Max Neuhaus

1997
Pier Luigi Tazzi, "Max Neuhaus", The Collection: Max Neuhaus [Italian, English] (Milan: Charta,, 1997)

The first years of the twentieth century witnessed the beginning of a dazzling process of evolution that permitted western art to explore a number of states of human sensibility which had never before stood at the focus of so much attention, or been approached with so much availability. Western art had previously followed a linear line of development, and while doing so had seen its goal in a kind of unification of the sense-perceptible data of what it defined as the outside world, or of the whole of the sphere that lay 'outside' the interior world of the sentient subject. That effort of unification, in turn, had proceeded on the basis of a set of precise models which, even though repeatedly subjected to a range of adjustments, amplifications, variations and modifications, could always be referred to a general framework that embraced the whole of art and endowed it with the character of a metaphoric reflection of the culture of any given epoch. And the twentieth century's initial achievement lay precisely in putting an end to all further possibility of any such synthesis. From the very start, the work of the artists of the twentieth century flows along innumerable rivulets that no longer allow themselves to be seen as having branched from any common or principal mainstream. The so-called 'historical avantgardes' were quick to disrupt all former unity; and even if they share a systematic denial of tradition and of all established cultural codes, this is no true common denominator, since they also present themselves as profoundly different from one another. Each adopted its own particular methods, and so thoroughly so as to lead each to achieve a widely-ranging corpus of results that finally supersede the premises, ideological as well as pragmatic, to which each of them had turned, initially and respectively, for its source of meaning and motivation.

This linguistic diaspora marks the abandonment of a territory that could no longer be held together on the basis of a unitary project. It also embodies a commitment to a 'promised land' that still remained to be discovered, or to a future realization of the human being in the world in which life is truly lived. And the reasons for which it took place have to be found in the recognition of the fallibility, which history produced no less than registered, of a language that pursues a linear course of evolution while siting its cardinal principles in notions of truth and universal pertinence. But they should also be sought in the vast new vistas of human desire which have come to be revealed by technological and scientific progress. In short, the historical avantgardes hold a place of cohabitation for something negative, i. e. criticism, and something positive, i. e. hope.

If these were the propositions of the various groups that constitute the historical avantgardes, and of the cultural collective which they represent, the manifold results that accrued while following the course of these two impulses should also be seen to include the way in which the artist as an individual took up the task of searching out a primary essence that precedes language, given the apparent demise of the legitimacy of language itself. While performing a series of acts of linguistic deconstruction, and while organizing and promoting a series of movements that proposed new modes of construction as alternatives to others that still maintained hegemony while growing ever inefficacious, the artist tended at much the same time to turn his own work into the site of an immediate confrontation with a primal reality that seemed to have nothing to do with anyone other than himself, or with anything other than his own personal solitude as an individual, considering that all systematic approaches had shown themselves to be vain and inconclusive, or in any case fallacious. The artists' repeated attempts to establish a level of direct contact with things themselves indicate a desire to retrieve a stratum of values that formerly-established linguistic institutions had obscured. Needs for transformation are accompanied by a drive that demands the experience of reality, which is the reality, simultaneously, of things and of the individual who finds himself confronted with things, and with things to which all codified language has greatly reduced if not expunged all possible contact, thus cutting him off from the land and the life of the living. This was the point at which artists began to talk about 'primary matter' and 'authentic, first-hand truth' (Giovanni Papini, 'Il cerchio si chiude', Lacerba (15 February 1914) p. 50). The world no longer appeared to be inscribed or capable of being inscribed in a closed structure that might be completed, defined, or at best invented ex novo. It presented itself instead as 'an unknown world of new phenomena that yearn to escape from the anonymity of the natural' (Umberto Boccioni, 'Il cerchio non si chiude!', Lacerba (1 March 1914) p. 69). The artist attempted to flee from any and all procedures that condemned him to lapse once again into tattered appearances. He attempted, quite to the contrary, to blaze a personal trail that would lead him to encounter the very reality that he himself intended to transform through the use of his ever more personal and ever less conventional tools of elaboration.

