Two Passages

Contradiction / Dislocation / The Passage Between

Neuhaus distinguishes between a series of works concentrated on 'place' and those where 'passage' is the determining element. In the former, the sound field, the site is fixed, as in his Times Square, an unmarked block of sound on a pedestrian island in New York City's Times Square from 1977 through 1992.

The 'passage' works, on the other hand, are situated in spaces which are longer – a corridor, a bridge – and which imply the physical movement of the listener through space to reach a destination.

These 'passage' works, then, imply an active role on the part of the listener, who sets a piece into motion, so to speak, by walking (or otherwise passing) through it. It also implies a recognition, on the part of this person, of the changing quality of a particular space. The difference between sound zones in a Neuhaus aural topography, is crucial to an understanding of how sound can construct (and deconstruct) a space.

Outside / Inside

A. The Suspension Bridge. It is, first of all, in the form of an arch. It crosses over a road and leads from the former site of a technical school to the new location. Going from the old school, one crosses under a white structure on which are attached the bridge's suspension cables. To the right is a park with a playground. To the left is an apartment building. The walk across, up one side, down the other, takes about fifteen seconds.

B. An office building just outside the center of Bern. It is made primarily of glass and stone. One enters a corridor, which is approximately 120 meters long, lined on the street side with large glass panels. They muffle the sound from outside, but do not eliminate it. Looking down the length of the building, one sees rows of columns and staircases at fixed points which lead to a mezzanine. The impression is of a light, tunnel-like space with demarcated zones.

Max Neuhaus' interventions in these two sites concern the experience of passage, of getting from one place to another.

An Absence of Time

The space is meant to be traversed. The office building is a hub of activity, a place where workers pass through on the way to and from their offices, a space where the public passes through on the way to conducting their business of the day. Each person's entrance and exit will, of course, be temporally marked, whether it is a morning, an afternoon or just five minutes. What strikes one about the sound work in the corridor, however, is its timelessness. It has no past, no present, no future. It cannot be measured as 'music'. It is both formless and seamless. The more we try to measure it, the more elusive it seems.

When one ascends to the mezzanine, the sounds seem more present. As we move along the corridor, as we did below, we become acclimated to the differences in tone and color. Once again, it is our passage through the space which activates the sound for us.

"These sound works are not a form of music. They differ from music in several fundamental ways. They're not a succession of sound events in time. In music, sound takes on meaning only as it progresses in time, as its sound events unfold over time. Instead, here we have blocks of constant sound textures, sound continuums which are unchanging. It is the listener who puts them into his own time.

"The other difference between these works and music is that here the sound is not the work. Here sound is the material with which I transform the perception of space."

Max Neuhaus from a conversation with Michael Tarantino, 1998.

A Different Kind of Movement

This passage through the building (one no longer has to separate the physical, stone and glass, architecture from the sound that has indelibly seeped into it) is broken down into movements. But not, of course, in the sense of musical movements, although the physical sense of that term seems appropriate to the listener's experience of temporally passing through a piece of music. Here, however, as the artist reiterates, it is a question of space, not time.

Nevertheless, one's 'movement' through space, and the different spaces that the sounds and architecture create, are integral to one's perception of the work.

A Kink in Space

In H. G. Wells' story, 'The Remarkable Case of Davidson's Eyes', we are told the story of Sidney Davidson, who, in the course of some experiments on time jumping, is struck blind. Despite his affliction, he is always able to describe an island perfectly. Whether it is a figment of his imagination or an actual place is difficult to decipher. What is clear is that he 'sees' this place, in infinite detail, during the period of his blindness. At the end of the story, the narrator recounts a meeting, some years later, with a man who knew Davidson. He reveals that Davidson had, in fact, been to the island that he was describing with such precision. It was real. Yet how could it have been so real during a period of such trauma, when he had lost the ability to see the world around him?

