2005
Hans Ulrich Obrist interview with Max Neuhaus, 2005
Hans Ulrich Obrist interview with Max Neuhaus
HUO Hello. To begin with the beginning, because so many artists in the last decade and in this decade have been very much influenced by your work and by your definition of doing sonic installation within the art context, I wanted to ask if you could tell me a little bit about the beginning and how that all happened. You started in the sixties in a very public way, actually, to be in the music context; you worked with Boulez and Stockhausen. You became famous around [the] mid-sixties with your solo recitals in New York, which then went on a tour. Your percussionist work ceased around the late sixties, ’68. From there I was wondering how this move happened, not necessarily to leave music but a move to basically go more into installations and into public space.
MN It was a process that began kind of unconsciously; I didn’t think my way through it and say, ‘Well now I will make a sound installation’. The idea of a sound installation was not there. I just started having specific ideas for certain situations. In a sense I knew what I was doing even though I didn’t. The first thing which could be called a sound installation was actually in 1967. I thought I would continue as a percussion soloist even after that, but it became clear fairly soon that if I wanted to go into this new direction it was in fact not music. In music and all of our experience of sound in life sound is always an event . What I was proposing was to create entities out of sound, pulling sound out of the event, out of its continuum in time, turning it over and putting it in place. This was unheard of. I just continued in that way until I found I could no longer be a musician, partly because if I was a musician no-one would understand this new idea of sound installation and partly because being a virtuoso musician demands full attention, it takes six hours a day just to keep in one place, so to speak. That was a long answer to your question! [Laughs]
HUO It is very interesting because it leads to a second question: we have in Domus covered long conversations with Pierre Boulez and Frank Gehry about the relationship between Boulez as a composer and, basically, spaces for sound, and a longer interview I held with Stockhausen. Both Boulez and Stockhausen talk a lot about this idea of extended spaces for sound and Stockhausen has experimented a lot and Xenakis with his “polytopes” about nonlinear strength. I was wondering to what extent composers like Boulez or Stockhausen or Xenakis were important for you at that time and where you then make the difference, the distinction.
MN Of course Stockhausen was important for me; I toured with him when I was in my early twenties as a soloist and I worked with Boulez even earlier as part of an ensemble. But their ideas were then, and still are, centred, contained, confined, within this entity we call the concert hall. is a This is a space that is essentially the museum for sound. The fundamental idea of my work, when I moved out of music, was to move outside of that context, essentially to work with a public at large, rather than one confined in that space but also in the time-frame of a concert, to move out of that framework and open a new one.
HUO To what extent, to go a little bit further back than Stockhausen and Boulez, were early twentieth century composers important for you? For example Satie and his early experiments. In the 1920s he made experiments about Musique d’Ameublement. To what extent was this important?
MN In terms of Satie, yes, certainly the works that are played over many days begin to stretch the idea of event but they still are in fact events but more importantly the music, although it’s repetitive, still develops in time and only makes sense in time. My idea was really pulling sound out of time and creating entities which people explored and put in their own time. Of course, another person that I met when I was nineteen was John Cage because when I was going to music school I was part of a percussion ensemble which played his works. But Cage is more of a catalyser; the stimulation of dealing with, of realising, a work by Cage is not so much about something specific, it’s about, in a way, empowering you to create yourself. That was the influence of Cage for me. But no, these - in the middle of the sixties trying to talk about a sound installation made no sense; I didn’t even have the word. I didn’t find the word until the beginning of the seventies when the word ‘installation’ in contemporary art began to be used to deal with this concept of a work that is specific to a certain place. By coupling that with the word ‘sound’, I came up with the words ‘sound installation’. Of course over the following ten years it became a term which began to be used by many other people in different ways and so I stopped using it in about the middle eighties and began with other kinds of terminology.
HUO We spoke about this transition in the sixties and you starting to work with installations, not only in museums but also in public places where you basically injected sound into the public place. I wondered if you could maybe tell us about some of these very early experiences.
