Neuhaus Notes

7/29/2019 Neuhaus Notes

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Notes on Place and MomentI

The major amount of energy that I putinto making a work is in the constructionof its sound. The real effort comes there- the process of placing the first sound inthe space, listening to it and finding thenext thing to try. I t is a process oflearning, on my part, about sound in thatplace, in the place that exists before Ibegin, but also this imaginary place ormoment that I want to build.In the beginning, the differencesbetween the things I try are large. As mydefinition of this imaginary place ormoment progresses, the sound of thisimaginary entity progresses too and theybecome closer.In these works I am not trying to build asound image fo r its listeners to hear; Iam building a sound to bring thisimaginary place or moment of minealive. I see these works not as definersof a single frame of mind fo r allindividuals, but as catalysts fo r shifts inframe of mind. I am not concerned witha specific individual's frame of mind.Sometimes when I finish a work I takeseveral people through it before it opensto get a sense of the range of what theyare hearing, but I am not interested inknowing what they are experiencing. Ina way it is none of my business. I amconcerned with the catalyst, the initiator;their individual pathways are veryprivate, their own.I think that it is this, the individual'sprocess of experience ina work of art,that artists tr y to initiate.

II

In these imaginary places that I build,often the moment the listener first walksinto the space, it is not clear that asound is there. But as you begin tofocus, a shift of scale happens. At firstyou hear what could almost be a roomsound, which then suddenly becomeshuge. As you enter into it , you move intoanother perception of space because ofthe change of scale.I am always amazed, myself, by thedifference between being outside of thatscale and going into it. When I ambuilding a work, near the end of theprocess when I am making the verysmall changes to the sound, after tendays of building it , I know its innerstructure, how it is made, how it sounds.I leave the work on overnight and comeback to it in the morning after sleepingand after having walked outside, pullingback. In working a sound, the only wayyou can get distance is over time, unlikeworking with something you can see,where you can step back from it inspace.I am always amazed by the differencebetween the moment I first walk in thespace after a night of not hearing it , andtwo seconds afterwards, when I am backinto the world where I was making it . I tis a crucial point in building the piece. Iam working with the plausibility of itssound.I often make a sound which is almostplausible within its context when youfirst encounter it. The point where aperson realizes that it is not plausible iswhen he jumps into the piece; he'sswimming on his own from then on. I t isa way of working which I use often in the


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place pieces; it is usually the way I buildthe entrance to the work.I call it the entrance, because i f you donot go through this refocusing you donot get through to the work. Somepeople call my work meditative becauseof this need to focus. I don't like thebaggage the word carries. These worksdemand only attention; they cannot beconsumed in passing.With each place and each condition it is adifferent kind of problem to get that tohappen. To get it to happen in a museumis more difficult. In the work at theMuseum of Contemporary Art in Chicago,there is exactly that situation: everyoneknows the piece is there, but manypeople walk through it and do not hearit .This is an important point, a deliberatepoint of making the sound almostplausible within the space. I t also leavesit hidden and means you can only find itby bringing yourself to the point whereyou can hear it. A beautiful thing aboutthe piece in Chicago is that, although itssounds are huge and loud, because ofthe plausibility of these sounds, manypeople still after fourteen years deny itexists.On the other hand, I sometimesconstruct an almost physical place withsound. The piece in Times Square is agood example; it is outside, in themiddle of a large open plaza. It 's a largeblock of sound, which you walk into.Even though invisible and intangible, it islike a solid place in the middle of thisopen space.Times Square is not a place where youexpect cultural intervention; if there isone, you expect to see and hear it . I twas not hard to make something thatpeople had to find in that situation.There, there is no need to alter your

aural focus; you alter your contextualfocus when you find that work.In very subtle works like Three to One,the 'almost plausibility' of the sounds arethings that draw you in, in a differentway than if the sound were overt eitherin its character or in its loudness - thequality that it is both there and notthere.You change the scale of how you hear.When you change scale, you start to lookat things differently. When you look atpainting your visual scale also changes.The same thing can happen with sound.There is a wonderful contradiction inThree to One that not many people see,although they all hear it without realizingit. The three spaces, although visuallydistinct, are for the ear one large spacebecause of the opening fo r the stairwayconnecting them in their centers. Yetwhen you first encounter these spacesyou hear separate sounds on each floor,three distinct layers in what isacoustically one space.I t took me a while after I had finished itto figure out how I had done it. In fact,certain parts of each floor's sound spreadto all the spaces. These commoncomponents are perceived completelydifferently, though, when they mix withthe sounds speCific to each floor. Byutilizing the components that go betweenall the floors in a different way in eachplace, the same thing on each floor isheard as something completely different.But this changes after you have been inthe work for a while.After you've heard these commoncomponents in their three differentcontexts, your memory comes into play.The sounds of the three floors fuse intoone whole with many variations - theperceiver's perception of the unity.


