Image: Max Neuhaus Working Drawings
Two 'Identical' rooms, 1983
Sound Source Location Trys, colored pencil on paper 45 x 43 cm. Collection: The Estate of Max Neuhaus
Circumscription Drawings,Two 'Identical' Rooms

'For a number of years, I had been interested in juxtaposing two identical spaces where the only difference between them was sound. It worked very well there at the Deichtorhallen; the contrast was large [Two 'Identical' Rooms, 1989]. The sound on one side was a fluid. Once you focused on it, you were completely immersed in it; yet it was so soft you could unfocus at any time. The other space was a mixture of hollow woody sounds – a dense texture. But here it was sitting above your head, like a ceiling. People felt this space was much larger than the one with the fluid, yet they both had exactly the same shape and dimensions.

 Part of my impetus for making a work this way could also have been to silence the Doubting Thomases, those people who were so convinced that they perceived space solely with their eyes that they thought this idea of transforming a space with sound alone was just talk. It was so nice to say: if it's just rhetoric, why are you sure that this room bigger than that one?'
Max Neuhaus

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In a series of works, Neuhaus has presented spaces identical in their contours, light values, and moods by using different sound installations: for example, the Two Identical Rooms (1989) for Harald Szeemann's exhibition in the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg, the startling virtuosity of which consisted not only in the different experience of the spaces but also in the fact that the sound did not issue from the wide entrance.

Doris von Drathen, in Max Neuhaus: Sound Works, vol. I, 110. Originally published as “Max Neuhaus: Invisible sculpture, molded
sound,” Parkett 35, 1993. 

(Translated from German by Michael Hulse).