MN The first work that could be called an installation was actually entitled Drive-In Music. I had the opportunity – I was invited to a centre for contemporary music in a city outside New York City in Buffalo, New York, and because I was well-known as a performer I was given a certain amount of latitude, although they really couldn’t understand what I was talking about when I proposed making a sound work for people in automobiles that they would hear over their car radio as they drove along a certain street. The idea of car - in many American cities, nobody walks; everybody drives, so it was a way of dealing in fact, with the public at large. I realized it with seven low-power radio transmitters, each one transmitted a different sound. I created a topography of sound by configuring their antennae into different shapes. So I literally shaped sound in space; I made a topography out of sound which people drove through. Each listener exposed its elements for himself through his car radio as he drove through it. You could drive through it in two directions, you could drive through it fast, you could drive through it slowly, you could stop… putting sound in place and putting time in the listeners’ hands.
In the beginning of the seventies in a public space, a subway entrance which was part of the entrance to an office building. This was a much different kind of work. It was subtle, it was anonymous (it was the first time I had made an anonymous work in public) and it was also set up permanently so people encountered it daily, people walking through this portico coming to and from from the subway and in and out of the building. It was made of click trains: very fast series of clicks that created, that built a space.
And then in 1974 I had the idea to make a work in the centre of Times Square which took me three years to realize. It is still there. It is a block of sound which sits in the middle of the square, unmarked, there twenty-four hours a day for people to find.
HUO That is actually a very important point, I think, to talk a little more about the Times Square piece because I had long discussions with Xenakis in Paris shortly before he died. He was very old; it was some years ago. Xenakis actually was somehow very sad because he said it was very strange if one looks at the history of sound there are a lot of really interesting moments in sound has [that have] become space but those are always very ephemeral, they stay for a few months in an exhibition. Xenakis had big exhibitions; he made sound in whole monasteries for some months and even museums and basically it all then disappeared. We were discussing the fact that if we visit a museum today, in most museums there are not many permanently installed sound works, and the same is true actually for outdoor works. In a certain way the definition of your Times Square piece which has become a permanent piece through Dia in a similar way where actually [like] the Earth Room by De Maria has become a permanent piece [x by De Maria]. I think it is a very visionary, ground-breaking moment. I wanted to ask if you could talk a little bit more about the discussion with Dia. I think it is something which is discussed a lot also with Stefano Boeri and Domus in Milan. It was discussed with a whole generation of Italian designers, long interviews with Enzo Mari, who I think is also here today in Firenze with Stefano Boeri. Being very different, all these interviews had in common was that they were all talking about an amazing moment in the fifties and sixties where in Italy there was a real dialogue with the industrialists who then produced these different design objects. That was almost like an infinite conversation, so to say [speak], and in an interesting way Dia in the art world has in a similar way been a very unique moment; completely different definitions could be made than are usually made within the museum world, as [? with] your Times Square piece and the Earth Room. I wondered if you could talk a little bit about how this happened and about your dialogue with Dia and so on.
MN Of course. The point you make about Xenakis having pieces which ran for a long time, that’s only part of being an entity, he was still making music, playing music for long periods of time. In fact this it the interpretation of the words ‘sound installation’ in music, what they mean to musicians. They don’t know the concept of installation that we use in contemporary art so they take the words, the term, literally. Their sound installations are usually installations playing electronic music for a long period of time in a place. I often make the point that with my sound works the sound is in fact not the work. The sound is what creates the place of the work. For people from music, this is something which they can’t understand, whereas the idea when explained in the context of sculpture is understandable. It really is also the nature of what the work is, what you do with sound, which creates an entity, not the fact that you set up a long installation of sound equipment.
To go the second part of your question, Times Square was completely unplanned. I didn’t live in that part of Manhattan at that time but I happened one morning to have to pass through the square and by accident walked across one of the triangular pedestrian islands in the centre of the square and came across a large grating covering a chamber underneath the ground, actually one of the chambers that’s used to ventilate the subway system. I froze, I knew at that moment that I would make a work in that place. I had no idea what the work would be, how I would do it; but that’s where it began. Of course, not having the words to explain, not having a precedent to explain what this would be, just getting into the chamber was a monumental task. First, of course, I tried to find a cultural institution which would support me, but at that time in New York public art was unknown. There was only one organisation called City Walls which commissioned artists to make large murals on walls of buildings. I went to them and they said, ‘Well, this is a nice idea but we commission artists for walls not holes in the ground’. I realised then that I really was on my own. I formed my own non-profit organisation, which is the only way to raise money in the US for cultural projects, and found my way into this chamber, raised the money and did it.
