Transcript of the conversation between Max Neuhaus, Paul Robbrecht
And Yehuda Saftan. Encore Brussels, March? 1997
Transcript of the conversation between Max Neuhaus, Paul Robbrecht
And Yehuda Saftan. Encore Brussels, March? 1997
Paul Robrecht:
It is interesting to note that documenta initially was part of an enormous event in Germany which is the Kunst ... because each time it's based only ... ten or seven years ... And one fragment of this whole event ... and precisely that corner which is a quite interesting fifties building Max Neuhaus installed this particular work. And the corner volume of this building is a spiral staircase which is a very interesting piece of architecture of the fifties and I think it's also a building which is protected. So you can imagine the position of the work in the whole setting of the city there ... the AOK building which is an insurance company in Germany, the national insurance company, and its staircase is where Max Neuhaus has done this piece.
For me the piece had a kind of position of a turning point ... ... much of our activity as architect during that documenta. So I was able to experience the piece and it was something for me that brought immediately some thoughts ... my profession as an architect and I had to think about because here was a piece of art ... you can't see anything ... at the same time so dense ... sound piece.... I was thinking about the connection of art and architecture (This is difficult to transcribe because of the traffic and his not being near enough to the microphone.) ... I was constructing down there, sixteen meters below this piece ... some elements that all of a sudden became very clear when the documenta was running and people were walking on the staircase, experiencing the work, and people were walking in the ... things in the work are articulated by moving people into a space, that all things are finally formed by the presence of people in a space and that I could understand the work finally at that moment when people were there. It was of course an important element that you could walk in ... a spiral staircase in a type of glass box that was overlooking the landscape Another element that came to my mind was that the work that you made there made me see that architecture has this materiality in the world and that art is doing something different.
I'm not talking about immaterial. I think it's towards the tectonic character of architecture ...One of the big possibilities of art is that it can work with illusion, with something which is representing something. Then I have to distinguish with your work that your work is there; it's not visual but it is there.
Max Neuhaus: In the past I've always thought of my work as Immaterial because you can't touch it, but on the other hand, I describe the process of making one as building a place and I treat it as a place, even though when I have finished you can't see any change in the space - the sound sources are never seen.
But what I have finally realized is that my work is not immaterial at all. It's the place itself which becomes the material part of the work. What you were saying also about the idea of illusion - for me the work only exists in the mind of each individual perceiver. That's partly because you can't photograph it, you can't publish it, you can't record it. It's manifested in the imaginations and perceptions of its visitors, and that's its only existence. One can talk about those things and move around them, but that's really all it is. But for me that's the essence of what we do as artists; we catalyze an experience, a train of thought, a voyage in a perceiver, whether it's eye or ear.
P.R.: ......?
M.N.:I use this word 'catalyst' because I'm fascinated by the variations, the fact that most people perceive these works completely differently. And it's not about projecting a specific image from my mind; it's about catalyzing a situation, catalyzing a process, catalyzing the aesthetic process.
P.R.: Another element that I thought about was the idea of movement. ...
M.N.: It was an amazing space because it wasn't one glass box; it was really three glass boxes with this pathway in the center - three glass boxes connected by this spiral staircase. One thing that I realized almost immediately was that it was very strange in the way that people entered it. Because you entered each space on the stairway, your ears entered each level before you eyes. So instead of entering a space face first, you entered it ears first.
The first ideas that I had about making a work there was to make three different layers of sound that you entered head first, so to speak. It was a bit complicated acoustically because, even though visually it was three boxes, acoustically because of the big opening in the center it was one space. The final form and the whole name of the piece, Three to One, was about these three distinct layers that you heard distinctly when you first entered this space, and as you walked through it finding each layer - your memory of the past layer and the present layer formed one thing out of these three distinct parts. You could certainly stay on one floor for half an hour if you wanted to, but the experience of the piece was moving through it and your memory coming into play in the journey and its coalescing the experience into making the spaces into something else.
P.R.: .. you're dealing with something which is actually very static: architecture is about statics ... still the thought in the back of your mind of movement
M.N.: ..and all the possible ways that people could go through this building
P.R.: ...a lot of architecture suggests movement; the fifties staircase suggests a spiral movement. ... also in very contemporary issues of architecture, this architecture wants to suggest movement, change, differences of layers, and so on. Of course your work is supporting that possibility. ...feeling of differences and movement.
