2000
11-Apr-00
Interview with Max Neuhaus by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev
CCB: A work of yours is the result of the interaction between sound and site rather than being a sound in a site or a site with sound.
MN: Yes they more than site specific, the site is the physical element of the work, what I make the work out of. Using sound, I transform a place by adding sound to it. The site isn't a place to put a sculpture, it 's what I make the sculpture out of.
CCB: So is the sculpture made out of two elements, sound and site.
MN: Yes, but the site includes everything, its sounds, its physical aspect, its social expectations...
CCB: It is the material of your artwork, along with the sound that you add to it. What is the relation between the visual and the aural, the invisibility and the visible.
MN: Our two principal receptors, in our present day form as organisms, are our eyes and ears. We don't use our nose or sense of touch to the degree that we use these other two. Eye and ear don't operate independently. They are always working as a team: each time one perceives something, it checks it with the other. They do different things: they compliment each other. The eye perceives space in one way the ear perceives space in another. The analogy I always to use make the point clear is the one of an anechoic chamber. This is a room which has no sound in it and no sound reflections because the walls are heavily padded. For the eye, this is a completely plausible space. It's not frightening. But for the ear it's another story. After a little while it goes into panic because, for it, the lights just went out. After a few minutes in this room this begins to make you feel very uncomfortable.
Another aspect of the eye and ear relationship is that we are very conscious of what we see while the ear is largely unconscious: most of the things we use it for we don't think about. For instance, right now you are hearing me talk but you don't think of it as sound. You hear only meaning. The whole process that's going on to get the sound out of my mouth and into an idea in your mind is done unconsciously by both of us.
Another fundamental point about the visual and the aural for me is that if you change a way a place sounds you also change the way it looks. I have made pieces where I put two different sounds into two identical spaces and made one place look bigger than the other.
CCB: What is the relationship between the already preexisting sounds that are found at a site and the newly created sounds that you add to that site?
MN: If your working in stone, and the stone has some character, you use that character when you're making a work. A place has a sound character and I build on that, I shape with that in the same way.
When I make a Place, I build upon a given - an aural given, a visual given, a physical given, a social given. The first creative act for me is finding the site of these Places.
CCB: The first Place that you made was 'Fan Music' in 1968. What was your personal experience of preparation of that piece, what did you...what where you looking for in the sounds what where you noticing, what did you pick up on and how did you proceed?
MN: It was early, at a time when there weren't many techniques for shaping sound, but it was a realization of several fundamental ideas of the Place works. One was the idea of aural topography - shaping sounds in space - and the second was the idea of an installation of sound. At that time, no one had made a sound installation. The only things you did with sound were concerts. Fan Music went on for three days, it was a topography and it was not an event anymore, people came, went and returned.
CCB: Topography in the sense of a mapping of a landscape or a landscape?
MN: Making sounds occupy physical shapes.
CCB: So you call it topography and not a landscape because a landscape refers to a painting or the picturesque? Topography refers to measuring also, to some sort of precise drawing of a territory, of a map almost.
MN: A topography of a piece of land is its shape in three dimensional space. I am referring to only a part of the work, the idea that its sounds have shapes. If we start talking about landscape, its aural landscape, then we are talking about the work's character also.
CCB: The difference between what you do and music is related to the dimension of time, which is negated in these Place works.
MN: Time is left to the viewer as it is in a painting or a piece of sculpture.
The instant we are born we learn that the only experience we have of sound is as its unfolds in time. Events occur, somebody says something, somebody drops something, all these things have meaning only as events. Speech can only take place over time. I have to say the whole word before you can understand it and that takes time. In music of course its the same, it only takes on meaning as its sound event unfolds over time.
On the other hand in these Place works of mine the sounds are usually a continuum, either a sound texture or a sound color that doesn't change. The sound has no meaning in time. I have pulled the sound out of time.
CCB: Many other artists of the same period where doing the everse, they where putting art works into time, they were saying that a painting is never out of time, since it depends on the light that you see them in, like with a Turrell that is monochrome but is an eternally changing monochrome.
MN: These Place works also change with changes in their visual as well as aural environment, but this is not the same as time in music: they have a meaning independent of time, music has none without time.
