2006
Commissioned specifically for Dia:Beacon where it was inaugurated on May 6, 2006, Time Piece Beacon (2005) creates a zone of sound around the perimeter of the museum. Tailored to the building and its surroundings, it introduces an aural experience into the environs; for Neuhaus has established here what he calls a "sound signal in reverse," a subtle sound that will be noticed when it disappears rather than when it begins. He draws an analogy with such conventional uses of sound as a signal as the chimes of a clock which announce the times of day: "Initially inaudible, the sound will gradually emerge from the ambient noise [as the hour approaches] and then will suddenly stop." The signal thus becomes the "silence" that ensues after the abrupt cessation of the sound.
A pioneer in the fields of contemporary art and music, the American-born Neuhaus is credited with being the first to explore the role of sound as a primary medium in the visual arts. Unlike music, his works are never a succession of changing audio events in time (for him, a basic definition of music) but are instead "continuums in space." Equally crucial to the positioning of his work in the field of the plastic arts, as distinct from that of music, is the fact that "the sound is not the work." "The sound is the material I make a work out of," he contends. "[It is] the material I use to transform the space into a place. . . . Trying to capture this work with a recording is [therefore] as silly as chipping the paint off the canvas, putting it in a box and thinking you still have the painting."
One of a number of works from the Moment series, Time Piece Beacon is premised-as are all his works-on a perception of space as a function of what we hear, as well as what we see. Whereas the Moment series introduces a regularly repeating sound into a context, many of his other works, including Times Square (1997/2002), establish what the artist terms "a time continuum." Yet Times Square, too, exploits qualities particular to that given site as the basis on which a new aural experience is created. Located on the pedestrian island at Broadway between 45th and 46th streets in Manhattan, it introduces a subtly calibrated low ringing tone into the cacophonous urban context. If many of the thousands of pedestrians who daily traverse this busy intersection remain unaware of the acoustic interloper, others find that this low hum indelibly shapes and gives definition to what is otherwise a nebulous city ambience.
For each project, Neuhaus makes a drawing-text diptych; what he calls a "statement in another medium." While his sound works can only ever be experienced directly-that is, in situ-his graphic works articulate the ideas informing each piece in other terms and, so, offer another dimension to the originating conception. While Neuhaus's work has been presented in numerous exhibitions over the past forty years, today there are a dozen pieces permanently installed in public and private venues. These two works in Dia's collection are the only ones located in North America; the remainder are in Western Europe.