Cubist collage brought snatches of reality into the composition. They were lifted just as they are from the 'real' world and inserted into structures that do not at all absorb them and cancel them out, and that indeed deploy the instrument of art as a way of giving them value, and of taking the measure of all their gravity, as linguistic no less than material fact. The real no longer consists simply of nature, but of nature and construct, of the primal and the manufactured. The work thus bears witness to the existence of a reality that moves in tandem with the augmentation of human sensibility, of eminently individual sensibility, free from all systems of meaning that would guide its course, and conjured up in all its own virginity and primal nudity, which is not to call it free from memory or in any way mythical. It is wholly and quite precisely real, like the sensibility of every individual human being, and therefore different, and grounded in difference, just as the differences that mark individuals depart from the homogeneity of collective norms. The constituent materials of Cubist collage derive from a context that speaks of collective experience; but their use as a part of a compositional structure, like the subsequent enjoyment of the work of art, belongs quite clearly to the sphere of the individual. That piece of wood, of cloth, of tin, that mustache, that scrap of velvet (Papini, p. 49), that fragment of newsprint, that label: they are the property of everyone, but the work of which they form a part is the work of a single individual. And the way in which a viewer relates to it is individual and personal. It sets in motion an individual sensibility and excites an individual wonder, that same sensibility and capacity for wonder which the noise of the world, the tedium of daily life, and the specified functions of every object, thing, sign and indication have reduced to opacity and deafness. 'I' see that 'thing' as though for the very first time; its timbre resounds within 'me' as something I have never heard before.

So the historical avantgardes and Cubist collage in particular lifted the 'thing' out of experience and used it to substantiate art and language. Art remained pre-eminent as a wholly individual act, whereas language came as though to be relegated to a secondary plane, since it is subject to collective consensus and thus to conventions. On the one hand, the 'thing' remained a thing (a material which the efforts of the artist would structure or endow with form, without lessening its pregnancy). On the other hand, the release of the 'thing. from its previous condition acquired a meaning precisely insofar as the act of endowing it with form had indeed taken place.

John Cage in the 1940s can be credited with having committed his various artistic practices (concerts, happenings ante litteram, lectures, and later writings) to the service of another kind of experience, which is the experience of the void, or of nothingness. Here the subject no longer sees himself reflected in a mirror supplied by form, and the object with which he finds himself confronted is the indeterminacy of his own substance. This status is much more clearly perceived than it might have been while confronting the 'things' presented by Cubist collage, which always, after all, remained a screen, even if the screen was metonymic and no longer metaphorical. Here the subject perceives his very own being as continuous with the continuum of the world. We experience that loss of separateness, on the part of the subject, which accompanied the demise of single and unique points of view. Such a state of indeterminacy can make no further use of screens and projections and measures itself against emptiness, against silence and noise, which indeed are no longer opposed to one another, as they once had been in those paradigms that contrasted the full and empty, background and profile, artifice and nature, form and matter. Cage understood that poetry has to be independent of any and all questions of form, since form, as such, always presupposes the primacy of language with respect to the being that deploys it. Cage sees poetry as a way of entering the world of words, or of entering that area of sounds and lapses of time which necessarily accompany the meanings that a language bears. He sees them as independent of any such meanings, or at least he sees no reason to take these meanings as the object of his first and foremost attention. Sound and its existence in time had always before been seen as functional adjuncts to the transmission of messages, and their essence had remained unexplored when they showed themselves to be extraneous to any such function. The way Cage shifted attention from form to poetry is also crucial by virtue of the central position which it affords to the subject, wholly independently of the subject's ability (or utter inability) to craft some formal receptacle in which to hold sensations and states of mind, fears and desires. The need for poetry is independent of memory, whereas formal operations that appropriate bits of reality can indeed be said to be grounded in memory, no matter whether short- or long-termed. Poetry is immediate, whereas realities captured in form can only be retrieved by referring to some former experience of which memory is the record. The 'things' we find in Cubist collage are memories of those things themselves. Cage, on the other hand, offers an experience of immediate continuity, without need for the mediation of any memory of precedent experience. Even if sounds appeal to memories that make them recognizable, they always present themselves as fresh and new, and free from all formal regimentation. And silence, which, like the intervals that lie between sounds, is another basic component of Cage's work, is entirely free from memory, and available as direct experience. Cage reveals continuities that lie wholly within the present.