CCB: What are sound fields?
MN: This is also a term concerned with technique. Building a space with sound is very much more than simply 'playing' a sound there. I have to articulate the space I am building for the listener's ear.
A sound field is built with perceptual queues for the ears. In the work in Venice, at the last Biennale, I built an invisible sound sphere. Even though the sound was coming from the ground you didn't hear it coming from there, you felt as though you were in a huge space immersed in sound.
CCB: Like a field of energy....
MN: Yes, but more, I gave the ear an image of a spherical space.
CCB: Are all your works experienced by the audience moving through and around these sites and sound fields, or is there anything that is the reverse, where the viewer would be standing still and the sound would some how be moving around.
MN: There are the Moment works which are the sounds which appear so gradually that you don't notice them and then suddenly disappear. You notice only their disappearance. These Moments are opposite of the Place works. They are everywhere but only for a moment whereas the place works are only one place but they are always there.
CCB: You have been using computers since the seventies. What is the relationship between physical perceptions, our bodily perceptions through our eyes and ears, and the artificial, the computer or the electronic?
MN: For me, the computer simply offers a means to shape sound, but I shape it with my mind.
CCB: Do you use recorded sounds or are they all synthetic sounds?
MN: They are all sounds from my imagination, I don't use recordings.
CCB: Is there are relationship between your drawings with color and the timbre of the sounds in the sound work?
MN: No. People are always trying to make music visible or make architecture into music... its always a disaster. I use color in my drawings only to make distinctions between things.
CCB: How do you choose color?
MN: The same way I choose sounds.
CCB: What's that? You choose sounds with your eye?
MN: No with my ear, I mean I work as an artist.
CCB: You mean it's intuitive.
MN: Yes.
CCB: Looking over your drawings, have you noticed a pattern in the way that you choose colors?
MN: There are in fact bright colors as well as bright sounds. Of course, I wouldn't use a dull color to distinguish a bright sound, but that is more to avoid a contradiction than an attempt to represent the same thing with the visual.
CCB: The sublime is an indefinable experience but one that can somehow indirectly or intuitively be perceived, but your work is also very close to that dream of somehow evoking or experiencing the sublime.
In putting the visual and the aural so close into relationship it is as if one where shifting the element of desire away from the visual towards the aural, and away from the aural towards the visual, away from the words that are poetic, into the image from the drawing. You are painting to an in-between space that is between what you hear and the drawing made up of visual image and words, in-between the sunlight and the sound of the birds and the noise from the people at the openings of these events and these sounds, it is as if one where trying to reach a space that is not a mental space, because its bodily, but its not a bodily space either, its something in-between.
MN: Yes.
CCB: It has to do with the notion of an absolute art, interdisciplinary or the total art work of the avant-garde.
MN: Sound is quite a wonderful medium. It is abstract by nature once one moves out of the codified areas of speech and music. The essence of what I do when I build a work lies in the nature of the sounds I build into a given context, what I call the character of the sound. We all have a sense of sound character. We are born with it perhaps, or learn it at a very early age. It is inherent in the sounds around us. For example, in our language, we use it as another layer of meaning on top of our verbal language -- it tells the listener how to interpret the verbal meaning. We do it without thinking by shaping the contours of tone and emphasis in our speech and also by adjusting the sound of different parts of the words. Our response to these nuances is highly refined: through minute differences in sound character we are often able to pinpoint the birthplace of a speaker.
You can think of sound character as having a number of continuums of meaning lying between distant points, say, harsh and smooth or rich and thin or warm and cold, superimposed upon each other. In the area between these points, within the nature of the sound itself, lies an immense zone of meaning. Its expressions are transcultural: they are neither literal nor codified.
CCB- What are the differences or similarities or the relationships between the works you made for outdoors and the works done indoors.
MN- The works indoors have much less of a sonic element related to the site because they are inside, but they do also have sounds. Often I attach sounds to a Place that are assumed to be sounds of the site but are actually added. The work for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (1979) had sounds which you didn't think about. Your body assumed they were the sounds of air moving, like a ventilation system. Although you didn't hear this consciously, it was what made the piece plausible in the space. Your mind could justify it as the sound of air circulating.
CCB- What did you do before you had all the software of today?
