2003
Max Neuhaus has pioneered artistic practice outside conventional cultural contexts for almost forty years and become a founder of the sound art movement. He is credited as being the first to employ sound as a primary medium in the field of contemporary art. Born in Beaumont, Texas in 1939, Neuhaus studied percussion from 1957 at the Manhattan School of Music, where he met John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Aged 23, he was one of the few performers with the bravado to play, ‘Zyklus’, Stockhausen's highly complex virtuoso composition for solo percussion and became renowned for his interpretation of contemporary music in general while still in his twenties, performing as a soloist on concert tours throughout the US. In 1964, aged 25, he presented recitals at Carnegie Hall, New York and in fifteen major European cities traveling with one thousand kilos of instruments to perform his repertoire, while extending his palette of sound by inventing early Electro-acoustic instruments. His career as a performer culminated in an album of contemporary solo percussion music, which he recorded for Columbia Masterworks in 1968.
During this period Neuhaus also began to create works with static sound colours which were generated electronically and so invented a new art form, coining the term 'sound installation'. These are not events, but entities which he builds for specific locations, sometimes anonymously in public places. During his career Neuhaus has realised a large number of permanent works for both public and private collections including: Dia Art Foundation, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; CAPC Musee d'Art Contemporain, Bordeaux, France; Documenta IX Kassel, Germany; Castello di Rivoli, Museo d'arte Contemporanea, Italy; Collection Kunst im öffentlichen Raum der Stadt Bern, Switzerland and Fonds cantonal d'art contemporain (FCAC). Geneva. He has also created many temporary works and had numerous drawing exhibitions, both in New York at Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and P.S.1, Contemporary Art Centre, Long Island. As well as Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France; Centre National d'Art Contemporain, Grenoble and the Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland. He has also contributed to Documenta VI & IX, Kassel, Germany and the Biennale di Venezia, Italy in 1999. In support of his work, Neuhaus has been awarded fellowships by the Rockefeller Foundation, the University of Chicago, the Deutsche Akademische Austauschdienst and both the music and plastic arts sections of the National Endowment for the Arts in America.
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May 2002 saw the reinstatement of undoubtedly the most important project by Neuhaus to date entitled, Times Square. Situated above a large underground ventilation vault on a triangular pedestrian island at Broadway between 45th & 46th Streets in New York, the work is an invisible, unmarked block of sound. A continuous cluster of tone emerges from the subway grating to form a rich, harmonic sound texture - the sound has been likened to an undying after-ring of a group of large bells. This creates a volume of activated space at street level that becomes an integral part of an ever-shifting sound environment and perhaps the most clandestine art experience in Manhattan.
''Think of the thousands of people who have crossed that island,'' Neuhaus mused, “For those who find and accept the work’s anomaly, the island becomes a different place, separate, but including its surroundings. People, having no way of knowing that it has been deliberately made, usually claim the work as a place of their own discovering.” *1
Although Neuhaus has left the site at street level physically unaltered this does not mean the work has no visual component. More than site specific, he has built the work out of the site. Once one is in the work's sound Times Square itself becomes a different place visually as well. It is an arrangement of sound in space - an aural definition of a new place.
“The major amount of energy that I put into making a work is in the construction of its sound. The real effort comes there - the process of placing the first sound in the space, listening to it and finding the next thing to try. It is a process of learning, on my part, about sound in that place, in the place that exists before I begin, but also this imaginary place or moment that I want to build.” *3
The artwork was originally conceived in 1973 and installed in the autumn of 1977, with the co-operation of MTA New York City Transit and contributions from the National Endowment for the Arts and other donors in America. It sounded continuously for over fifteen years until Neuhaus, disappointed that still no institution would step forward and take responsibility for its maintenance, dismantled it in 1992. The ambitious task of rebuilding the piece was lead by gallerist and collector, Christine Burgin, and has resulted in the work joining the prestigious permanent collection of the Dia Art Foundation with its base at the Dia Centre for the Arts, Chelsea, New York. The piece, the only sound work in the Dia archive, now sits alongside other such off-site works in the collection as Walter de Maria’s, Earth Room, 1977, New York and The Lightning Field, 1978, New Mexico, and Robert Smithson’s, Spiral Jetty, 1970, Great Salt Lake, Utah.
“Although invisible and intentionally anonymous, the subtle but palpable sonic resonance of Neuhaus’ invention made it a landmark of public art,” said Michael Govan, the director of Dia, at its recent re-inauguration. “To restore it is a gift not only to the Times Square neighbourhood and the city of New York, but also to art history.” *5
The reinstatement of the work was sponsored by the Times Square Business Initiative Development, a non-profit agency, in collaboration with MTA Arts for Transit. The Dia has granted an initial endowment of $30,000 and the promise of a publication for the project, while the Sulzberger family raised $110,000 for its reinstallation and its modest operating costs of $1,000 a year.