Two further elements are also to be found in Cage's compositions: structure and materials. Without them the work could not exist, and the ways in which they find articulation by reciprocally distinguishing themselves from each other makes them responsible for the dissolution of form. The necessity for structure derives from the fact that life itself is structured: 'Structure without life is dead. But life without structure is un-seen. Pure life expresses itself within and through structure. Each moment is absolute, alive and significant' (Jogb Cage, Silence (1961) p. 113). Materials are the very substance of the work, and therefore the artist has no other choice than to love them and as well to show patience in dealing with them. The acts of transformation which formerly typified the artist of the western tradition are supplanted by Cage's loving attention, and he understands patience to imply passivity. He abandons the desire to leave a mark on the world, and instead allows the world to leave a mark on him: he accepts the world and aspires to a state of cosmic communion in which differences cancel each other out. 'If one is making something which is to be nothing, the one making must love and be patient with the material he chooses. Otherwise he calls attention to the material which is precisely something, whereas it was nothing that was being made, or he calls attention to himself, whereas nothing is anonymous' (Cage, p. 114). He concludes: 'The technique of handling materials is, on the sense level, what structure as a discipline is on the rational level: a means of experiencing nothing' (Cage, p. 114).

Cage's nothing is thus related to the nothing of Oriental thought, and specifically of Zen, as Cage himself practiced and understood it on the basis of the writings of Alan Watts and the doctrine of Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki.

The extent to which these considerations have something to do with the work of Max Neuhaus is what this text proposes to elucidate. But if we want to complete the frame of reference into which Neuhaus' work inserts itself, we also have to consider another vast series of artistic experiences that have greatly determined the evolution of the whole of western art in the second half of this century. We have to deal, on the one hand, with the tradition of American painting from Barnett Newman to Robert Ryman; and, on the other, with the propositions of Minimal Art. In the last years of the 1940s, still in the wake of that catastrophic war which had signaled a kind of ethico-political limit to the cultural expansion of western civilization and to all its progressive optimism, Newman declared: 'We are freeing ourselves of the impediments of memory, associations, nostalgia, legend, myth, or what have you, that have been the devices of Western European Painting .... The image we produce is the self-evident one of revelation' (Barnett Newman, 'The sublime is now', Selected Writings (1990) p. 251). In addition to declaring his freedom from history and asserting his will to live only in the absolute which is consciousness itself, Newman also isolates the viewer into the act of pure perception, thus glorifying the sensation of time and the possible fullness of emotional experience. Self-awareness reveals itself as kairos, and hidden symmetries link physical form to the sphere of metaphysics. Ryman, at a later date, was to present himself as a radical champion of the rejection of representational illusionism and glorified the experience of pure perception.

Minimalism, in turn, defended an intuitive art, in no way theoretical or given to illustrating theories, that directed its attention to mental processes, and which saw itself, finally, as 'purposeless' (Sol LeWitt, 'Sentences on conceptual art', Sol LeWitt (1978) p. 168).

Max Neuhaus returns to Barnett Newman's notion of the 'sublime now' mollifying its character as an absolute and endowing it with further extension by means of the universality of sound. Sound is not yet language and possesses a zero degree of meaning; and when presented as uninterrupted duration it shows nothing of the 'short story' character, whether emblematic or symbolic, of music, where the event takes place in terms of fixed durations and scansions of time. Sound is universal in much the same way in which abstract articulations of color present themselves as universal on the screen of non-figurative painting. Neuhaus makes use of sound as a way of confronting space, in all the various ways in which we define and understand it: as extension, presence, habitat, and as repository for memory. Memory, moreover, is also an always active faculty, a present-tense ability to memorize, and not simply a body of accumulated records of the past.