MN- One can't make a sound installation with a record or a tape.
Neither can one install musicians somewhere for twenty-four hours a day for infinity. I had to find some means to make sound continue, so I built my own machines - when I stopped performing as a percussionist, I taught myself how to build electronic circuits that generated sound.
CCB: Parts of your work is focus on the synchronic. However, some pieces you have done are walk throughs or stairwell pieces, experiences one has in passages. Could you tell me about the piece that you just did in Berne (1999), the 'Suspended Sound Line'.
MN - It was a public commission. From the plans for the site, I selected a pedestrian bridge three meters wide and thirty meters long over roadway.
As it wasn't built yet, I had input what the bridge's construction would be and I was able to realize a unique topography, a segmented line of sounds where the sounds actually abutted one another. The topography is highly defined. When you are standing a few meters in front of the bridge you hear nothing, it's only when you step on the bridge that you enter what seems like a corridor - although the bridge is completely open you feel as though you are walking through a tunnel. I divided the bridge into seven segments, each about four meters long. The segments alternate between two contrasting sounds.
CCB So it joins the Place works with the Moment works in a way, when one passes form one to the next one perceives the proceeding.
MN - It actually falls into a group of ideas I call Passages; ideas for moving sidewalks, for elevators, corridors, places that by their nature people are moving in.
CCB So the two different sounds what are they like?
MN - Ah, this question. Because our activities with sound are so unconscious, we don't have much of a vocabulary for talking about sound - we rarely do. There is no way to effectively describe these sounds with words - you can't say they sound like something you already know.
CCB - Yesterday the idea of doing this interview came up because I was talking about gardens- your work makes me think of gardens - and I perceived you didn't like that analogy or find it pertinent.
MN- Now I see the connection between your wanting to use the word landscape - typography is a very lean term for what I build, I do build luscious things, but I don't know, garden is...
CCB - You have done works with sites in parks, Lake Lucern, Documenta VI, Domaine De Kerguehennec... can you tell me about that experience working in sites that have fresh air, sunlight sometimes trees, sometimes running water..
MN - Venice also...
CCB - ...because of course the experience of the viewer is very different.
MN - Its not so much the distinction between inside and outside for me its really the unique nature of each site, the nature of the site itself. That's the real difference between works. I would never group them - inside / outside.
CCB - So you would never group them inside / outside - so you don't make a distinction between what is so called between nature and culture - gardens are not natural of course, because they are artificially constructed , but you don't feel that there is any distinction to be made from that perspective. However you are interested in these different types of perception - doing pieces in water has something to do with the different kinds of perception that one has.
MN - But doing a work in water is so very different from doing one in air.
CCB- What gardens tend to do is to enhance the different senses because there is not just the visual of if your sitting in a concert hall in the dark you tend to try to focus on listing and if your sitting in a gallery in front of a painting you try to focus on that - gardens are have been a kind of activity of creating something that's like a sculpture but that usually enhances different things like smell and touch.
MN - I think gardens are much more functional than an artworks, but of course it depends on who makes them.
CCB - So you don't see your works... it's strange because I experience them (its what I meant by landscape ) almost like gardens - gardens of sound.
MN - I don't really object to it, I think your idea comes from the fact that although I only add sound to a location the result is a transformation of it visually as well as aurally.
CCB - Could you tell me about the work for Documenta VI.
MN - It was clicking sounds (snap) like this, that seemed to come from points on the ground in a clearing underneath a very old, large, oak tree in the Karlsaue Park.
CCB - Why this particular site.
MN- I usually don't know why, but only when I have found it - when the bell rings - that's it.
CCB - So you took a walk and they said you could use any place you wanted inside or outside...
MN - No I was invited very late, so it had to be outside. I was in Kassel for only for five hours or so and I had to decide on a site and make a proposal. I really moved fast through the town then down into the park. I came across it.
CCB - So you saw the tree...
MN - I saw the tree but it was the clearing which hit me. In fact I did use the tree to put the sound sources in - sort of sound
spotlights - but the sounds seemed to come from various points on the ground - a clicking sound in the woods its kind of a natural sound - like stepping on a twig - its also a neutral sound. They were irregularly spaced clicks [snap...snap.. snap...... snap.............snap]
CCB - Its beautiful
MN - It was a beautiful piece, yes.
