1989
: Two Sound Works 1989 [German, English] (Bern: Kunsthalle Bern and Kölnischer Kunstverein, 1989).
Text published in Max Neuhaus, Sound works, Volume I, Inscription (Ostfildern-Stuttgart: Cantz, 1994)
One of the distinctive traits of Cologne is its inhospitable, disorganized, haphazard architecture. Disrupted rows of houses and incomplete squares abound, while architecturally harmonic areas are scarce.
However, there are some exceptions to the ultimately attractive chaos just described. They are rather hidden, and perhaps intentionally so, to be known only to a small number of people. Not far from the crossing of Cäcilienstrasse and Nord-Süd-Fahrt, one of Cologne's ugliest panoramas, there is such a gem. It is the park between the offices of the Kunstverein, the rear of the Kunsthalle, the building of the Order of the Maltese Cross and the two churches of St. Peter's and St. Cäcilien's. This small green oasis is reserved for pedestrians; cars are banned. It is adorned by two great chestnut trees as well as the west portal of St. Cäcilien Church, walled up since the day the church was rededicated as a museum of medieval art (Schnütgen Museum).
Both in the context of the city's history and the history of art, this little nameless park is special, but it is so particularly owing to its tranquility which contrasts with the busy adjacent, noisy thoroughfares. The layout of the two churches with the small quadrangle between them is the only one of its kind in Cologne and endows the complex with a special aura; the motif of duplication recurs in the two high chestnut trees on the square. For several years, the closed portal showed the Zurich Sprayer Harald Nägeli's perfectly executed graffito of a human skeleton which seemed to bar the entrance to the church and which had become the symbol of Cologne's cycle of the Dance of Death. The director of the Schnütgen Museum intended to preserve this work of art, but as other sprayers destroyed it, everything had finally to be washed off.
Without knowing about the past and planned artworks for the currently empty space, Max Neuhaus selected this tranquil park surrounded by traffic for a sound installation. The work that grew out of his several visits, inspections and encounters with personalities connected with this site: a Bell for St. Cäcilien.
I was fascinated watching Max Neuhaus walk around the park in all kinds of weather, developing, testing, altering the sonic sequence, its pitch, sequence of sounds, its rhythm. Having tried out many slightly varying positions for the two sound sources, he very soon decided on the basic principle: the sound was to be projected from the two roofs of the Kunstverein and the Kunsthalle, roughly equal in height and distance from the walled-up portal of St. Cäcilien's. Max Neuhaus installed himself and his computers and technical apparatuses next to the entrance to the Kunstverein's secretariat, converting the lobby into a composer's studio-cum-technical laboratory.
The artist wanted to define the space between the buildings, to vary and redefine its aural space and to interpret it by means of the 'shape' of sound, in a very subtle way, almost imperceptibly, unobtrusively and in harmony with the nature of the site. After a week's intensive work and experimentation, Max Neuhaus was certain that a bell-like sound was required: mass is celebrated only twice a year at St. Cäcilien's to preserve its status as a church; although St. Peter's is a very active church with the bells ringing daily for evening mass at six, as well as on Sundays and feast days, its hourly bells have been silenced so that no chime is heard during the day.
Although it seems fairly obvious to create a sound installation with bells for these two churches, I think it is just as important to mention another idea which was also thematically relevant for the composition of the work. It is the 150th anniversary of the Kunstverein, i. e. 150 years of awareness of German culture and education. For people living in the early 19th century, the sound of perhaps distant bells, of bells ringing as if from beyond, was deeply significant. It connected that which was near with that which was far away, that which was above with that which was below, the macrocosm of the universe with the microcosm of the home. In Abendphantasie (Evening Fantasy), Friedrich Hˆlderlin writes, 'Gastfreundlich tˆnt dem Wanderer im friedlichen Dorfe die Abendglocke' (In the wanderer's ears, the evening bell in the peaceful village has a welcoming ring).
These words carry a great deal of the connotation of shelter inherent in the 'spiritual chime' of a church bell. Joseph von Eichendorff expressed the same idea even more sublimely in his poem Nachts (At Night): 'Ich stehe in Waldesschatten/Wie an des Lebens Rand_ Von fern nur schlagen die Glocken über die Wälder herein … Denn der Herr geht über die Gipfel/und segnet das stille Land. (In the shade of the forest I stand/As if on the border of life … From afar only the bells chime/Across the forests, … For the Lord is crossing the peaks/Blessing the quiet land). Since the German Romantic era, this transcendent connotation of the ringing of bells has been part of German culture. No doubt, it also influenced the German-descended Max Neuhaus, whose ancestor, Friedrich Neuhaus, built all the railway stations between Hamburg and Berlin, including the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin.
Max Neuhaus has created sound installations for traffic-clogged squares, for underground railway stations, but also for museum gardens and staircases. None of his restrained works intrude on passers-by. Rather, they only affect attentive pedestrians. Only those who are receptive to the sounds and the atmosphere of a place notice any change, restrained and subtle, yet intense, and all the more clearly noticeable if one is open, if one takes amused or alert notice. Then, the place suddenly seems different, redefined by a special aural structure which can be spatially experienced. This is what happened to me years ago as I rushed up the stairs of the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art for the first time and suddenly perceived the dark, penetrating sound which seemed to rise up the staircase.
During documenta 6 (1977) at Kassel, Neuhaus implanted his sound installation as a natural part of the environment, as an almost imperceptible but all the more incisive action upon the wood in Karlsaue Park. Wandering through the sprawling park from the wood and steel paths by George Trakas to the rock piece by Robert Morris, one had to cross a small wood in which one suddenly heard a click-like sound which repeated itself. It seemed so natural that only a few people heard it for what it was, an artificially-produced sound projected from speakers hidden in the trees. It represented something which had almost ceased to exist - the sound reminiscent of the quiet snapping of a twig, heard even where there was no one. Art transports our imagination back into a reality which has developed in a different direction. That installation was neither a gesture of politico-ideological denunciation, nor was it an emotional and merely reproductive idealization of nature. Rather, it remains the gesture of an alert artist who expects receptive hearers. It is completely different from the perverse falseness with which hackneyed feelings and phoney cosiness are these days sometimes evoked in postmodern metropolitan hotels (it was in Hiroshima that I once heard 'natural' birdsong coming from a speaker hidden in a plastic birdcage).
For his sound installation in Cologne, Max Neuhaus proceeds as he did in Kassel, adding a sound which might be expected by passers-by. But he does not only change the aural space, creating an imaginary aural structure which cannot possibly originate from an 'ordinary' bell. He also creates a new sound. At the test-ringing, the most diverse reactions could be observed: many passers-by walked on unperturbed. A few, wondering, looked up to the steeples, from which, however, the bell-like sound evidently and audibly did not originate. In one particular spot, however, near the two chestnut trees in front of the church-wall, a clearly discernible aural edifice with an invisible source was created. Thus, the hearers gained a new awareness of this little park, feeling it anew and perceiving its space, sounds and atmosphere in a new way.
We are looking forward to the birthday gift from Max Neuhaus which subtly links space with time and in which quietness works in sound.
Wulf Herzogenrath