2024
DÁDÁ INTRODUCTION
My work as an artist is concerned with communicating visions from my imagination to people. Traditionally painters and sculptors have used the eye as a direct non verbal channel to the mind. I instead, have chosen to use the ear.
Although most people aren't aware of it, sound is as important an aspect of how we perceive a place as the way it looks. We of course sense the size of a space with our ears as well as out eyes and our sense of position and motion may come from aural as well as visual cues. Perhaps more interesting than these psychoacoustic observations though, is that the feeling of the basic nature of a place and ourselves within it is determined as much by sound as sight.
SOUND INSTALLATIONS
My sound installations use sound to actualize imaginary places-places to explore aurally or simply to be in. Unlike music, the sound is not the work, the place is -- the sound is only the catalyst which creates the place. The impetus for the first sound installation was an interest in working with a public at large, and inserting works into their daily domain in such a manner that people could find them in their own time and their own way. Disguising them within their environments in such a manner that people discovered them for themselves and took possession of them -lead by their curiosity into listening.
The first work of mine which can be called a sound installation was realized in 1967. It was a radical departure from the then current, and still prevalent form of production of sound art. i.e. the arrangement where a group of people gather together at a specific time and place and watch and listen to a usually smaller and more specialized group make sound, i.e. music. I had spent the previous ten years functioning wholly within this context and had come to know it intimately. I felt it had a number of flaws, the major one being the onus of entertainment, a serious burden for any art form (the visual arts seem to be free of it, while music, dance, and theater are forced into it at some level, by the form of the presentation itself.) I also felt I was dealing with an extremely small segment of my society, many of whom were deafened by overexposure to the music of the 18th and 19thcenturies. My first opportunity for departure came in Buffalo, New York, a city with an unusually large music-loving public and, at that time, a center devoted completely to contemporary music activities. I felt it was important to do a work which would be accessible not only to that music public, but also to those who were not initiates to those particular rituals. One problem I saw was making the work accessible without being obligatory, not an easy task with sound in a public place.
The idea began with the realization that in most American cities people spend a great deal of time in their automobiles (something I had forgotten, having spent the previous ten years in New York City.) Most of them listened to sound over their car radios. I didn't know much about the inner workings of electronic equipment then, but I did remember that singers sometimes used "wireless" microphones that actually broadcast their sound a short distance to a radio receiver. It seemed like the ideal solution. I decided to form the work with a number of these small radio transmitters placed in different positions along a stretch of roadway, each one broadcasting a different continuous sound. Since the transmitters broadcast only a short distance, I could physically shape each sound by stringing it's transmitters antenna to enclose the area I wanted the sound to occupy. It solved the accessibility/obligatory problem and allowed a complex set of possibilities.
Archive of The Estate Max Neuhaus