CCB - So you were inspired by this natural landscape, it was the oak and the clearing - you mentioned the clearing.
MN - The clearing yes, its not so much inspiration, when I'm site hunting its very intense its like when your making something.
CCB - But what are you looking for?
MN- I don't want to know what I'm looking for, its best when you don't know, the best artists, I always say, don't know what they are doing, they just know exactly what to do.
CCB - The clearing makes me think again of poetry and of sort of the space in-between. A clearing is a space in-between.
MN - The clearing was made by this tree, it covered so much area.
CCB - How was the piece made -how was it thought of and technically how was it made , what were the sound sources?
MN - I built a circuit to make the clicks and I also built some very directional loud speakers. I put the whole thing up in the tree along with four big batteries and camouflaged it. I aimed the speakers at different points around the clearing.
CCB - And the sound itself? The source?
MN - It was the circuit
CCB - Again it wasn't a recorded sound, it was artificial sound.
MN -Yes,Imadeit.
CCB - It's a very visual work, given the tree and the grass - its like walking inside a painting - a natural landscape.
MN - The clicks coming from different points on the ground in the clearing drew your attention to its expanse.
CCB - Markers almost.
MN - Yes, they built the space... it was over there -so your consciousness of the space extended to that point... then it moved over there... gradually the space was constructed.
CCB - But they were alternating..
MN - No, it was one kind of click, spaced irregularly, often with several seconds in between each one.
CCB - So that the sounds created definition and markers that created the boundaries of a virtual space.
MN - Yes, stretched your attention. Pulled your attention into the space.
CCB -So its like being inside a sculpture.
MN - Yes, its being inside something. All my works are experienced by being inside... you can't stand outside them
CCB - There are two questions I want to ask. First, about the categories that you mentioned yesterday - each one being something that is throughout all your work. The second is the reverse, do you feel that from the sixties through today there has been a evolution in your work or is it always the same sculpture that your making?
MN - I'll take the second question first. According to current practice in the visual arts I could have taken something like the work in Documenta VI and for most of the rest of my life made clearings with clicks.
CCB - Like lots of TALLE DE FONTAINA
MN - In fact the Place works are incredibly diverse, it's the diversity of their sites which drives the very different ideas of each work. But it is strange, the way many in the visual arts think about sound. For them using sound is the basic concept of the work, not a medium.
CCB - For example the Walks, you were doing more Walks earlier on then now.
MN - Yes, and I don't do any more pieces in water.
CCB - Why has that happened?
MN - The walks were my first independent work as an artist....this idea of pulling people out of the concert hall with their aural attention in tact.
CCB -In a sense at first it was yourself that was guiding people to noticing certain sounds in their environment and relationships between the visual and the aural that they wouldn't have normally noticed and secondly you begin to remove your persona of it and to construct these pointers without yourself pointing to things but with the sounds you construct.
MN - Don't forget at the end of the sixties nobody in contemporary art was working in public space. Public art didn't exist as a term the artists that were working there were artists who made statues of horses and politicians.
CCB -I know, I know, Vito Acconci started at about the same time
MN - Vito wasn't doing works in public spaces yet at the end of the 60s. To get out of the concert hall was a huge step. The next step was to make something which wasn't an event.
CCB - Ah! - Very important, because way to get out is obviously to create an event to performance or happening.
MN - The water pieces established the idea of an installation. It wasn't an event anymore. It was a sound installation where the public was free to come and go. In the context of all other sound work at the time - music - to come 'late' was bad enough but to leave before it was 'over'...if people walked out of your concert it was supposed to be really bad.
CCB - What are the Networks?
MN - Constructions of virtual aural spaces - two way sound spaces - by combining a broadcast with the telephone network - building sound spaces which people entered by telephoning into a radio broadcast.
CCB - But the radio broadcast was in a room or on any body's radio?
MN - On any body's radio
CCB - So you were on the radio when you were doing this?
MN-Yes,thefirstoneIdidwasatWBAIin1966. Itwasavery radical idea because there ware no call in shows in 1966. The engineer was terrified that the station would lose its license, he refused to have anything to do with it.