Neuhaus' work can likewise be seen to ground itself in the achievements of Minimal Art, which created a whole new way of conceiving of art, and which set it free from the categories that formerly enclosed it. Minimalism was a great deal more than the separation of the sculpture from its pedestal, or of the painting from the wall, which in any case were no mean achievements. It gave them a new collocation in real space, putting an end to their long-standing exile to the spaces of imagination. The painting superseded its status as opaque, translucent or transparent image of some beyond, just as sculpture turned into something more than the sign of a sublimated and superior reality. Rather than refer to realities that belonged to some otherwhere, they turned into actual presences in the physical and mental space concretely experienced by the persons who confront the work. Further, as a corollary, it followed that the work of art has to establish a relationship with architecture, or with the environmental context in which it finds its collocation.

The work's relation to its site has been a fundamental component of Neuhaus' art ever since its beginnings. First we have a place, then we have a sound construct that hinges on that place. Neuhaus begins by attempting to achieve an understanding of a work's specific site, examining the kind of sonority in which it is immersed, its historical or traditional connotations, the social functions for which it is employed, and finally the physical features that distinctively condition its use.

Briefly returning to the ways in which this work shows analogies to painting, we could say that the space itself is equivalent to the pictorial space, and that its sounds correspond to the colors that define such a space and imbue it with form.

Neuhaus models sound electronically. His method not only offers him the freedom of sound construction without the physical constraints of the traditional means of sound production, but also the first practical means of realizing a place with sound - of generating a sound without an end.

He begins building the acoustic foundation for the work by determining how sound will be projected into the space. He works by ear in the space itself, forming special sound sources by determining the quantity, size, orientation and configuration of loudspeaker elements. His goal is not simply the emission of sound into the space, but to find a means to apply sound to it. The sound sources he designs are never visible as such; and by utilizing the interaction of acoustics and the listener's aural expectations he causes them to disappear aurally as well, perceptually attaching sound to space and embedding it.

He then prepares what could be called a sound palette - templates of sounds in electronic form which he constructs to meet the needs of a given site and his preliminary ideas for it. These preliminary sound frameworks are stored in a portable computer system which he takes to the site. Here is where the conception of the work's sounds takes place. Working again by ear he applies the first template to the space, transducing it directly into sound through the special speaker systems he has installed, and begins to build upon it. Operating in the presence of an uninterrupted relation between space and sound, the sound takes form and acquires its body in the space itself.

The work is the place that the sound itself determines and constructs; and its very existence is confined to the moments in which it in fact is perceived, and to the ways and tempos in which this perception takes places. Ways and tempos cannot be verified through the use of fixed analytical instruments that offer results of purportedly equal value for everyone. They can only be described in terms of separate, individual impressions, just as the persons who make acoustical, physical, and mental contact with Neuhaus' work - on purpose or by chance - are no less separate and individual, each confined to a purely personal horizon of perceptual possibilities and aesthetic presuppositions.

So it might be said that the presence or existence of a work by Max Neuhaus is both weaker and stronger than the presence of a work of visual art. (Both are concerned with space, whereas a musical composition, strictly defined, is concerned with time: with beginning, end, and duration, or with the natural limits of an event.) It is weaker in the sense that a long-standing cultural presupposition deprives us of any possible doubt that a visual or sculptural artwork occupies space quite independently of the experience of any viewer. Things stand differently with a work that consists of a sound and that takes on body only in the moment in which our ears inform us of its presence; here the cultural presupposition is that a space determined by a sound alone can only be thought to be empty, and occupied by nothing at all, if no such listening ear is present. A visual or sculptural signal is subject to a highly ample range of attention levels—from the zero of disregard to the maximum of careful observation—but none of them question its presence. A visual or sculptural sign can go unnoticed, but such a fact in no way implies that it ceases to occupy the very same space in which it stands in the moment in which a viewer pays attention to it. The attention we pay to an auditory sign has far more drastic implications, and counts as essential not only for determining its position and extension, but even for determining its existence. An auditory sign is subject to a much more limited range of attention that includes no zero degree: a sonorous entity that goes unheard is considered non-existent, even if in fact it continues uninterruptedly to occupy the very same space in which it is to be found in the moment in which one starts to perceive it. On the other hand, the auditory signal is the stronger of the two in the sense that it proves, once having been perceived, to be inescapable, even in the case in which the ear that hears it attempts to ignore it. In other words, the relationship between auditory signal and sentient subject is more direct and immediate than in the case of the subject’s relation to a visual sign. It should further be noted that visual perception depends in large measure, even if not totally, on the direction of the gaze, which often implies an intentionality on the part of the sentient subject, whereas questions of direction are irrelevant to auditory perception. Finally, the focusing of sensibility on a given sense object is far more specific with auditory phenomena than with visual stimuli.