The hardest part, actually, in one sense, was at the end when I told the sponsors that the piece would be anonymous. They were outraged, even when I explained that I wasn’t going to put my name on it. My idea behind the anonymity is that people discover something very special for themselves when they are ready to find it and they have to find it completely by ear. I maintained Times Square myself from 1977 until 1992, at which point, since I was no longer living in New York, I tried to find a museum who would begin to take care of it. But museums are really about taking care of the works they have in their basement and on their walls, so no-one was really interested. And in New York, of course, they have this saying that ‘If it aint broke, don’t fix it’, so I decided to break it, I put the work on strike; but to take a work that is invisible, anonymous and only audible and to put it on strike seemed ridiculous to some, but over the fifteen years that it had run it turned out that there was a large group of people who had become very fond of it. After ten years the wherewithal came to be and I reinstated the piece and it became part of the collection of the Dia Foundation. Dia really has a commitment to dealing with art works that are outside the context of a specific museum.
HUO What is also very interesting in relation to the Times Square piece and the other public pieces you described before is actually that they produced community. You have said in many previous discussions and interviews that actually there is a certain amnesia and maybe also a lack of knowledge generally about the history of sound in the past. You mentioned a lot that societies in the past, their music was very much part of a community and of a dialogue, which you called a non-verbal dialogue of the citizens. I am very interested in this non-verbal dialogue of citizens which is triggered by your work and this idea to produce community, so I wondered if you could tell us a little about this idea.
MN Yes. What I have done in the last twelve or so years after experiencing many interviews where the interviewer would try to start from the first work I ever did and continue, in a fashion, to understand in a line how I came to these points. I would always explain that it wasn’t a line, it was an explosion for me - it was an explosion of forms, actually I call them vectors now. Times Square falls into a vector I call Place - the idea of place: creating, transforming, building a place with sound alone.
At the same time, I started in another direction which I now call Networks; these are inter-connections of lay people again, having a dialogue with sound that is beyond language. I did the first one, also in the middle of the sixties, with a radio station in New York City. It involved doing something which was unheard of at that time: I plugged the telephone system into the radio station. I installed ten telephone lines at the station and asked people to call in during a two-hour period with whatever sounds they wanted. It created a live sound collage made with the participation of anybody within a twenty-mile radius the ten million people who were living there. These Networks gradually progressed into a series of radio/telephone events, in different cities. In the middle of the seventies I realized one for the whole of the USA with two hundred radio stations and five cities where people called into. I made huge trans-continental loops to transform their sounds.It was called Radio Net. At that time the word ‘network’ wasn’t a word in general us; it was a word that engineers knew but if you mentioned ‘network’ in a cultural context or any kind of conversation except with an engineer, no-one would know what it was. With these network ideas, I was also trying to go beyond the event and make them into entities. I was trying to figure out how I could take over a radio station twenty-four hours a day, or a network of radio stations. Fortunately, though, the Internet arrived. As of last year there is a work, Auracle, which is there twenty-four hours a day at a site called www.auracle.org. It is a point of meeting to create a network of people who play an instrument together using their voice.
HUO Responding to the voice?
MN Yes. It responds to your voice. The fundamental idea behind Auracle is to let lay people continually invent their own kinds of music. To give them the means to do this you allow them to use the most developed part of their sound-producing skills, This is their voice. It is the most sophisticated means of making sound that we all have, it is a very fine control over muscles which produce sound – you have to be a professional musician to begin to do things with your fingers, but everybody who can speak has the potential to do fantastic things with their voice.