M.N.: I had the feeling that the reason why you're ambiguous about that in architecture has to do with the difference between a kind of freedom and coercion, pushing people in a certain direction or allowing. But when you build a building you build something, and how the building looks is coupled with its physical shape. Where the hallways are, where the doors are, do set up a situation. Yes, there seems to be a movement in current architecture which is more about coercion than about freedom.
P.R.: ... something which is not static ...
M.N.: Their shape but also inside you didn't walk around the room; you had to walk through the room
P.R.: ...
M.N.: I use this word 'place' firstly to distinguish between the neutral term 'space', something which contains air - I use it in a special way; I usually capitalize it if I write it or put it in italics. It's another element on the physical element of a block of inside air; it's also its character. I call this group of pieces that are in specific locations and always there I call the form 'place' because it takes a space and makes a place out of it. The basic principle and the reason that I'm in the plastic arts and not in music is that we perceive space both with eye and ear. We're much more conscious about what we see than what we hear, but in fact the eye and the ear function as a very closely linked team, and if you change what either one is perceiving it changes the other. The best example I have is this experience that John Cage talks about but is very well known. If you walk into what's called an anechoic chamber, which is a room used by scientists to investigate sound itself - so it's completely quiet and there are no reflections - and the room is quite normal and plausible visually but aurally it's completely implausible. And most people get very nervous in this room because half of the team is missing. The eye and the ear constantly check with each other to see what's going on, and if one of them is sending a strange message the other one .... Traditionally people in the plastic arts have adjusted the way we experience a space visually. I having been focused on sound for all my life thought of changing this perception through the other sense of the ear. And the reason it's not music is because it's about space, but also these place works are completely out of time. Music is a form which is about events basically, and my idea was for the first time in history to pull sound out of time, make something with sound which had no time. If we think about it, all of our sound world is just events. It's the event of my words happening here; it's the event of the squeak of the car outside; but it's something which occurs and stops or disappears or passes. An important element about all these pieces is that they're always there, so this fundamental dimension of sound - time - is gone. That also pulls them into the plastic arts because they're static in time.
Yehuda Safran: I'm in a peculiar relationship to the other two speakers since they tend to speak about things that are not here and the credit for them speaking here tonight ... which you can neither hear nor see, that you have to rely on your imagination and your knowledge. Well, I'm here by virtue of being as it were a critic who depends on what he can present at the time in which he presents it. In that sense he enters into performance art, and indeed I think the great pleasure of Max Neuhaus's work is that it is always so contemporary and always so as it were ahead of its time precisely because it is a bit archaic: a work which is timeless, a work in which there are no events. It seems that almost every rubric, almost every category of his work suggests a work that is against most of the precepts architecture and art plastique.
In architecture the idea of event has become in fact the most dominant one. There is an important group of architects - not grouped as a group but understood to be subscribing precisely to such a concept of architectural construction as events.
The other difference that permeates my intervention is that I do not belong to either and belong to both, architecture and art, which have always made my own life a bit difficult. And therefore perhaps I am a little bit more qualified than others to speak on this occasion. I thought that the best way to present my thoughts in the most coherent manner and succinctly is to read a few pages which were originally written apropos the work of Max because you realize that since the work as I portrayed it rather goes against the grain in some sense it has been extremely difficult for Max even to find somebody who would address his drawings, for example, as drawings because they are unlike other drawings.
They're not like technical drawings, they're not like architectural drawings, they're not drawings made by sculptors as preparatory drawings for their sculptures, they're not drawings of a painter. They are drawings of somebody who thinks with sound. In that sense it is something incredibly powerful which normally we ignore and that is that writings have exactly the same character.
And so between these senses I suggest the following words in order to articulate it.
For me the inspiring outside reference in this sense is the writing of Edmond Jabes who always felt that writing is a kind of mimicking the body, mimicking the life of that body, mimicking the life which could only be conceived not as a series of events but as an event tout court. So the first paragraph is from his poem 'Elle' where he says the inside and the outside are only the arbitrary ... of the division of an infinite time whose minutes always moving forward call the center constantly into question. So in the beginning there is transparency ... and we are all ears. In any event beginning meansclearing away.