These cultural habits and presuppositions, and these characteristics of human perception, as viewed within the limited context of a culture and an epoch, are the basis on which Max Neuhaus constructs his work. They have led him to redesign the very configuration of the subject who encounters the work of art, or of the subject as defined by the historical avantgardes and their subsequent tradition.

With Cubist collage, the subject confronted 'the thing' in its pre-discursive primalness or in its post-discursive indifference. But the thing held its ground before being perceived by the subject; it was part of that otherness that stands in opposition to the subject. So the encounter with the thing was a meeting between the subject and otherness; and on retrieving the state of primary apperception which such an encounter produced, the subject increased his own potential as a sentient entity, thus counteracting the cultural habits, social acts, and modes of practical functioning that tended to reduce the sentient entity to a purely instrumental commodity, thereby depriving it of its most essential and defining quality, or of sentience itself, which is to speak of the value that sites itself in the subject' s experience of the uninterrupted duration of his own sentient acts. Life itself seemed to sputter as acts of feeling grew more dim. With Cage's silence, the subject no longer confronted something with which he stood in opposition. Instead, he was asked, at the moment of the event, to immerse himself in that continuum to which he in any case knew himself to belong, even though imagination, desires, aspirations, fantasies, dreams and fear held him always at a distance away from it, and thus stood in the way of every direct and conscious experience of it. With the work of Neuhaus, on the other hand, the subject's position is neither off to one side (as when faced with a Cubist collage) nor in medias res (as when involved in the practices theorized by Cage). Here the subject occupies a specific space which is all his own, a space that the work reveals in the moment in which it rises into the subject's particular sphere of perception.

What is the space of the subject?

We could say first of all that it is the space that contains the subject. Yet this subject is no primary entity that simply takes up a position in a given space, nor indeed that simply traverses it. There is no discrete opposition between two separate entities. The subject in Neuhaus' work is a unit of perception that activates itself in the presence of a discharge of sense-perceptible material. Rather than as absolutes, space and time are conceived of as the space and time of perception. The primacy of the subject is thus reduced to the subject's capacity to recognize the self as a sentient entity, and the other-than-the-self as a fabric of connective tissue that constitutes and permits the existence of the subject. Reality therefore configures itself as a relationship between a sentient subject and the entirety of the sense-perceptible material that lies within the precincts of the space and time of that sentient subject’s experience. So it can neither pre-exist the subject, nor present itself as distinct from the subject. This model of reality is marked by the self-awareness of the sentient subject; and yet it is not absolute, since it depends directly on the physical, psychic, cultural and spiritual conditions of this same sentient subject (conditions which determine his state of attention or inattention), just as it depends on the conditions that determine the recognizability of the sense-perceptible materials with which the subject is involved (their intensity, structure, duration, and extension).

The conditions that regulate perception are extremely variable; and this is why Neuhaus makes each of his works for a single, specific place. No work can be transported as a whole to any other place, and partial reproduction is likewise impossible. Rather than products or objects, the works are situations: perceptual situations. Each work is a space that finds its definition in the light of the set of environmental characteristics that pre-exist the work's realization. The work can't even be said to 'establish a relationship' with those characteristics, as though it were a separate entity. The work indeed consists of the relationship between the pre-existent set of environmental characteristics and the sound materials elaborated by the artist. That relationship is itself the work that finds its manifestation in the moment in which it comes to be perceived. The immateriality of Neuhaus' work is its putting material elements in a determinate relationship with others that are not material. Both devolve upon three fundamental components: the sentient subject, the new articulation of sounds elaborated by the artist, and the context. The actual procedure of composition might be said to reverse this order, moving from context to subject. But it can also be said to hold itself entirely open, following no fixed order at all, since the relationships between these three components are constantly reviewed, cross-checked and revised as the artist works his way to the final conclusion of his process of elaboration.