"That completes the remarkable story of Davidson's eyes. It's perhaps the best authenticated case of real vision at a distance. Explanation there is none forthcoming, except what Prof. Wade has thrown out. But his explanation involves the Fourth Dimension, and a dissertation on theoretical kinds of space. To talk of there being a 'kink in space' seems mere nonsense to me; it may be because I am no mathematician. When I said that nothing would alter the fact that the place is eight thousand miles away, he answered that two points might be a yard away on a sheet of paper, and yet be brought together by bending the paper round. The reader may grasp this argument, but I certainly do not. His idea seems to be that Davidson, stooping between the poles of the big electromagnet, had some extraordinary twist given to his retinal elements through the sudden change in the field of force due to the lightning.... He thinks, as a consequence of this, that it may be possible to live visually in one part of the world, while one lives bodily in another."

Like many of Wells' stories, this is a tale of being in two places at the same time. It is about the intentional confusion of the laws of space and time. Davidson is in his house, at home, blind, while he is also on his island, where there is almost too much to describe, to see. The narrator, also quite typically of Wells, is skeptical. Yet the conclusion, broaching the possibility of living visually in one part of the world and bodily in another, is a temptation too strong to resist for the novelist. Davidson may see the island when he is blind, but he still experiences, physically, the surroundings in which he is rooted. So it is not just a disjunction between two different kinds of seeing; it is a disjunction between the senses. The fact that we are told at the end of the story that his island exists in the real world is almost irrelevant; it exists in his mind and that is enough. His experience of it is completely separate from its ultimate reality.

Defining a Space

As one walks through the lobby / corridor of the office center, one sees / feels / experiences this space in sections, thanks to Neuhaus' sound work. Divided into four zones, it not only becomes part of the architecture of the space, it defines that space; it becomes inseparable from our experience of being there.

My immediate reaction upon walking into the building was that the sound seemed faraway. Its presence seemed almost invisible, ambient. I knew it was there, but sensed that it was faraway, away from any immediate encounter. Its volume, its presence, is only apparent when one stops, when one concentrates on hearing it.

This reaction would be tempered the more time one spent in the space. As the sound is integrated into the overall spatial parameters, as it, paradoxically, becomes less of an intervention and more of a permanent quality, one does not have to stop and listen. It is just there.

"The major amount of energy that I put into making a work is in the construction of its sound. The real effort comes there – the process of placing the first sound in the space, listening to it and finding the next thing to try. It is a process of learning, on my part, about sound in that place, in the place that exists before I begin, but also this imaginary place or moment that I want to build.

"In these imaginary places that I build, often the moment the listener first walks into the space, it is not clear that a sound is there. But as you begin to focus, a shift of scale happens. At first you hear what could almost be a room sound, which then suddenly becomes huge. As you enter into it, you move into another perception of space because of the change of scale."

Max Neuhaus, excerpted from 'Notes on Place and Moment', Max Neuhaus, sound works; volume I, inscription (Ostfildern-Stuttgart: Cantz, 1994).

Sonic Interlude

Sitting on a staircase, on the ground floor, staring down the empty corridor, focusing on the sounds that are present, 'remembering' the sounds that are not present. A car goes by outside. You can hear the whoosh from the tires on the pavement, but the sound inside does not disappear. Only the level of its presence changes, for a split second. Even if hundreds of cars were going by outside, even if thousands of people were filling the corridor in front of you, the sounds would still retain their presence. Once you realize they are there, they exist in your mental perception of that space. Even when you are standing in a corridor at a right angle to the mezzanine, where no sound work exists, you 'hear' the sounds in front of you. Your anticipation, your memory also becomes integral to this architecture which has forever changed.

A Kind of Cinema

In fact, as one stands on the mezzanine of the building, looking outside at the traffic passing by or at the people moving past below, there is a kind of filmic effect that takes place. Not in the sense of a soundtrack – there is no direct relationship between what we hear and what we see. It is rather in the sense of an overall compatibility of experience – all of what we hear, all of what we see, all of what our senses take in becomes separate yet indivisible. It is like our absorption into the cinema screen, in which every element is taken as a part of the whole and nothing seems out of place.

Between Two Points

You step onto the bridge, walk up, reach the center, walk down and step onto the other side. The center, between the two railings of the bridge, seems louder. The closer one stands to the sides, the softer the sounds seem. There are blocks of sound, alternating every four and a half meters. The bridge is divided into seven sections, with the accompanying sound blocks forming a pattern of A B A B A B A. Thus, while there are only two sounds, it seems like many more, because of the combinations produced by one's different positions on the bridge.