Each work assumes the unmediated character of what we call a beginning. The moment our pencil draws them the voices are set free. They are the sound, mixture of sounds, remote, sign and inscription made some time after what was not written, no longer sound, a drawing not yet a sound. Max said 'to change perception' but in fact it's not only to change perception; it's to make perception alive. And yet this kind of mark, writing, drawing acquires the unmediated character of a beginning. the peculiarity of a leap out of the unmediatable, which does not exclude but rather includes the fact that the beginning invisible as it is has prepared itself for a long duration and often inconspicuously. That from which this art is made does not preexist the art but comes into being only when the art ... the material, and I think here for me the distinction between the material in one case or another it's not so great, it exists. The material in the world as it were does not speak as such but in every work of art whether it's a sound piece or architecture it's what I would call la material parlante. The material ... gives to speak to us in a way by virtue of attending to it; it's born at the point when the painter casts his gaze on the immense reality in movement or if you like in this case his ear for which we have no equivalent to the gaze of the ear or opening one's ear to this immense reality in movement and in doing so endows it with a form ... possibilities and impresses upon it as an artificial destination.
The image and the material, the flesh and the soul, live off each other while they remain forever apart. The beginning of course contains the end within itself. The project of being in the beginning on the contrary always engages the undisclosed abundance of the unfamiliar and the extraordinary which means that it engages in and embraces the familiar and the ordinary. Another very important aspect of Max Neuhaus's work is that the sound is not as it were special except in being there in particular relation but in itself it is a sound electronically produced just as most of the sounds that you are most of the time exposed to, and in brackets I would like to say that we have not yet realized what a shock it has been for us to be in this world as it is now in terms of sound. This shock in my view permeates much of twentieth century art; it's an attempt to accommodate, to mediate, to make it possible to live with this barrage of sounds and of course from a visual point of view just as well. The machine images are not only dealing with the machine as an image; they are also dealing with a new kind of sound with which we have not yet come to terms.
And in fact paradoxically precisely the outcome of this immense technological leap that means that the sound is in our heads, something which it has never been before. If it remains the sound like the red flowers of Mondrian or the sound of a country bell our drawing and our unrealized project had to assume the unmediated character of what we call a beginning, as if we could only speak through the silence of the spaces left empty by their difference. The basic incompatibility between man and his world, between man and his sound, something that keeps them apart, condemned to live off each other and yet at a distance. So much in the world is seen as a visual reflection of this symmetrical creature, the only mute creature who is condemned to sound. The plurality and multiplicity of intervals are solidified in dreams of space which are these places.
A certain sound's constellations which disappear as soon as they become audible, as if in order to be heard they need to take off their appearance. There is another incredibly important aspect in this work which of course we cannot experience now, the fact that in order to be heard they need to take off their appearances. Drawings like notes are like a book whose words we need to cancel to let it return to its quiet plurality, that's Jabes. Words we need to cancel, notes, signs, in order to return to its plurality. The hand draws and writes between places. The lines are either before the sound in anticipation of sound, memory and so forth, or after the sound, an elaboration between seeing and hearing. The memory in back of our memory is hearing with eyes in despair, noise, sound, images, silence. Likewise drawings or the sound pieces before the drawing as if we were here to discover the ... between one point and another no matter how distant and limited our ability to perceive them. Is this perhaps true living knowledge? And again a passage from Jabes: all this ruin necessary for the rise of the spirit, a point beats in your breast - your heart, a point beats for your hand - your pulse, a point beats in space - listen.
One of Max Neuhaus's first works was called 'listen' which meant simply that people were gathering at one point or another in New York where each one received a kind of paper which said 'listen' and they were led by Max on a prearranged itinerary in which all they had to do was to listen, though of course with his ears, guided by his ears. If the body masters our attachment then we are condemned to writing, to a graphic representation within its four walls and margins ... which the eyes convert into a subversive knowledge, knowledge of things which are not. Infinite digressions carved in space between the place under the authority of seeing and the place under the authority of hearing. To listen to a voice, to attend to a reading, is to accept it a priori. We follow an advice; we obey a command.
So these works are born of and exist as the only ... of certain sound configurations which are intimately connected with and could not exist without certain spatial configurations - language which exists in the absence of a language. A terribly important aspect which I don't think has been touched sufficiently so far and perhaps will never be completely understood and that is the idea that the work is actually conceived in relation to a particular spatial configuration and could not exist otherwise.