In the specific case of Rivoli Castle, the environmental context is typified by two main features which are highly integrated with each other, even while remaining of two quite different natures. Firstly, Rivoli Castle is a museum of contemporary art; and I myself see it, in terms of the activity and breadth of its programs and collection, as the first and foremost museum of contemporary art which Italy possesses at present. Even though contemporary art enjoys no particular favor in our country, this fact is important and demands consideration. The primary tasks of today's museum of contemporary art lie in the conservation of the works produced by contemporary artists, and in the further production of events, when the work presents itself as event and not as product. While realizing a work at Rivoli Castle, Neuhaus can in no way disregard this circumstance. He knows quite well that his work will be flanked by other works that belong to the Castle's collection, or by works which are momentarily installed, if the Castle is hosting a temporary event or exhibition. The context, in both of these cases, implies a cultivated public, or a public in search of cultivation: a public with a conscious desire for direct confrontation with the proposals that the artist presents by way of his work or actions. If the work is to function in such a museum context, it will have to be installed in a space that satisfies a number of requirements, a well-defined space that allows it to be properly read, a space sufficiently distinct and ample to allow it an adequate scale of expansion, a space that consents to its integration with the other works, and as well with the signs that in various ways (historical, art-historical, of use and function) characterize the environment in which it is to find its collocation on the terms implied by its own formal and structural autonomy.

At the same time,speaking of its other principal feature,the Castle is an architectural structure that preserves the memory of its own considerable history. It shows the scant remains of a castrum ripollarum that dates to about the year 1000, and then a more substantial portion of a true and proper fortress that continued to expand until the fifteenth century. Rivoli stands at the mouth of the Susa Valley, and this structure offered defense from enemies that might have descended along its flanks from the north-west. In the seventeenth century, the fortress was transformed into a palace - thanks primarily to the work of the Ducal architects Carlo and Amedeo di Castellamonte - that served as the residence of House of Savoy, and as an authoritative sign of that "monocentric form of government that revolves around the figure of the monarch' (Gianfranco Gritella, Rivoli (1986) p. 47). In style it fully accorded with the canons and rhetoric of the Baroque aesthetic which dominated the period throughout most of Europe. In the following century, the ground plan established by Carlo and Amedeo di Castellamonte served as the basis for the further constructions designed by Filippo Juvarra. Juvarra's project was based on a notion of architecture as theater and was so grandiose as to endow its act of celebration with a presence and a dignity that far outstripped the qualities of the powers it intended to celebrate. It's as though the grandeur of the song were more impressive than the grandeur of the hero of which it sings. But Juvarra's project never reached completion. Construction drew to a halt in 1731, and the building, which was later used for a variety of functions, including its service as a barracks for nearly a century and then briefly as a gambling casino, knew no further significant development up until the moment of its restoration and subsequent transformation into a museum of contemporary art.

Contemporary art, at least in Italy, finds itself confronted with the historical past of the surrounding territory. It often attempts to establish a more or less intimate dialogue with the past, while also insisting on the gap that separates the glorious projects of former eras from the conditions that guide the life of the modern world, of which contemporary art itself is willing to serve as a conscientious spokesman. Ancient dreams stand solid in their opposition to the reality of an always-moving present; and the conflict grows all the more evident when the past is represented by a fragment, or by a work that remained incomplete, as in the case of the Rivoli Castle - whereas the present, quite to the contrary, finds its voice in the founding of an institution which it sees as destined to endure. Juvarra's project foresaw a Castle that functioned like a mammoth stage set, or like a great theatrical machine. Its highly complex articulations were to represent no obstacle to the free unfolding of broad and spectacular effects. The whole arrangement starting with the geomorphologic situation of standing in a morainic amphitheater at the entrance to the valley seems to mark a threshold. Still today, as a museum, it marks a limit. We have history and tradition on the one hand, as revealed in the visible traces of a dream of grandeur; and on the other we discover the urgency of the present, as reflected and manifested by an art which speaks, in all its diversity and complexity, through the kinds of symbolic forms which it is always more or less appropriate to discern within it.