HUO And this project, the Auracle project, is not only obviously a community-producing project where you actually develop a network condition of instruments but it is also an invention of yours. I wanted to ask you because, departing from this idea that the conference in Florence is about the new, one of the things which is almost a red thread in your work from the sixties till now is that there has always been a great anticipation, or to use Clark’s term, one could say a présentement, a kind of presentement maybe, of things which then later became very important which you anticipated. One of the things beside the instruments you invented and the whole idea of the sound installation you invented which is now – there is not a single biennale or art show without a sound installation - it has become so widespread one could almost say you have created a butterfly effect. One other thing which you very, very early talked about, which now in many art practices and architecture practices is important, is the notion of non-linearity. I wanted to ask if you could talk a little bit about this. You have already alluded to it before when you said it was not a linear evolution but it was more like an explosion. At the same time I wanted to ask if you could talk a little about non-linearity also in relation to how the work is seen because [of] this whole idea of the open form. [x maybe it’s also nice if you could tell us a little bit about your idea of open form because] In the architecture world Oskar Hansen, the Polish architect, had always talked about the urbanism of the open form. [x and] I would very much like here to remind [remember] the work of Oskar Hansen with whom Domus worked very closely over the last couple of months, who actually died in Poland a few days ago. Oskar Hansen talked about the open urbanism in terms of open form. I wondered if you could tell us a bit about your open form and also about this whole idea of non-linearity of how to see the work.
MN Yes, but before I forget, actually you are bringing up Domus and Domus did an article on my work in, I think, about 1974 or 1975 and there is a large picture of me working underground in the Times Square chamber with a large loudspeaker speaker. I think in the context of this symposium it might be interesting for me to talk a little about the process I go through when I build one of these Places with sound. The foundation for the idea, of course, is that we perceive space as much with our ears as we do with our eyes. What we hear is immaterial, though. What we see is material. Our perception of sound is largely unconscious, whereas our perception of visual things is largely conscious. But this doesn’t change the equality between the two senses in terms of determining our sense of space the ear any complement each other. So instead of building space, as many contemporary sculptors do, by shaping physical forms, changing colours, building things out of materials, I build a new sense of space by building and adding a sound which change, transforms a given space into a new one.
The realisation of one of these Places is in two fundamental phases: the first is deciding where it is. When I am commissioned I usually don’t let them tell me, where should be; I search for a while until I find a space that – although I don’t know what I will do there, like I didn’t know what I would do there with Times Square, I know that something can be done there. Along with that phase I find the means to embed, to apply sound to the site that I have chosen. If you are really building a place out of sound, the sound can’t be coming from four loudspeakers which you see. I have to find a way to perceptually make you think the sound is part of the place and this is partly a technical question, partly a psychological question as well as an aesthetic question. In any case, once I have found the way to embed the sound I design the hardware for the work and it is installed, In a sense though, I only really start to build the piece when I go there and create the sound, usually over a period of two weeks, by ear, in the space itself. I’ve worked with electronics from the very beginning. Its the only way you can make a sound entity. Since you can’t ask performers to be there twenty-four hours a day for years and years, I had to find a way to make it with electronics, so I essentially invented the means to do that.
The process is very much different from planning something. Now even more so with current computer technology it is very simple to have a very large palette of sounds completely under the fingers, no matter where you are. So I go in and by ear gradually assemble this subtle sound presence which creates one of these places. I don’t have the necessity to plan it because I do it all myself and I can feel my way through the various phases, the various degrees of what the sound is. I think one of the techniques we learn as artists, one of the most powerful ones we learn, is to learn how not to know what we are doing, but of course to know exactly what to do. This essentially means that you are working completely with your intuition and the real skill is knowing when the work has arrived and knowing when to stop.
Your questions are a little hard to understand over this amplified phone connection from Paris, Hans Ulrich.
HUO We can come back to the question because I think it is nice that this interview has moments of non-linearity.
MN [Laughs]
HUO The whole question was about non-linearity and maybe we can come back to it towards the end, but I think you have entered now a very interesting zone which we could explore a little bit more, which is the question of studio or post-studio practice. You were starting to describe to us a little bit how you work and I wanted to dig a little bit deeper and ask if you could tell us [talk] in terms of the studio and the travelling. I know you now live in ………., but obviously your practice is not a studio-related practice, it is a practice which has a lot to do with the context. And in relation to practices which ….. in situ have to do with context, a lot has been said about post-studio practice. I was wondering how you relate to all of this, if you still have a studio, if the studio plays a role, what role travelling plays, the whole question about the studio and the laboratory.
MN Yes.
HUO [x And to what extent] Bruno Latour talks a lot about the laboratory and one can in analogy also talk about the artist’s studio becoming a network condition.
