Drawings texts

The Drawing After

After finishing a sound work, if time allows, I wait several months before listening to it again. This is the first time I can stand outside the work and see what it is that I have made. It is only at this point after experiencing the work with distance that I make its circumscription drawing.

This drawing, two panels, a visual image and a handwritten text, integrates two traditional forms of communication to circumscribe something both invisible and indescribable. The image is not the drawing nor is the text: the drawing is what they synthesize together. When read in parallel, they evoke a central idea of the sound work, a point of departure and a reference, for reflection.

Drawing by Ear

A point beats in your breast: your heart.
A point beats for your hand: your pulse.
A point beats in space. Listen.

Edmond Jabès

There are but few methods of drawing sound: musical notation and of course the one you are looking at now – phonetic notation of speech – are the most often used. Max Neuhaus' art lies outside both speech and musical conventions, outside the dotted line of writing vocals of voice or of instrument.

As he found himself out at sea he had to teach himself how to swim, how to draw with only an aural thought to make us see, let us hear. His syllables are image and song.

We take the sonority of our world for granted. We are no longer able to experience aurally the spaces we live in, places to which we are no longer listening. There are also those who do not want to hear, or are simply hard of hearing, or bound to remain out of hearing.

But if you grant these drawings a hearing you are bound to see things differently. To listen to a voice, to attend a reading is to accept it a priori; we follow an advice, we obey a command. For these drawings are born of and exist as the only matrices of certain sound configurations which are intimately connected with, and could not exist without, certain spatial configurations. Places inaugurate these particular works, and they remain site-related even if only indirectly.

Some of these sounds are no longer, some will not continue in time. Therefore, these drawings are also the only possibility of knowing certain thoughts that otherwise would remain unimaginable.

Drawn on translucent paper, shimmering and reflective, as if the lines are suspended just above the surface, asserting their own shadow against the transparency of the paper – an introduction to an aural difference which endows these lines with a shape in the absence of images, a thought cut from the landscape which is simply an immense white screen. A form is born out of the silence at the outskirts of unmarked space.

Neuhaus draws in primary colour; the colours are applied with a pencil, the colours referring to sound differences. They are never mimetic and yet they take as a point of departure a conventional and descriptive language, depicting a space as given; they take note of a site.

If seen as drawings in relation to the places of which they are not, they are relatively small in scale, somewhat like landscape drawings, small in relation to the large project they are part of.

And yet the source of these manifestations is unlike any other drawings with which we are already familiar. More like technical drawings of a bygone age or graphic means used by aboriginals to represent the terrain or even ordinary topographic map-making, except they have little in common with these familiar things, they are unlike other representations; they represent what would otherwise not exist.

Our innermost being refines sounds, tunes our voices to renew the pact with a world we rebuild in our mind. In these drawings, sound is closer to a groove yet barely a trace, as if the mark is a threshold of a line, of a line creating its shadow as sound. At each turn of the street we are made to make a point of taking our bearings. We draw to circumscribe that which is invisible, that which we cannot circumscribe – where there is nothing.

The real quality and grandeur of these drawings lies in having created the sound works which bear the resemblance of the world of dispersion and which give it a meaning on the verge of discord. His difficult triumph, on the edge of perception, is to have been able to extract from the incessant flight of sound forms, by means of memory and intelligence alone, the tentative trembling icons of the sound of human sensibility.

Yehuda Safran