1995
Conversation between Max Neuhaus and Gregory des Jardins, Ischia, Summer 1995

des Jardins '94 'Like'

Excerpt from a conversation with Greg des Jardins, Summer 1994
.......

Let's go on to talk about Hamburg.  It looks like your firstopportunity to have more than one space to work in. As it is the
first of the Like Spaces, how had that idea become attractive?

I have to admit that part of it was to get rid of the doubting
Thomases - that it's a very strong demonstration of the power of
sound to transform place, and a lot of  people had taken that as a
kind of rhetoric, and it was nice to say, OK, you think it's
rhetoric, why is this room bigger than this one?

Having the immediate comparison

It's not immediate; it was more complex than that in this case
because of this strong confrontation with all these plastic works,
all this visual sculpture just outside this work.  It was maybe
sixty meters between these two wings through the rest of the
exhibition, so it wasn't go from this room to this room - it was two
completely different rooms.

It's worth emphasizing because in later cases like Three to One ...
they are immediate.  You have a sort of bridge of normality.

I think the experience of the visitor in Hamburg was: come across
this room, find it empty, if he was attentive, realize it was sound,
listen and find it, and then go out, saying, OK, that's Neuhaus'
sound work, and then start through the rest of the exhibition, and
maybe a half an hour later find the inverse of that room on the
other side.  The contrast between the two spaces was huge - the
sound on one side was a fluid, once you focused on it you were
immersed up to here - and the other side,  clicks - a dense texture
of them, but  sitting above your head, like a dropped ceiling just
above your head.  It wasn't two fluid textures that were very
different, which I could have done - these had a completely
different natures.

It was very difficult to do because I didn't (end of tape)

We were talking about the second sound at Hamburg.

And the fact that it is this texture, and I was saying that I wanted
to make sure that none of these sounds would go beyond the space. It
wasn't easy because the space was divided from the rest of the
exhibition with walls only three meters high.  But the space was ten
meters high so it was a real challenge to try and get both these
things which are not necessarily ... it's one thing to get a click
in a special place, it's another thing to get a big texture and
stuff it in a space like that

And these were only things you heard when you were in each room?

I made a very narrow break as an entrance in the center of the wall
that went across the front of these spaces, so you walked to this
narrow break, there was a text in the form of a label just outside -
the same form as the labels of the show - saying when certain kinds
of sound are very soft et cetera, and then you were in it.

The two immediately following works are also Like Space works, and
what's interesting about them is that the rooms aren't separated by
something else in between but they communicate either with having
the wall or having two together.

Turin was really next in concept I think.
Say something about the invitation for those two Like Spaces.

Well, I went up to Torino in the summer of '89 so this was even
before my invitation for the Deichtorhallen came in something like
August and it had to happen fast, so I'd already been to Torino and
agreed to do a work for Giorgio and knew about the similarity of
these rooms, so to speak, and I think it was then in my mind
perhaps.  That could have been the first Like Space work and then
Deichtorhallen came in and bang and then yes right after making the
Deichtorhallen work I went to make the piece in Dallas and went even
further with the idea

There in Dallas, you chose a room or were given a room.

I chose a room.  I had some alternatives. and I had thought about
doing two rooms but then this idea, since I had worked the concept
already, to go to the extreme of making two sounds which sounded the
same but created completely different feelings  when you were inside
them even though you couldn't t hear the difference between them.

I really had to work on it ... what I am doing when I am building a
work is comparing sounds and the closer I'm getting to the sound I
want the more similar these sounds become. At one point I realized I
had two sounds that I could barely hear the difference between but
something  very different was happening in each. I already
established that it would be one room with a divider.

How high was it?

It went from floor to ceiling, room height, three meters or so
dividing the room in half with another wall.

You must have seen this as a continuation of what you were
undertaking in Hamburg.

I was fascinated with this idea of how far I could go with this idea
and then bingo when this thing happened with the two sounds sounding
almost alike but having completely different natures...

But then Turin is immediately after Dallas.

But before Dallas was opened to the public.