MN Yes, the studio for artists is a very big question that there has been a lot of discussion about. In building the first pieces I discovered that I couldn’t make a work in my studio and take it somewhere, that was just playing a piece somewhere. I found that in order to build it my ears had to be in the place, whether it was being in the car that I was driving along the roadway in Buffalo, or in the portico. At that time it was very difficult; in order to adjust the sounds for the piece for cars - I had placed the transmitters in trees along the roadway - I worked at night with a rented car and a ladder on top of the car. I would drive through the sounds, stop, climb a tree, adjust something and climb down the ladder and continue. Of course this meant that I ran into the police a certain number of times but finally I got a letter from the mayor of the city which allowed me to climb trees late at night - in Buffalo, New York! In the portico it was different, I had to go inside to adjust and then outside this building to hear changes. At this point I realised that I had to find some means to adjust this electronic circuit that was making the sound in the place of the work itself.
I began inventing – there were no computers at the time – I began inventing means, control systems. At one point in the late seventies I was using a battery-operated TV set with a light pen to control the synthesis circuit with a long wire into the space. My studio at that time was about building tools to be able to build a work anywhere. I remember even in the eighties trying to get on an aeroplane with a computer was really difficult. I had one of the first compact computers which was about the size of a sewing machine and I remember I tried to get on the aeroplane and the guy said, ‘No, you can’t take this on. It has a tube in it and it will blow up’. So when business started taking over computers I was a very happy man. I could just dress like a businessman and pretend I was normal like anybody else!
Right now, of course, computers finally have given us the first means to shape sound to the degree that people making visual images have had for millennia. We have been able to make lines on rocks for how long? But we haven’t been able even to capture sound in a recording for more than a century and to actually shape sound, to form it, to have the ability to go beyond the physical things which make sound and really synthesise like we can synthesise color and shape with paint, this means has been generally available for less than a decade. For me a large part of my studio is inside my laptop. I was involved in inventing the systems for generating sound digitally, so for me it’s not something that’s strange, it’s the fruition of many years and many dreams. Computers would never have been this powerful if there wasn’t the huge market pushing for it and that power has enabled me to… I can’t believe the tools that I have to work with now. In a sense it hasn’t really changed so much what I can do; it is the old question of technique for artists. You do what you do with the technique that’s available, but just because of having worked so hard on developing the tools, to see the means to be there at this point is a dream come true.
Have I lost the sense of your question, again, Hans?
HUO It’s great because it leads actually to another question, which is the only recurrent question in all our interviews. We talked a lot about your inventions, we’ve talked about realised projects. I wanted to ask you what are the yet-unbuilt roads of Max Neuhaus, projects or maybe some examples of the ones which are particularly important for you, some examples of projects which have been too big to be realised, -
MN Unrealised projects.
HUO - or too complex to be realised, or too small to be realised, or too expensive to be realised, or eventually censored. One of the things which I have always found very interesting if one talks about the world of architecture and art is that in the architecture world there is a lot of talk about projects and every project of an architect actually gets published and in time through the publishing of projects there is what one could call a production of reality, whilst in the art world it is really very difficult to find the unrealised projects of artists; they are very seldom published. So I think it would be very interesting to hear from you about yet-unbuilt roads.
MN Well, until very recently, this complementary idea to the idea of building a place; building a moment which I began working with in the early seventies was really unrealisable on its full scale. It was only in 2003 that I finally realised the concept as a sound signal for a city, a sound signal that is heard first when it disappears. I do it by gradually introducing a sound over a period of minutes so that you don’t notice its arrival and then at its peak suddenly ‘whoosh’, pulling it away so you sense its absence. This idea, because of its scale, was always very difficult to get across. Municipalities don’t really think about sound at all and to try to talk to them about a big sound that you don’t hear… it took many years and many tries. Finally last year in the city of Graz, at the new Kunsthaus there, I built the first full scall realization. In a sense it is a voice for this building, a voice which is heard when it disappears every hour. But there are many, many previous proposals in the file proposing this to different cities in different places. I am actually in the process now of realising one for the Dia Museum in Beacon, New York.