Hence the refusal which is sometimes frustrating and makes things much more 'complicated' but it is inevitable the refusal of Max to reproduce any of the sounds which frustrates almost every novice on his or her first encounter with his work as a sound of a certain character and yet you cannot hear it, he won't let you hear it, except where it is.
M.N.: Yes, but it's really because the sound isn't the work. This is such a strange idea for an artist to work with a medium where the medium isn't the work, and it's much more strange to work with sound where we only have this example of music where sound is the only thing of the work. I use sound to transform a perception of a place. The analogy would be to say that the only thing that a painting was the paint; therefore we could take it off the canvas and we put it in the box and we have the paint. To take the sound of a work of mine and put it in another place makes no sense. I'm using it to build a place. It loses its spatial configuration in the same way that a painting loses its.
Y.S.: Our innermost being refines sounds, tunes our voices to renew the pact with the world we build in our mind. We make marks in which sound is closer to sound and a groove yet barely a trace, and if the mark is the threshold of a line, of a line casting its shadow as sound. At each turn of the street we are made to make a point of taking our hearing. We draw to circumscribe what is invisible, what we cannot circumscribe, where there is nothing. All is intact; only fragments can be grasped, says Jabes. In ... universe we are experimenting with writing; our attempt to approach it will have failed.
One language may provide us with a much larger vocabulary for hearing than another, but it is not necessarily nearer sound. And yet the reality of art is made by individuals who do not fit into the world conceived collectively, who have a certain conception of the world other than given in the games people play. What these individuals don't always realize is that even with the complete dedication of their lives the most they can achieve is a small change in the rules by which these communal games of mankind are played. We are after all above everything by a deliberate choice, a careful selection, of unique experiences which we choose from the most secret recesses of our inner selves. Immense empty spaces are thus discarded from life because they have left no trace. We are concerned with the most difficult and exacting of impressions. The memory which rejects the dispersion of the actual world and which derives from the treasures of the lingering sound, the secret of a new and ancient universe.
We undertake the task of recreating our experiences and in doing so we demonstrate in the face of the passing time that the past would be regained at the end of time, now in the form of an imperishable present, both truer and richer than it was at the beginning. Painters eliminate as much as they include. We isolate our subject both in time and space if our action is not to be lost in another action. Thus we arrive at the point of equilibrium. The painters give the impression that the ... is the only ... they can place, that your own movement has arrested its movement. In this respect it's completely comparable with most classical examples long after ... Breugel's Icarus falls into the sea ... the same sun continues to melt his temporary wings.
How, strange a thing it is, painting which beguiles us by the resemblance of objects which do not please us at all. ... These objects do not please us at all because we do not see them. They are obscured and negated by a perpetual process of change and purpose. We hear the prose of the world each day of our lives, but we neglect it. But we see and hear it represented, transfigured by the incessant movement of intelligence and the free exercise of rationality which is our equivalent for the passionate agony of Christ.
Again and again we are drawn into either metaphysical conceptions as Mach described Newton's notion of absolute time which is independent of change, non observable, a pure mental construct that cannot be produced in experience, and an absolute space which exists without relation to anything external. Our laboratory cannot be considered insulated ... by matter in a remote part of the universe. Indeed Mach instructed his reader not to forget that all things in the world are connected with one another and depend on one another and that we ourselves and all our thoughts are also part of nature. According to the author of ... a cabalistic text ... the vessel to contain the divine light broke in the primeval act of cosmic drama and the light of the divinity became scattered throughout the world. To lift up the scattered sparks of light and to restore them to the place they were intended to occupy had not catastrophe intervened. This is the essential task of a man in the process of repair - it's called ... in cabalistic language. There is a kind of redemption which can take place in every man in every time, and it does not require messianic redemption. Discovering much ofourselves in distant landscapes and language we turn out to be exiles out of our own time as if there is no epoch. Only green grass, ash trees declaim objects, dragonflies over ponds, but no epoch. ... That from Adam Jagowitski, apropos the fact that these works claim their time as it were as given, not as changing.
M.N.: I have to take exception with what you said about fifteen minutes ago, about the fact that the sound isn't special, partly because I spend a great deal of time and energy making the sound. On the other hand, you're quite right because in each of the sound works I have to make the sound fit in the space, and so I work at the same time towards making something extraordinary happen, but in order for that to happen the sound indeed has to be not special or plausible within its context.