But in terms of working, the idea was even before Hamburg - in terms
of working you come to Turin having worked with pairs of spaces -
now you have three.

One interesting point is that both in Hamburg and in Dallas they're
mirror images of themselves - but you don't notice that consciously.

In Turin they are just three similar spaces - the same high ceiling,
same dimensions, two doors connecting them.  And so it was, yes,
this idea and this idea of the way of executing it was again ...
another extreme because it was making three spaces out of two
sounds; it' was another way of going further - one is two sounds
which sounded exactly the same, the other making three different
spaces out of only two sounds by building one sound each for the two
extreme rooms and combining those sounds in the center room -
building them in such a way that when they combine, when I put both
of them into the center room we had a third sound - you didn't hear
the sounds of extreme rooms in the center room, though, you heard a
different room.  Using the same components re-juxtaposed, creating
something else.

Was the making of the work in Turin finding the two sounds for the
extreme rooms?

I don't remember how I did it, or which I found first, or even
whether I came in with that concept, but at one point it clicked,
this idea of changing the meaning of a sound with context.

At the doorways to the center rooms you can't find a line where the
sound changes, but at one point you enter into both sounds and
that's when this formation, this combination is evoked.  It's also a
lot going on in your own head; they're indicators for your
imagination, that's what makes it happen.

The most common way of entering the work is into the middle room
first.  The entrance to the gallery goes into a hall which goes into
the middle room and then it goes to another room and then there's a
doorway into one of the extreme rooms.  And the only way you can get
to the smaller of the rooms is through the middle room; you can't go
there first.

So the experience I'm describing of going from the extreme to the
other was after you'd been in the piece for a little while.  You've
got both sounds in the middle room and your ear is carrying both
those sounds and it enters a new room with only one of those sounds.
The fact that it's gone has to register at one point.

What about the plausibility of the sounds?  You described both the
Hamburg and the Dallas sounds in terms of feeling.

Dallas also had the diptych in the entrance to the space - because
of putting this horizontal wall to match the horizontal wall at the

other end of the space I had a little hallway and you walk in and
then you either turned left into one side or turned right into the
other side but to your side were these two things.  But most people
came in were confronted with two openings one on the right and one
on the left and went for the opening, so it was only after you'd
been in the room and perhaps like nonplused that you came out and
you saw the image of the diptych or the text panel of the diptych.
That was a beautiful way to use those things, not confronting them -
read these before you go in - but go in, stretch, and then all of a
sudden have this - no, it wasn't possible to get by yourself.

What about Turin, was there a diptych?
Yes, hung in another part of the gallery.

Giorgio reinstalled all the shutters which he'd taken out so the
rooms could be made semi-dark, just enough so that any visual work
became secondary. I envisaged it as a permanent work, so I had to
deal with the fact that there was always going to be a visual
exhibition in there.

The sounds are not as subtle as the other works.  The work appears
only when the room is semi-dark, when the shutters have been closed
for a while, it appears.  It's real healthy textures that you're
hearing, you're immersed in.

In a way, Hamburg and Dallas form a pair
They're all different directions out of this idea.

In the case of the Dallas work, it's not that the sounds weren't
very, very different but that you didn't hear it. I think the
confusing thing about  talking about this piece is that people don't
understand how we hear, that we don't hear reality any more than we
see reality.  We build what we hear in our mind.  And I'd found a
way to have the mind build in its own perception the same thing
which in fact wasn't the same thing, and that was the key in Dallas.

Another thing that obviously differentiates Turin is the fact that
there are the three, and that presented you with a problem of
mixture

I was intrigued by the challenge of three instead of two. I am
fascinated with this idea of juxtaposition.  This was a step in
another vector, away from this central idea of juxtaposition of just
two.

The reason it's good to speak of all these as Like Spaces is the
fact that 'spaces' are plural; in contrast to all previous works,
you're dealing with more than one space - whether those are two
spaces or three is a new piece of exploration.