In fact, thinking about where you are sitting right now, there is a famous, very famous, unrealised work of mine for the Coluour de Correspondence at the Montparnasse Bienvenue Metro station. I fell in love with it just about the same time I fell in love with the ventilation chamber in the middle of Times Square.I spent a year inside it working at night and started to build a work which was, in the end, unfunded. Basically the problem was bureaucracy, cultural bureaucracy. I have written a text about it, actually; it’s called ‘The Institutional Beast’. [Laughs]
It is a project that I would like to finish some day.The concept for the work falls into another one of the vectors, the one that started everything, the one with people driving along a roadway. It is Passage, it’s not Place, it’s not a Moment, it’s a passage, this corridor with the moving sidewalks is a passage.
HUO The question of Montparnasse is very interesting because I remember it was actually in Paris in the early nineties once when we had a conversation and you told me about another project of yours.
MN A what?
HUO Another project, a different project, I wanted to ask you about which leads us from the new to the useful, to cover the other aspect of the title of this conference, which was a project you had at the time imagined actually to improve the situation of the ambulance siren. You told me about the fact that there are many unnecessary accidents because we cannot actually locate the sound of the ambulance siren. I was curious because it is not the only project of yours, there are many other of your projects which in this sense have to do with improving the world and what one could call a useful aspect of the sonic improvement of the world. I was wondering if you could tell us about this ambulance project and about this useful dimension in general.
MN Si. Utilitarian. In fact this falls into another vector which I call Invention. I don’t consider them artworks, though. I have had to invent a number of things just to do my work but the siren project is a little different. In the beginning of the eighties I realised that the sound of police cars, ambulances and fire trucks was not ever designed, and it had a lot of problems. So I decided, knowing as much about sound as I did, and the mechanics and electronics of it, and also the psychology of sound, that I could design something that would work much better and that I could probably do it in six months.
This began an odyssey. It began in the area of research because I had to, in a way, defend doing this. For most people sound has a very large contradiction: on the one hand it is not powerful, you can’t do anything with sound, but on the other hand there is a thought in the public consciousness that it is also dangerous. So on the one hand it doesn’t do anything, it is useless, on the other hand it is dangerous. I had to talk to people in the City of New York to begin to propose this idea. What I found first of all was they couldn’t conceive that another sound could exist and that if it did exist it wouldn’t do anything different. The whole idea of doing something with sound didn’t click, nobody got it. So I went back and tried to illustrate it with the history of emergency vehicles. Basically in New York the Fire Department used to have a guy running in front of the wagon pulled by people blowing a trumpet when they wanted to get through traffic. It gradually evolved. When they motorised the fire engines someone had the brilliant idea of putting a whistle on the exhaust pipe of the motor which made an incredibly, horrible shriek. It was so bad that they finally took it off. Later they invented a mechanical siren and the electronic siren we have today. The basic idea of all these sirens was the louder the better, the more noise the better.
One of the fundamental problems of the siren sound, still today, is that in a city, especially a city with tall buildings, you don’t know where the sound is coming from and this is the fundamental piece of information you need to be able to do respond. If you don’t know where ambulance is coming from most people just panic and sit there and block traffic. There are other kinds of flaws too: all the siren sounds that exist are continuous. Often when there is an emergency there are four or five different vehicles going towards the same place around blind corners. They can’t hear each other’s sirens. The only thing they can hear is their own siren because that is the loudest and because it is continuous it covers up all the others. There are many documented accidents, tragic deaths, of two police cars running into each other around a blind corner. Finally over a number of years I convinced the powers-that-be in New York and managed to raise enough money to begin to work.
The place to build a siren, of course, is not in your studio. You need to work outside with moving sound sources in a complex environment. I raised enough money to work for six months in the desert in California near a place called the Salton Sea, which had a very flat plain, which was acoustically neutral, but also a river had cut a canyon that was as complicated acoustically as the canyons of Manhattan. During that period I developed, I designed, a siren that you could track in a complex environment by ear without any training. You didn’t have to learn how to do it, that you could locate easily, that had a system of various degrees of urgency that made no more sound than it had to. The fundamental idea was breaking up the sound. Instead of being continuous, breaking it into sound bursts. Because bursts of sound, two cars would be able to hear each other. It also had another advantage. Our perceptual system for locating sound depends on the onset of the sound, the beginning of the sound; all the information is there. This is all cancelled out in any kind of continuous sound.