CCB -So this was before people would do the phone calls to radios.
MN - Yes.
CCB - So you invented it and they copied you?
MN -Yeah maybe, but they used it in a very different way. The Networks are continuations of my activities in music, they are unconnected with the plastic arts. They propose the self-evolution of new musics. Their premise is a form of music making which exists now only in societies untouched by modern culture. Rather than something to be listened to, music in these cultures is an activity open to the public at large -- a dialogue with sound rather than a performance. This first one in New York created a public two-way aural space twenty miles in diameter encompassing the whole city. Any inhabitant could enter the live sound dialogue by making a telephone call.
CCB - Sound dialogue with the audience.
MN - Between themselves.
CCB - In your sound sculptures - do you call them sound sculptures?
MN - No, I designate my whole oeuvre as sound works and divide it into these eight vectors or directions - Place / Moment / Passage /
Networks / Performance / Walks / Water / Invention.
CCB - Invention?
MN - Yes, but that's a different thing. In that category I am not functioning as an artist anymore, but as an engineer or designer.
MN - But to stay with the Networks for a moment, music today is also part of a dialogue, but it's a dialogue of specialists - if your playing in an orchestra your not alone, you're in a dialog with the rest of the orchestra, if you're a jazz musician your dialogue is with the other musicians in the group. I believe the original impulse for music was a dialog between everyone not just 'specialists'. On our way to materializing music we lost this idea. Actually I didn't go in this direction because of a theory - the theory came about in retrospect. The idea just grew. The last Network realized was a broadcast by NPR on two hundred stations around the country with five cities that people called into. It was a two hour broadcast in the afternoon of New Years Day in 1977. Since then I've wanted to make one that is a permanent entity and global.
CCB - on the internet?
MN - Internet doesn't work because everybody would need a computer and it could be a long time before everyone has one. The beauty of these pieces are that anybody anywhere with only a telephone can enter them.
CCB - .So the only reason that your not thinking of the internet its not distributed enough.
MN -Yes, and that it is too slow at the moment.
MN - The most sophisticated sound making means that everybody has is their voice. These pieces weren't just people talking or yelling at each other. The first one I moderated myself boosting the shy and moderating the excessive to make the group function together. Later on I began to make 'instruments' for them to play with their voice - the voice would come in and would do something. In the first one of these, each voice controlled the pitch of a tone, so there was a luster of tones which were very slowly changing, gliding, their voices floated on top of this.
In Radio Net, the work for the whole country, I used a techniquewhich is now called graining where you combine instants of sound. At that time NPR's programs were distributed to their two hundredstations on a wire loop. I reconfigured their system into five loops and closed each with a frequency shifter. The combined grains of sound from the callers circulated in each of these loops shifting in pitch with each cross country pass. It produced the most wonderful textures - it was quite spectacular
CCB - You only heard it off the radio - that's beautiful, like a concert. That seems almost opposite of the Place works.
MN -Yes, it had no place, you could hear it or join it from anywhere. Also, it was music: it existed in time
CCB - What would be the similarity between these two. Why would Max Neuhaus doing these two things that seem so different - I mean its not just sound. Why not? Why not other things?
MN - I don't know, these vectors have been there throughout my life as an artist. They sprang up at one point and ever since, I've been extending each one.
CCB - So Places would be the environment, the Networks would be the people and Moment would be time, Performance would be yourself...its somehow categories of the world around us
MN - Maybe. I have simplified with these names, but I like them as one word names.
CCB - But its true In our life we do live in spaces and we meet people and we do have a watch and we do have ideas So maybe these are.
MN - They are really general metaphors. When I first started to have interviews the interviewers always became desperate to try and somehow find a way to pull them together. The more they would ask me questions, the more it would pull it apart, though. I realized at one point that I was at the center of these vectors moving out in different directions... they were each moving away at a different angle, and there really was no point in trying to join them into a grand whole.
CCB - That's why I think of your work in relation to gardens, I think gardens, as a metaphor, are very complex. They are natural and cultural poly-sensorial. They are the complex things where we have to balance between how much we can do and how much we find. They're abstract but they are not they are real. So somehow I see that as a metaphor of a lot of things that are.