Like the car passing by the office building, there is a baby crying in one of the nearby apartments. Its voice is integrated into the bridge, into the sounds which now seem a part of the neighborhood ambience, even if they are always somewhat distant from that 'world', always separate in the sense that they are unchanging. The baby will stop crying. The sounds on the bridge will continue. The sound, as Neuhaus says, is 'there and not there, a sound and yet not a sound'. Like the length of the passage over the bridge, the time that one spends between the two entrances / exits, like the relevance, the relationship of different sonic elements in the space to each other, it is up to the listener, the viewer, the walker to decide.

"The impact of this form lies in its contradiction to our assumptions about sound itself. Instead of sound being dispersed evenly, here we have a seeming impossibility: highly defined sound zones standing in free space without apparent source. This physical form and its contradictions are one element of this sound work; the other, of course, is the sounds themselves."

Max Neuhaus, Notes for Suspended Sound Line, 1996.

La Clef des Songes

In Magritte's painting, the canvas is divided into six equal parts: on the upper left, is an egg, next to it, a woman's shoe; on the middle left is a bowler hat, next to it a burning candle; on the lower left is a glass, next to it a hammer.

Simple enough, it seems. But with Magritte's work, of course, there are always discrepancies between what we see and what we perceive. In this case, this is effected by the titles which are written out under each object: under the egg is written 'an acacia tree'; under the shoe, 'the moon'; under the hat, 'snow'; under the candle, 'ceiling'; under the glass, 'the storm'; and, under the hammer, 'the desert'. The point here is not that we should search for a relationship between the written word and the image. It is that we must establish a new kind of perception, one which sees pictorial, architectural, even sonic space – for the words in Magritte's paintings connote the sense of hearing – as being in a state of flux. A state which can accommodate additions, subtractions, even contradictions – which is, literally, what we find with each pairing of text and image.

"Je vis très sérieusement une mosquée à la place d'une usine...."

Rimbaud

"Les six compartiments de ce rétable moderne se disposent de telle sorte qu'ils nous figurent une fenêtre. Que des fenêtres chez Magritte, et que de tableaux où elles mêlent le jour et la nuit! Celle-ci aussi associé à la pensée diurne des mots critiquant les paroles habituelles, nous fait voir les étoiles en plein jour."

Michel Butor, 'Les Mots dans la Peinture'

Seeing and Not Seeing

"After we see an object several times, we begin to recognize it. The object is in front of us and we know about it, but we do not see it – hence we cannot say anything significant about it. Art removes objects from the automatism of perception.... In the case of Tolstoy, he makes the familiar seem strange by not naming the familiar object. He describes an object as if he were seeing it for the first time, an event as if it were happening for the first time."

Victor Shklovsky, in Russian Formalist Criticism

Shklovsky goes on to discuss the 'defamiliarization' of the art object, the ability of the artist to make something appear 'strange'. Is this not exactly what Magritte does in La Clef des Songes, in making us question the relationship between what is pictured and what is written? Is it not what Max Neuhaus does in Suspended Sound Line and other works, when we experience a space in a different way than we had previously? That space becomes 'strange': we recognize it, but we do not see it as before. We hear it as well.

Being There

I'm walking down a street in Bruxelles. It's located about ten minutes from the Grand Place, but it's deserted. It's a Sunday morning, about 9:30. Not a soul on the streets, not a car on the roads. I'm wearing a Nike tee-shirt featuring Spike Lee and Michael Jordan. Michael is holding Spike in the air, as if he is about to dribble him like a basketball. Why is this tee-shirt, which I have worn over fifty times, on my mind? Because no one knows I am wearing it. It's underneath a shirt, a sweater and a coat. It is important to me this morning because it is unseen. As I am walking down this street, I feel alone in the city and, to be frank, it seems boring. If people could see this tee-shirt, if people could see me on this deserted street, perhaps from a helicopter, it would be striking. I would be a character. What I'm feeling is that I'm missing from my own personal movie.