After designing it I tested it on the streets of Oakland, California and found it worked. Then I had to patent it. This in itself began another odyssey because no-one had ever thought of patenting a sound before, naturally, because sound can’t do anything and a patent is a new way of doing something. So I had to convince the Patent Office. In the end, I patented a new way of moving vehicles through traffic with sound. The patent has forty-six claims. The real problem, the real object, was to get it implemented, though. The New York City Police Department offered any manufacturer who would make the prototypes, that they would put it on all their cars in one precinct and test it out over a period of months. This is like offering gold in that industry because New York is the toughest nut to crack, so to speak. But not one of the existing manufacturers went ahead and made the prototype. It’s not too hard to understand why. The existing manufacturers are few, they have control over the market, they’re on the committees that are part of government regulation so they regulate themselves, they certainly don’t want to spend any more money than they have to, they don’t want anyone to interfere, they don’t want to change the game. The fact that a few hundred people get killed every year doesn’t seem important.
So the project sits there as a patent. An unrealised project in one way, but in a way its not: it is realised. By taking it to the point of patenting the sound means that it is real, when someone wants to realise it it’s there. For me it was very important that this project not be considered an art work of mine. I don’t believe that artists should be limited, confined to only making art works. Being an artist was also one of the difficulties of the project, of course. If I had been a scientist it would have been easy to defend, but being an artist I was supposed to be a madman. Who would let a madman loose in the city to make a symphony with all the police cars? [Laughs] This was the image I was fighting. Even though I know much more about the psycho-acoustics of sound than most scientists do, just as most visual artists intuitively know more about the perception of colour than psychologists of colour, it would have been much easier if I had been a scientist.
But I have again wandered around your question, Hans Ulrich. Come back.
HUO Great. It’s almost like a wonderful conclusion. I just have a last question which I thought is interesting, to pursue this question of the unrealised project. For those interested to know more,.on your website.www.max-neuhaus.info you can find most of the projects which have been mentioned in the conversation. On this website is also your yet-unrealised elevator project, which is sound work for elevator passengers and you told me that so far there hasn’t been an architect adventurous enough to include a few of these works in the elevator bank of the bigger building projects. As one of the main ideas of Domus as a magazine from the very beginning, and that was the idea of the founder of Domus, has always been to bridge art and architecture. It was interesting when Stefano and I discussed with Alessandro Mendini, former director of Domus in the eighties, who had still known the founder who at the time actually gave him advice, Mendini told us that the founder had told him that the most important thing for Mendini as a director of Domus would be to look very, very carefully at contemporary art and the inventions of contemporary art. The whole idea of Domus being a bridge between art and architecture being so important, I thought it would be nice to conclude on this project of yours of the elevator and that yet-unrealised dialogue with an adventurous architect.
MN [Laughs] Yes, indeed. I have always wondered, I don’t know enough about the history of architecture, but it seems that at one point the architectural community was much more informed about sound than today, they knew more about it and were more interested in it, take the Greek amphitheatre for example. Currently in the field of architecture sound, except perhaps for sound isolation, sound doesn’t come into the equation, I have the feeling, though, that this maybe changing. The means to adjust sound are developing rapidly. We are now at the point where it is practical to do things with sound on an architectural scale. But to go back to the elevator idea, yes. One day while riding an elevator in New York I realised they had gotten them to the point where they were so smooth that you no longer felt that you were moving: a door opened, you walked into this box, the door closed, and then you didn’t feel anything, you just saw the lights above the door moving, 12, 13, 14, 15, and all of a sudden the door opened and you were in a different place. So the idea occurred, why not bring this journey back into direct perception and yes, one could do this with sound. For example, if you controlled sound in the car with the elevator’s motion, you could make something which would sound different for every trip. If you put, say, layers of sound in the elevator shaft, as the elevator car went up the shaft it would go through each one of these layers. Which stops it made would determine how long the layers were stretched in time or compressed in time. Depending on where you got on and where you got off it would determine which sounds you actually heard. It is possible to build a sound work that in fact is generated by the pathways of each group of passengers that takes the elevator. That’s the fundamental concept. And no, there has never been an architect who has even started a discussion about this idea with me, but it would be wonderful to realise it, of course.
HUO Hello.
MN Are you still there?
HUO Yes. That was my last question so I wanted to thank Max very, very much and thank again also Anna Maria and Micele, and of course Stefano. It has only just begun. Thank you very much.
MN Thank you, ciao, Hans.