But 'not special' is not true, Yehuda.
Y.S.: But not special in its origin, it's special in its destination.
M.N.: Its origin is my imagination or am I mistaking what you're saying?
Y.S.: The sound comes from the sound that's there, in some sense.
M.N.: No. I synthesize it just as a painter synthesizes a color.
But I make it by ear, by applying it to a space, listening to it, comparing it with another sound, changing it in some way, gradually evolving it until it embeds itself perceptually in a given context. It's not something which is casual at all; it a process which usually takes ten days or so before it finally gells and finally works. Question from the audience: For the piece in documenta did you try different sounds or did you have the right sound from the first?
M.N.: It's not so much trying sounds.
Our reference is, yes, we have a collection of records and we play them. But for me I go into a space and try the first sound and I work with a kind of palette of sounds - the same relationship as palette has for a painter - it's a starting point for a particular sound but actually shape the sound by ear in space. No, the first sound never works. It's not choosing the right sound; it's gradually forming the right sound in the space.
It was complicated by having to make three layers, three sounds next to each other which sounded different at first - at the same time a very complex puzzle to put together because they all had to sound different at one point but even though they all had elements which were heard in all three places. So it's a process really of building by ear - trying something, trying something else, saying 'well, what if you try this and that'. But in this case it was kind of like three dimensional chess compared to just one.
Y.S.: One of the essential properties is the difference, the difference between one sound and another.
M.N.: Yes, these pieces where I take identical spaces and make two different spaces out of them. They're physically identical, but I can make contradictory spaces out of them by the sound that I build in each one.
I've started articulating what I do. I started just doing it. What I work with is what I've come to call sound character. Sound character is the nature of the sound itself.
We all have a highly developed sense of sound character even though we don't think about it.
We use it when we're speaking by inflecting our speech, by changing the emphasis, the tone of voice. It's a language that we superimpose on verbal language, on the words themselves, that tells the listener how to interpret those words, and often it's really what people listen for.
We listen to it completely unconsciously, but its meaning is very profound and very direct. It's very refined. If we think about that most of us in our native language can listen to another speaker and through only sound character, the difference in the way that he pronounces his words, pinpoint where he was born.
So we have this unconscious facility that we use and that we perceive. In music this idea of sound character came through orchestration - that the sound and not just melody and harmony had an aesthetic meaning. So as music progressed from Wagner into Edgar Varese - with Wagner you could still play a lot of the music on the piano and know which piece it is but it's very much different, there's a lot missing, if the orchestra isn't there, if the sound character isn't there.
As music goes further into Stockhausen there is no melody and harmony, so if you don't have the sound character you don't have the work.
Still it's only part of the meaning in music, and what I do when I build, when I shape, when I form, when I evolve a sound for a particular space is distill this element, this parameter of sound character and build only with that. It's a very nice material to work with as an artist because it's pan-cultural.
Our normal daily sound world exists in two broad categories, I think. One is literal, that is to say, the sounds of things, that identify those things - the sound of a dog, a cat, a car, a bang. Those are all literal meanings of sound; they tell us something about the event that happened. And we have another part of our sound world which is codified, which is the sound world that I'm using right now with language. The meaning of the word doesn't have anything to do with the sound. The word 'sound' doesn't give you a meaning because it sounds a certain way; it gives you a meaning because you know this particular sound means something, so it's codified. But sound character is on top of both those things. It's not literal, and it's not codified, which means that it can pass between cultures.
Anyone from any culture can perceive a work of mine because it's not part of their culture and it uses this very fundamental carrier of meaning, this idea of sound character. It's also completely unarticulated. I'm the first person to try to articulate it, which means that it's free of a lot of baggage and rhetoric.
I'm building its rhetoric right now.
Q.: How do you choose a space. Do you accept the space as it is? Do you listen for some kind of particular space, or do you want ...?
M.N.: I don't know, really. In the case of 'Three to One', the piece in Kassel, I was offered that space, and I had the choice of either accepting it or proposing another space. But it was carefully offered, so it was indeed a wonderful foundation; three vertically juxtaposed spaces. There is also a group of my works which exist anonymously in cities, and in those cases finding the place is crucial; I can't start to conceive a work without the place I'm going to build with. It's like trying to build a building without a brick. Often those selections are completely intuitive. I can't find a practical reason why I made a piece in a hole in the ground in the middle of Times Square.