Some people thought they were getting two installations for the
price of one, which was fine with me, but it really is analogous to

a two panel work; one part doesn't exist without the other.  You
could have a fine time just if you happened to go into one of those
rooms at the Deichtorhallen or in the other one.

How did it happen?

After documenta Harry was building a show for Bordeaux but it's
actually a longer story than that because the director, Jean Louis
Froment came to see me in my studio in New York before I even
started working in Europe. We talked and I took him to Times Square.
It's strange, I remember what happened at the time - he was being
very French and I had no idea what being very French was at that
time of course and he had to bring up the question of money - I can
see what happened now, but then I was completely mystified. I'd
taken him to Times Square and he said well then how much could
possibly, should, would, might such a work of yours somewhere in the
world cost. I was obsessed at that time with raising the money for
the siren project, so I said you know I'm working on this siren
project and it's got a budget of five hundred thousand dollars.  He
kept talking but left and I never heard from him again - in the
early eighties, half a million dollars for one of my sound works was
unheard of.   My first lesson in the French conditional.

Harry wanted to include me in this show that he was doing and I said
no I'm not going to do any more works in exhibitions because it
means they are distroyed and he said but you have to be in this show
and I said no way Jose and then he said OK I'll talk to Jean-Louis,
so they talked and the whole connection of ten, fifteen years before
pushed it through I think. I went down to Bordeaux, spent a day
looking.  The stairways I chose are the only symmetrical ones there.
There's a very interesting staircase on the other side which is
completely different.  It's spiral, and I was really torn between
whether to do that stairway I wasn't looking for a place to do
another Like Space work; in fact I almost chose this other stairway,
the single stairway, but those two were finally what clicked.

These are more like Hamburg than any of the others in that they
don't communicate.

Exactly.  It's about the same distance between them, about sixty
meters, they're completely identical. The lower floor is dark
because it's an old warehouse; and it doesn't have any windows
coming into the lower floor, so it's artificial light, but at the
top of each of these stairways is a window with daylight...and these
vaulted ceilings. They're not labyrinthical like Southwest
Stairwell, but if you didn't know your way around the museum, you
could confuse one with the other because they're that identical.

But the sounds here - one is warm and rich, the other is bright and
hard, one is soft and rich; the other is cool and hard - both
continuous textures. Really extreme contrast but within the same
form, whereas the contrast with Hamburg was fluid vs points, a fluid
in one space juxtaposed with these points of activity just over your
head in the other.

These are both fluids but of a completely different nature.

They're continuous in that as you go up or down either of the stairs
it doesn't differ

No, they do not have topographies.
So was this in the show or not, Harry's show?

Yes, it was part.  It was inaugurated with this exhibition and
stayed, and that's become a very good way to do works for me,
because they aren't exhibitionable really.  I mean, the real meaning
of these works comes after you know them for a while and you have to
get to know them.  You can walk through either space without hearing
anything, and many people do, in fact I make sure that some people
can walk through my works with out noticing them before I finish
one. They need the time of being in a collection, but no matter how
long they are there they remain discoverable

I didn't want it to enter the downstairs space because that's the
main exhibition space. It wasn't that hard to contain it because
there's a smaller arch where you enter the stairway and at the top
also a little smaller arch, so they are rooms kind of.  I had the
architecture helping me confine it to these two places. Entering
these works is not about walking across a line as in Sound Line or
Times Square.  You enter the zone; it is sudden but I didn't use
that, in a way, it's not how you find it.  You find it by knowing
that it might be there and going to look for one of these stairways
and going in it and stopping for a second to focus and then, bang,
it comes.

I'd like to do Three to One at this point - how did that happen?

They called me, I was one of the first artists chosen, I'm not sure
why.  Actually I remember being at a dinner in Pistoia, big dinner
for a Mario Merz opening or something, and Jan Hoet being there and
in the middle of the dinner in his outspoken way brought me up to
the table and saying Neuhaus, I'm Jan Hoet. you're in it, you're in
it!  But also I was lucky that Denys Zacharopolous was part of the
committee and knew my work and knew how long it took to make a work
and knew that I'd refuse if they called me only six months
beforehand.

