1997
To reduce it to the simplest terms, imagine a room with something evidently within it. When you walk into the room, you will most likely sense that something is there although there is nothing to be seen, nothing to be touched. There is a physical body in the room that has an effect because it is an acoustic presence, but very subtle. A space body, a sound body, installed by Max Neuhaus. But what is that, what is a sound body, a sound installation by Max Neuhaus?
One of his installations, a place work, has been in Kassel since 1992 (since Documenta IX), in a building bordering a large common, the Aue. (The Aue has always been a special site in Kassel; Documenta made it famous.) The building situated on the edge of the Aue is a plain structure that houses the administration of the local health insurance company, the Allgemeine Ortskrankenkasse. The installation of Max Neuhaus' sounds - they belong there and only there; they are conceived for this site - has brought out the beauty of the building, a three-storey glassed-in stairwell overlooking the common.
What we hear is not music but clearly identifiable, recognizable sounds. Bit by bit we gradually feel our audible way through distinguishable structures. Some sounds are going places, some move in minimal variations, but they are all endless. Sound emulsion that makes us take note and can as easily be ignored but, once heard, it can no longer be ignored, for it is invested with a certain irony - it may catch us in the act of not paying attention. (Irony is not the only strain of wit in this piece, and it is always witty to perceive something new in art.)
Proof of the real presence of the sound installation is the fact that it is untouched by commentaries and descriptions. It requires experience, experience on site.
In addition to the personal experience, it is a pleasure to pursue thoughts on the edge, such as the memories evoked by Max Neuhaus' sound emulsion although it entails a new treatment of space. (I seemed to sense something ancient and long-forgotten.) Such as, the ideas that are stirred by these Neuhausian sound bodies, for example, in connection with time. They do after all take place in time, like all the familiar tones of music or the familiar sounds of daily life. The visitor walks into the acoustically-altered space, the insurance company's glazed stairwell in Kassel, and listens - taking time. But in time he falls out of time and his perception turns to the space, the surroundings. The perception of the sound is a physical experience.
Or another issue with respect to time, Max Neuhaus composes a sound work. Then he installs it. Only then does the visitor come, and it is in the visitor's presence that the sounds are perceptible. Yes, it is presence, the present that counts, and what happens in it, says Max Neuhaus.
The visitor is the meeting place where these so-called past sounds join the present. Since the sounds not only reach outwards but also inwards, each visitor is left to himself and his own perceptions, which is an ingenious feature of Neuhaus' installations. Their solitude sneaks up on us. (At least that is how they struck my aural solitude.)
But Max Neuhaus talks about society and about community, for instance, about the time-honored function of church bells capable of uniting a (hearing) community and about how their acoustic topography has always been accepted, understood and used. Or he speaks about other more recent acoustic signals that spread in a specific aural space and affect us as a community. But what does it mean to say that he speaks about these things? He composes (kneads, he says, laughing) such surprising communal signals in his time works (more about that another time).
Visitors alone or as a group cannot and will not locate the source of the sound, but the intention is not to mystify. Concealing the sound source is related to the technical side of this new listening experience. Max Neuhaus says that as soon as visitors discover the source of a sound, that is, the loudspeakers, they will automatically direct their listening attention to them. Then the sound is no longer located in the room where it actually is; then it will seem to be sitting in the speakers.
How does a sound spread? (How does a smell spread?)
It goes without saying that these lines have a separate life. There are sound installations by Max Neuhaus, and in addition there are these lines.
Not quite as independent from the audible side of his work, the listening experience, are the drawings that were on view at the Kassel Kunstverein until last March. They ca be studied in a recent three-volume publication - Max Neuhaus, sound works, Ostfildern-Stuttgart, Cantz Verlag, 1994) reproduced with the texts belonging to each of them.
The making of these drawings and texts is inseparably bound up with the sound works. They are 'catalysts for individual trains of thought, active memories, viewpoints into process, and projections of what a thought might become' (M. N.). The drawings, as slender and serene as the sound colors, can be viewed as drawings and remain as such. They too have a life of their own.
A sound work (location Villa Celle, Pistoia, Italy; dimensions 120 x 60 meters) has the lines:
A hillside / of woods / Entered / through / inconspicuous / paths / Sound / establishing / visions of / other / wooded / life.
If the images evoked by the (12) lines resemble those evoked by the composition, that is good. But they do not have to, because the media are not the same (even though words and sounds are distantly related).
The sound colors vary on each of the three floors in the Kassel installation. As we ascend, their intensity increases step by step as if we were climbing up into elucidation, as if finally something were perfectly clear. The glass walls let the landscape in; the stairwell is filled with the view from outside and with the graduated sound of a volume that never dominates. Even on the top floor, the sound remains slender, so slender it almost escapes us. And then it is back again.
One of my obsessions (more firmly put, my acts of desperation) is to fight the lame word 'like'. What can 'like' possibly mean? It plays at mystification. It is often said that a pleasure of one kind or another is like music, so that we find ourselves forced to imagine how this pleasure and this music are alike. But I shall contradict myself for once and compare the sound body in Kassel with the presence of pleasure or with an equally present pain. Pleasure has nothing whatsoever to do with time, endless. Pain when it is there is exactly the same, and that is what Max Neuhaus' sounds are like, there in Kassel.
Translated by Catherine Schelbert
Published as "How Does a Sound Spread", Three to One: Max Neuhaus (Brussels: La LÈttre VolÈe, 1997)