation". Ten years later, Radio Net involved one hundred and ninety radio stations and spanned the entirety of the United States. Neuhaus speaks of these works as "networks", and their goal lay less in interacting with the public than in creating a work that equally consisted of the sound materials that the public supplied, inserting them into its circuit of transmission, and of the structure which the artist had designed and predisposed in order to make the system work. The work consists of an organized accumulation of sounds.
In what Neuhaus refers to as his "moment works," the mechanism is inverted: the work’s activation in the listener’s field of perception doesn’t take place until the moment in which the listener grows aware of the interruption of the sound which the artist has deployed. The work comes into existence in the moment in which the sound produced by the artist grows imperceptible, and not in the moment in which it adjoins itself to all the other sounds in its circumambient environment. Here the work makes use of a technique of subtraction, rather than of addition. This act of subtraction sparks the awareness of the sentient subject (the listener) by allowing him to sense that he senses an absence, and his awareness of the experience of such a sensation reconfirms his awareness of his own existence as sentient subject. He grasps the existence of himself and his senses in the moment in which his senses inform him that something has ceased to exist, and that what has ceased to exist is not his own capability for perceptual experience, which is reconfirmed, but an object of such experience which up until then had been unconsciously perceived.
With his "place works"—from Times Square in New York to the park of the Domaine de KerguÈhennec in Brittany, from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago to the AOK building in Kassel, from the Bern Kunsthalle to the Castle of Rivoli, leaving aside all mention of numerous occasions of participation in major group shows—Neuhaus articulates a sound that functions as a kind of definition of the space in which it acts upon us. Rather than spaces in which a sound is "collocated", these are spaces to which a sound gives form. Here again, the presence of the percipient subject is much more central than the percept; the percept becomes a catalyst that directs the perceiver’s attention both outwards (I hear, and therefore am here in this specific place as a sentient entity, independently of my psychological or social conditions) and inwards, or towards the Self, which takes itself in as a sentient entity, with no other determination or over-determination.
This is the sense of meaning that the work redefines and reactivates in the moment in which we perceive it.
Meaning (a sense of meaning) is the goal of the work, and the work is free of those functions of representation and communication with which history and established habit have burdened and continue to burden every human act, depriving those acts of their meaning (their sense of meaning), which is always finally a sense of the meaning of human existence. But the work is also structured in such a way that this sense of meaning in no way annuls the sphere of things that already lie around it, that sphere of difference or alterity into which it has no need to project itself, as a way of effecting its own realization, just as it knows no need to destroy or subdue it, as a way of proving or defining itself.
First published as "Constructed Sound: Max Neuhaus", Carte d'Arte Internazionale (Messina), November 1997