How long had he been part of the committee?

He was part of the team from the beginning - I guess, I don't know.
Hoet always talked about the piece being central to his documenta,
and he called it the elbow.

You were given the site

No, it wasn't that.  I could have been in documenta in another
place, and I went looking for my tree of 1977 and walked up from the
park and I realized it was indeed perfect  - all that glass to work
with -  these rooms on the vertical rather than the horizontal -

this juxtaposition in the center.  One of the first realizations
about the spaces I made - I'm not sure when, maybe at the point that
I was agreeing with this fascinating thing that these were the only
spaces I'd ever worked in where you enter by the top of your head
and your ears go in first and you hear them from the bottom up
because you're coming up.  The work begins on the first floor in the
European sense, so the first space you enter is up the stairway and
the top of your head comes in, so it's ears go into this space first
and you gradually raise the level in the space as you come up the
stairway and walk around, then walk up the stairway, ears first into
the next level, and the same with the other.

So it's a very different way of entering spaces.

Yes. The building had been transformed.  It was a landmark building,
one of the first buildings - Kassel was flat after 1945 - so it was
one of the first buildings built there in this fifties style, I
guess.  But it was also very clean once we cleaned it up.

Everything except this space had been transformed in the building
quite radically with dropped ceilings and computer platform floors.
The employees of the building tried to defeat this space in a way by
putting rubber plants in it and they put a carpet on the floor;
originally it was very sparse.  They had changed the color of the
walls - the architect had chosen these pastel, light colors - a very
deliberate color choice for different floors.  So Hoet insisted that
they restore the stairway, what they had done to it was so ludicrous
because it was clear that they were fighting this space, especially
with the plants.

I realized that if I had the carpet it would have been a lot easier
because each floor would have absorbed its sound, but I was game.
It was a big fight; documenta had to pay for the new floor, had to
store the carpet; they had to take all these rubber plants out and
all during documenta store them somewhere and water them.

When I came in May of 1991 with all my equipment trying to figure
out where to put the sound sources - whoops, this thing is made out
of  reinforced concrete - God help me!

These working drawings show the progression of the idea.  This first
one is called Entry, and it shows this head coming up above the
floor.  The second one is called Path, which just shows this path.
And then there's a series of three or four that show different
parts, finally realizing that if I threw it on the glass I had it
because the source would unconsciously seem to be the glass and
therefore be outside because that was the only logical place; and
then I was lucky that near the glass this heating system was but it
was too small to fit any kind of conventional speaker.  I knew that
from the heating system I could get it on the glass.

I found a speaker-box designer who was obsessed with the base reflex
box, which is one small area of speaker design, and I said I want
you to design me a speaker box that has this frequency response but
the maximum dimension on the width can be five centimeters.

Silence.  It's against all the rules because it makes - I have two
of the prototypes upstairs - you'll see they're long tubes, and
that's the last thing you want to do with a speaker box.  But he did
a very nice job and we built them, installed them.  I insisted that
they be insulated from the heating system; he said, but no,
documenta is only in the summer, the heating system won't be on.  I
said, no, I think we'd better be sure, there could be an accident,
who knows what could happen here? Then I went away all summer and,
like I was saying yesterday, prepared the palette.

When the sources had been installed I went in for two weeks to try
and get this thing to happen. Acoustically it's one room because of
the huge opening in the center even though you perceive it visually
as three.  So it's like making a layer cake.  I worked until I got
it to work, this gradual finding the path, finding sounds that
worked without spreading.

After I'd finished I started to try and analyze how I got it to
work:  This is one of a pair of drawings which is what I called
Spatial Interlock because between each of the floors the three
colors represent each of the sounds here, the sound on each floor
and the space they occupy on the floor in the hearing zone, but each
one spilled to its adjacent floor - and this is the images of the
spill - the middle one gets the spill of the red and the blue; these
can only get the spread of the purple.  So this showed me where the
interaction was; there's another drawing which is the spectrum of
the three sounds, and in there I found that there were - I'd have to
look at the drawing - a total of three common frequencies in the
spectrum of these three sounds.  There's one frequency, I think,
that goes through all three; and there's several others which go
between adjoining ones.