Neuhaus' work occupies two arcades of the completed part of Juvarra's project for a great double atrium of the ground floor. An 'area of passage and of rapid and continuous movement' (Gritella, p. 114) - entrance, carriage-way, the approach to the stairways - was to stand to the north-west, a gigantic recess marked by an air of 'solemn composure' (Gritella, p. 114) to the south-east. Neuhaus' work is positioned between these spaces. The completed and still-standing part of the project consists of a double series of three arcades that lead into an unroofed space that serves to connect the Castle proper to the so-called Manica Lunga, or Long Wing. Still today, following the restoration, this is the Castle's principal entrance; and it immediately reveals that the project remained unfinished.

The series of three arcades which Neuhaus has used for his work is the one on the south-west, the one which Juvarra planned as the link between the first atrium and the second. Neuhaus has inscribed his work into the two arcades that stand at the ends of the structure, leaving the middle one free. The work consists of two sound curtains. One of them, the one on the right for a person facing south-east, strikes me as showing an ancient rotundity. It presents a sound that seems to rise through an empty space to an indeterminate but nonetheless unequivocal origin. The one on the left seems to have a more variegated character, less monolithic and more strictly adherent to the present. This, of course, is an absolutely personal reading of the work; and it finds its only basis in a personal and singular experience. I might further define the sound on the right as the sound of time; it comes from a distance and undergoes no changes, if not for the innumerable veils that it seems to traverse. I think of the sound on the left as the sound of the present; it allows itself to be savored in the very moment in which it arises into the immediacy of here-and-now perception. But, again, this is clearly a personal interpretation, the fruit of a train of free associations that have only the value of an after-image in the eye of a particular individual. The spaces respectively defined by each of these two sounds are of subtle consistency, and it is only inside their respective arcades that each finds its full manifestation. One perceives the sound almost suddenly, since the hum one hears before its certain identification can easily be attributed to background noise (traffic, voices, distant echoes). So there is a need to 'grab hold' of the presence of the sound; but once we have done so, it follows us back to far beyond the limit at which we first identified it. Little by little as we move away from it, it continues to pursue us; and we continue to perceive it up until the moment of the realization that it has slipped definitively away from us and been replaced by something else which is far less distinct. At this point, we ought to turn back, returning almost to its source, in order to reconstruct it within ourselves.

Yes, we are within the area of the museum; but we are still outside the building, in a space which is also open to passers-by who have no interest in visiting the museum. So the work can be encountered quite by chance, without previous intention or inclination. The work's collocation in an 'open' space frees it from the overdetermination of its status as a work of art and thus sites its precise determinacy in the indeterminacy of 'the open'. The source of the sound is concealed within the architecture and constitutes no visual clue: 'In my work the speakers are always concealed, so the system producing the sound doesn't become a physical reference'. So the encounter is immediate and takes place at a purely auditory level. In the moment in which one's ears 'grab hold' of the presence of the sound, which is something they can also fail to do, the other senses likewise come to be activated and the work achieves its realization, presenting itself as a work that directly interacts with the space-time continuum of existence itself. The sound is a catalyst that gives rise to a particular perceptual situation, and it endlessly continues to evolve without interruption or self-repetition. It gives rise to a situation in which space is perceived to have substance and density, and not as a void or as a gap between solids. This density, moreover, can only be real, since we experience it by way of our senses. It dawns into the consciousness of the sentient subject, but in no way detaches perceiver from perceived; the subject and the subject's experience of space become amalgamated parts of a whole. The situation that Neuhaus creates is no partial or momentary invitation to a simply indicative awareness of self in a simply symbolic here and now. His work finds its fundamental terms of reference in freedom and responsibility, in generous respect for the fabric of existence and for the indeterminacy of the self; and it sees that they are not to be retrieved from myth, from the ideology of redemptive form, from the fantasy of poetry, or from the dream of 'the thing' which has since gone lost.

First published as "Max Neuhaus", The Collection: Max Neuhaus [Italian, English] (Milan: Charta,, 1997)