I don't think that this is a particularly egotistical or self-indulgent reflection. Compare my thoughts as I walk along the street to the memory of anyone walking down the street in a film. What we remember in the latter scene are the additional elements that accompany this walk: the composition of the shot, the moving camera or editing, the colors of the surroundings, etc. In particular, however, we remember the accompanying sounds, whether it be artificial, as in the case of a musical 'sound' track, or whether it be naturalistic, as in the case of the sound of shoes hitting the pavement, a wind, a clearing of the throat, the rustle of clothes, etc. In short, it is the sound which makes the scene, the scene which makes the character, the character which takes this far beyond my initial experience of a Sunday morning walk. It is the cognizance on the part of the film viewer that the walk down the street is 'dramatized' which makes us identify with the character. (This occurs even if the 'dramatization' is not particularly theatrical, as in a documentary film.) The same thing could happen outside of a film of course. I could, in fact, focus on the sound of my steps, on the eeriness of the absence of other people, other sounds on my walk. I could imagine a sound track that accompanies my walk. And what I am doing, of course, is defining the architectural space which exists around me. Because of my familiarity with that space, I no longer see it. I have walked down that street so many times, it is nearly invisible. But, if I hear it, if I realize that the definition of that space is more than visual, it begins to become an animated space. A space that belies its own appearance.

Dense Tension

Max Neuhaus' drawing for Suspended Sound Line has a text which sounds / reads like a haiku, in its combination of simplicity and suggestion:

A footbridge
lined with

Sound

Partitioned into
abutting regions

Alternating
sound entities

Reciprocating
open with dense

Tension with relaxation

Another walk across this bridge. Because it is outside, because it is so seamlessly integrated into the sounds of the city, of the neighborhood, one wonders where the sound is coming from. It is a part of the structure; it is a 'footbridge lined with sound', as if the sound was another element of construction, like steel and concrete.

One of the differences, however, is that the sound is 'partitioned into abutting regions', splitting the experience of traversing the bridge rather than enveloping it in a unified block. The areas are deceptive, though, in the sense that their identity as units seems to float, to change upon close inspection. Thus, for example, as the listener walks towards a particular sound, it seems to get softer. It almost seems as if the sound from the other side of the bridge is more present. One feels that it is impossible to tie down these sounds, to fix them in any kind of concrete reality. As we try to close our hands (ears) around them, they shift into something else, disappear and transform themselves before our eyes. (Again, one has the tendency to describe an aural phenomenon in visual terms, but they do seem to be divided into regions, do seem to be completely integrated into the landscape.)

Because the source of these sounds is not evident, we never know exactly where they are coming from, how they change, how the program has been constructed. There is thus a mysterious, inexplicable side to the experience, which can elicit a number of responses. If the listener opens himself to concentrating on the nature of the sound blocks rather than their physical and technical makeup, he may find that the 'alternating' entities can come to sound like, to feel like, breathing. One block of sounds mounts up, the other slides down. A leads to B leads to A.... The use of repetition and variation makes us anticipate the next block before we even hear it, until it becomes as natural as breathing in and out. It creates, indeed, a tension which is 'dense', voluminous, one that you can almost feel. A tension, however, because it is endless, because it has become part of this bridge, which can also elicit a kind of relaxation, a state in which we hear the sounds almost subliminally. As we walk across this bridge, as we cross this 'suspended sound line', we ourselves become suspended, in an experience which is always present but always elusive.

It is the same when attempting to describe Neuhaus' work, to put into words this experience which affects so many of our senses. Perhaps one should end with another text by the artist, not of Suspended Sound Line, but of Untitled (1990), a sound work made for Lake Luzern. The words from the drawing on pages 74 and 75 in Max Neuhaus, Evocare l'udible (Milan: Charta, 1995), bear an uncanny resemblance to the feelings evoked by Suspended Sound Line:

As one enters the work's wooded grove,
one encounters a high bright sound –
like a fine aural mist. It permeates
the grove, seeming to come from nowhere.

At first the sound seems constant, but
if one listens for a few minutes an
inner detail and motion begin to appear.
After a while the sound sometimes seems
to disappear, becoming embedded in the
sound of the woods. It is an intense
but not unpleasant place to be.

Upon leaving the wood the sound becomes
distant and things slip back to normal.

Michael Tarantino, Oxford,
December 1998