I just knew that that was the place. I guess I have to feel that I can come to an agreement with it, that I can in some way do what I do with it. But I don't really know why.
Q.: You mean you can't play one of your sounds anywhere?
M.N.: No, it has to work. Something has to be there. I have to know I can get it to click.
I'm usually commissioned by an institution or a city, and the first thing that happens is that I visit and I know that I have a range of places where I could do a work. I look at it and then I talk to the people who are there - because I can see it physically and I can see it acoustically but they can tell me what its meaning is socially in this particular context. And with that information I usually propose several locations and come to an agreement about a site.
But if someone said 'you have to do it on this street corner', I couldn't.
A good site flashes, and I can get five or six flashes out of a given area.
But if it doesn't flash it's not going to fly.
P.R.: Some of your work is about the disappearance of sound, though.
M.N.: Yes, one group of my works is this idea of place. There is another group of works which are less known because I've made fewer of them which are about this idea of moment.
They are sounds which occur over a whole city or a large area of a city very regularly but they have a contradictory nature. They arrive very, very gradually, so you don't know that they're arriving. And they suddenly disappear, and it's their disappearance which you notice, which creates this moment.
They're connected to a tradition of sound signals in a city and completely opposite of the place because they're not always there. They create a moment, and the place works create a place.
On the other hand the place works make a place, but it's a place where people exist in their own time.
And the moment works make a moment, but because they're in many Different places at the same time they create a sense of place at that moment. It's one of my favorite contradictions between these two forms. I hope to start doing more of these moment works, but because they're so large scale and involve many people they're a little more difficult to do.
Q.: Are you interested in how people react to your sounds?
M.N.: I'm most happy when I don't know my audience, when I don't know who my audience is. I began as a solo performer. I think most people think that a musical performance is one way; the performer is projecting something on an audience. But if you're a solo performer you know that it's not; it's a conversation - every gesture you make you feel something from this many- headed animal because an audience is an organism within itself.
So when I was a solo performer it was a dialogue between this many headed beast and myself. And when I stopped being a performer one of the things I liked about it was not having to talk directly to the beast, not knowing who the beast was, letting the beast be free.
Q.: The effect of sound on us is very powerful it immerses you, but at the same time it is hard to remember a sound.
M.N.: Those are two very interesting points. Hearing something and seeing something are two opposites. You're immersed in a sound like you are in a liquid even if the sound is very subtle like the sounds in this work. Sounds still surround you, and you perceive them by their actually touching you; whereas visually we're standing back from it, we're judging its distance by light reflections, you have distance. I think these are fundamental differences. Each piece is different, though and each sound is different. The sounds of these three layers in Kassel for instance aren't static.
They're moving. These kinds of sounds are what I call sound texture, a constant sound color, but within the detail of this color there's movement, there's activity. I think this also contributes to the idea of liquidity. The other point you're bringing up is one of the nicest aspects of these pieces. It's really a kind of afterimage; your mind remembers this sound.
And because I make sounds which aren't literal but are plausible - they're near literal – after you've heard a work of mine, often you can walk out of it and when you hear a sound that's close to that sound you remember the sound and recreate the sound as an afterimage in your own mind. These are all things which we usually don't think about because we don't in daily life deal with sound this way. We only deal with it as language or as the literal, and I provoke another kind of sound life I hope.
Q.: Do you remember the sounds of all your works?
M.N.: No, I remember them as places. I know the sounds because I've made them all, and I can go back and find one and say 'this is the sound of the work at'. But it's not something that brings the piece back, listening to the sound. It's the place that brings the piece back, because the place is what I've used sound to build. Hearing the sound of a work out of its context is like an architect looking at some bricks from a building that he built.
Of course if I spend ten days building a sound I never forget it. It's like color a painter builds on a palette, it's special, he knows it intimately.
Even though I'm not a painter, it's a very good analogy. There is a lot of hype around about the influence of new technology upon art. People tend to think of people who work with new media as working in a different way. I think artists fundamentally work in the same way, always have, always will. We take a given material, we work it until it works. And the most important thing you need to know to be an artist is knowing when it works.