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I I I

In the seventies, I began experimentingwith the idea of making a sound bytaking a sound away. This had occurredto me as an idea, but I wanted to seehow other people felt about it. I couldnot find out much by just asking peopledirectly, so I built some alarm clockswhich functioned in this way. Byconnecting it with sleep I thought itwould be closer to the reality; theirreactions, in that way, would be realinformation. I t was not a scientificinvestigation. I was talking to peopleabout their feelings with this experience.This idea is not something that happensin nature; continuous things do notdisappear suddenly in this way. Yet ithappens in the modern world. The moststartling example fo r me in everyday lifehas always been the coffee-grindingmachine in a cafe. When somebody turnsthe machine on in a noisy cafe, you donot register it. I t just seems to maketalking a little harder.That is quite amazing in itself, becausethe sound is quite loud. But your mindjust puts it in the class of the soundsthat are an expected part of the cafe andgoes on with what it was doing.Then, when it is finished and suddenlystops, there is a huge silence whichenvelopes the cafe, even though it is stillvery noisy. I've always loved thatmoment.The moment or time pieces are alsoconnected to ideas we may have alwayshad in SOCieties about sounds: signals.Concepts about sound are not wellarticulated in history. Most writing abouthistory is more about visual and socialenvironment than about sound. I t is veryhard to find out what our sound worldwas like before sound recordings. Howcan you know about a sound made a

thousand years ago? There are norecords.But it is clear that, in Western culturefive hundred years ago, sound signalsfrom the church were an early form ofbroadcasting. Cities were divided up intoparishes whose borders were fixed bythe range of their church bells. If youwere outSide the sound of the bell, youhad no information; you were outSidethe community.A sound signal is a unifier andcommunicator over a whole areasimultaneously. I t is perhaps the firstconcept of large scale broadcasting, theconcept of a medium that many can getinformation from without actually beingin one place, that the information can betransmitted to many places at the sametime, unifying them.The basic idea of the moment works is tobe without place; they encompass placesrather than being only in one. That is thereal difference. For a place work youhave to go to the place; fo r a momentwork you can be in any of many placesat the moment.These moment works depend on a longterm relationship in order to function;they need to be lived in - a small shifton a regular basiS throughout the day,that you forget about, and thenencounter again. They cannot be visitedlike an exhibition.I envy the people near the KunsthalleBern. Although I made this work andknow it intimately through making it ,they know it better than I do. They havespent more time with it than I have.They've had three years with it .I t was a strange piece to build because Iwas building a sound fo r its afterimage.


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The sound I was building is not the thingI was building; I was building the thingthat happens when the sounddisappears. It's fascinating to construct.It's also strange because of its timescale; in order to hear it disappear, I hadto wait fo r it to grow each time.In many of the place pieces there is anafterimage also, but of a different kind.After leaving the work, you can findyourself beginning to hear the work'ssound in other places. By buildingsounds for these works which are closeto things which can be there, outsidesounds can trigger a memory. Then thatoutside sound becomes the sound of thework. It's not the afterimage of amoment work; it is an image of the workwhich gets superimposed on things orwhich everyday sounds evoke.

IVThese terms 'place' and 'moment' whichI use and within which I work haveevolved into general forms - twocomplementary areas within which Igroup individual works. The thing thatmakes moment pieces different fromplace pieces is that the moment piecesare in all places, but only occur fo r amoment in all those places; while theplace pieces are only in one place, butare continuums which are always there.The moment pieces don't constructplaces, but they cause this realization ofplace to happen when they disappear; inthe same way that the place pieces donot construct time, but they allow yourown realization of time to happen withintheir static nature.Each one generates in the perceiver theopposite of what it is: the momentpieces generate an instant of being inone's own place; place pieces generate aperiod of being in one's own time. Theyare two opposites; each one is what theother is not.

Max Neuhaus, 1993First published in Max Neuhaus: SoundWorks, vol. I, Inscription (OstfildernStuttgart: Cantz, 1994).

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