“We are very excited to have this distinctive artwork brought back to renewed life in Times Square.” Said Tim Tompkins, President of the Times Square BID, “It is great not only because it was designed specifically for Times Square, but also because its unconventional nature fits with the energy, diversity and edge of Times Square.” *6
Sulzberger and Burgin managed to achieve financial support from the immediate commercial neighbours on Times Square despite the fact that the work must remain anonymous with no plaque acknowledging its sponsors *7
Neuhaus sees his practice as re-defining our spatial understanding of the environment through the use of sound alone. He says, “In our daily lives, our eye and ear are constantly working together as a closely linked team to form our perception of the world. Traditionally practitioners in the plastic arts have adjusted this perception through vision, forming with shape and colour. I on the other hand work with our sense of hearing.” *9 “Sound is the material with which I transform the perception of space.” *8
Based on the premise that our sense of place depends on what we hear, as well as what we see, he utilises a given social and aural context and from this foundation builds a new perception of place. As a result of the interaction, the inherent sounds of the site and its characteristics whether acoustic, visual, or social, all become the elements that constitute the work.
Throughout our lives sound has always represented an event, something that happens, which begins and ends. A barking dog, a spoken phrase, a piece of music can exist only in time and have meaning only over time. The fundamental idea of Neuhaus’ work is the opposite, to remove sound from time and so form place. Once initiated these works run continuously 24 hours a day. To turn them on and off would force them into time, turning them back into events. His first permanent sound work was realised in 1973. Entitled, Walkthrough, the work was sited in the Jay Street subway entrance at Borough Hall in Brooklyn.
In 1992, Neuhaus was invited to participate in Documenta IX, in Kassel and realised a permanent site-specific artwork. Created in the AOK Building in Friedrichplatz, the work entitled, Three to One, sits opposite the main hub of the recurring exhibition in the internal glazed space of a stairwell overlooking the square. Installed now for over a decade, it represents a major theme in Neuhaus’ œurve, whereby existing identical spaces are occupied by contrasting sound colours, transforming them into contrasting spaces with sound alone. The sounds here are subtle, simply presences in the spaces. “In these imaginary places that I build,” says Neuhaus, “often the moment the listener first walks into the space, it is not clear that a sound is there. But as you begin to focus, a shift of scale happens. At first you hear what could almost be a room sound, which then suddenly becomes huge. As you enter into it, you move into another perception of space because of the change of scale.” *2
Invited by the Italian Pavilion in 1999 he exhibited a temporary sound work entitled, Intersection 1, as part of the 48th Biennale di Venizia. The work created a subtle outdoor space of sound. Neuhaus defined the work as ''a sound to carry you to a new place, to transport you to another frame of mind, just different enough to throw you even though you perhaps were not even aware of it.'' *10 Situated in the center of the wide gravelled promenade leading to the pavilion, the piece consisted of eight slits in the ground from which emanated a soft sound colour that seemed to surround the viewer from the sides and above when centrally positioned within the work.
In 1999 Neuhaus realised a commission for the Collection Kunst im öffentlichen Raum der Stadt Bern, sited on a footbridge at Lorrianstrasse, Bern, Switzerland. The work, Suspended Sound Line, can be seen as a radical departure from his previous projects. Here he partitioned the sound into abutting regions that divided the experience of traversing the bridge into seven distinct sections. "One feels that it is impossible to tie down these sounds, to fix them in any kind of concrete reality. As we try to close our hands (ears) around them, they shift into something else, disappear and transform themselves before our eyes. (One has the tendency to describe these aural phenomenon in visual terms, but they do seem to be divided into regions, do seem to be completely integrated into the landscape.) Because it is outside, because it is so seamlessly integrated into the sounds of the city, of the neighbourhood, one wonders where the sound is coming from. It is a part of the structure; it is a 'footbridge lined with sound', as if the sound was another element of construction, like steel and concrete." *11
“The impact of this form lies in its contradiction to our assumptions about sound itself.” explains Neuhaus, “Instead of sound being dispersed evenly, here we have a seeming impossibility: highly defined sound zones standing in free space without apparent source. This physical form and its contradictions are one element of this sound work; the other, of course, is the nature of the sounds themselves.” *12
Seen as a means of documenting the essence of a completed sound work Neuhaus creates diptychs of image and text that complement each installation. These free-hand images typically produced on large sheets of tracing paper using coloured pencil range from the almost purely diagrammatic to elegant subtle arrangements of colour and tone that articulate his interest in making sounds that occupy physical shapes. Here the term sound colour is translated literally into differing coloured gestures across the page capturing the poetic and transient nature of the experience of the works and offering a two-dimensional understanding of a highly complex three-dimensional volume of sound.
The accompanying text panel with each image reads like a Japanese haiku poem, through its combination of simplicity and suggestion. In July 2000, Neuhaus exhibited a selection of these drawings in a solo show at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Centre. Curated by senior curator, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, the exhibition focused on the drawings produced after some of Neuhaus' most well known installations including Fan Music, 1968, originally installed on Manhattan rooftops and Walkthrough, 1973, created for a New York City subway station.
His latest permanent public sound work entitled, Promenade du Pin, after its location in Geneva, was inaugurated on 12 November 2002 and joins the collection of Fonds cantonal d'art contemporain (FCAC) there.
This coming November sees the first ever Max Neuhaus sound work to be shown in London. The short term, outdoor work will be sited in Bedford Square, Bloomsbury for a six-month period to accompany a new exhibition of drawings entitled, Max Neuhaus: Aural Space. The drawing exhibition will focus on a selection of international projects dealing with the notion of defining and occupying space with sound. Curated by Neil Robert Wenman it will be held at the Architectural Association, 24 Bedford Square, London WC1. Max Neuhaus is represented by Lisson Gallery, London.