You know what we hear as timbre is the spectrum of the sound - which
frequency components it has and the relative shape of the
amplitudes. Our voices don't sound the same even though we're both
men and have the same frequency range. What the difference is, that
even though we may have many of the same pitches or close pitches
because we are both male humans, it's the relative amplitudes of
those common frequencies that determines how we read the timbre and
the fact that I can tell the difference between your voice and mine.
It's a shape. If you make a graph with frequency on the horizontal
axis and amplitude on the vertical each frequency of the timbre
becomes a vertical line. The height of the line represents its
loudness. If you look at the tops if the lines you see a shape.

Like this.  That's really what we're hearing; that's what the brain
has decoded.  These common frequencies in the work of course,
because the sounds were completely different on each floor, had
different meanings on each floor because they were in the context of
a different spectral shape on each floor.  In fact what I had done
was take the things that spread and give them completely new
meanings in each of the three places.

The title came months after I actually finished the piece.  ...
going back and I had to add a balancing system so that no matter how

many people were in there the level balance was always constant.
And during that phase I noticed myself that after a while - I mean
the first time it happened I was really terrified because I thought
something had changed - the distinctions disappear because your mind
learns what's going on, it learns the structure, and then the work
gels into one space, it becomes a terrain; it starts off as three
separate layers, textures, and as your experience grows with it it
becomes a terrain.

It's not acuity of hearing, I think it's acuity of attention - that
many people walk in the ground floor where there is no sound and
hear the piece, hear that there is a sound work there, probably
people that have heard works of mine before; they sense that
something is there.  And other people go up the stairs, go into the
first layer, and hear nothing, because here the sounds really are
almost plausible as room sound. Many people, I can see them
struggling to separate - they know there has to be a sound there,
but all they can hear is the room. Then when they go to the second
floor the difference between what they thought was the room sound
and the sound on the second floor... all of a sudden they go into
it, it becomes clear.

One of the things I'm curious about is why you - it must be perhaps
the nature of the space - used three sounds rather than mixed two as
in Turin.

Well, it was hard enough to do with three. In Torino I had separate
rooms with only a door opening connecting them; here I had one room
to make into three spaces.

I suppose what gave me the idea is this about spillage or interlock.
Was there a possibility - even though you had three levels - to make
two ...??

In fact I did that but on a much more complex level; I did it in
spectrum.

What about the feeling one had in the piece?
We can talk in the present about this work.

It was this dilemma, knowing myself that it would be a permanent
work and also knowing that it would be exposed for the first time as
part of an exhibition and within the crowd context. I dealt with it
by taking translating the text panel into six languages, and placing
them on the ground floor to bring people away from the visual
context. Many people didn't read them of course those were the ones
that came down and said there's nothing here.

I had to find a way that it would work when people were in the
exhibition mode, but also that would work as a permanent work and
still remain discoverable. I removed the texts after documenta, of
course.

Once you reach the point of hearing the work, you realize these
sounds are not plausible at all there, once you hear them.  They
have a strong harmonic structure that musicians sense immediately;
they have a harmonic relationship that's very clear - not everybody
realizes it, but anybody who has been trained in music and thinks
that way, it hits them.  But I think that was my way of, in a way,
distracting them; it was an attempt finally to get musicians to be
able to hear one of my pieces - not by making music for them of
course, but that harmonic relationship was a way of distracting
those people, distracting them with something familiar so that the
real nature of the piece would work for them.  They were too 'good'
listeners, so I gave the too good listeners something to listen to
to distract them, make them less self conscious so that the piece
could work for them also.

But a nonmusical person, a person not trained in music?

Wouldn't hear that structure, consciously, but would sense it which
is more profound.  The top floor is really open; all of a sudden you
come up there and its like you are on the Great Plains. Analyzing
harmonic structure gets in the way of being able to have that
feeling I think.  The only thing anyone needs for a work of mine is
to listen.