1989
Time Piece, Kunsthalle Bern, 1989

Image: Invite Bern, Archive Max Neuhaus Estate

The experience of momentary silence is the focus of a separate and as yet still fairly small group of works which Max Neuhaus calls Moment Works. One of them was installed at the Kunsthalle Bern in 1989 and was in operation until 1993. The sound of this work was broadcast over a radius of about 300 metres by four outdoor loudspeakers, one located on each side of the building, towards a busy square, a wooded slope, a small park and a bridgehead. Max Neuhaus describes the work as follows: „A sound texture is slowly introduced over a period of minutes so that it is not noticed directly; but subtly establishes a different or imaginary sense of place, acoustically. Once established, this place is removed, juxaposing the imaginary with the real and exposing the real, in a new way, as a moment of quiet. On the hour and on the half hour, a sound that had been gradually faded in before would stop. Whereas the work in Parc Lullin, Geneva, needs the directional movement of the listener in order to hear the sound becoming louder and breaking off to give the effect of silence, in the Moment Works it is the sound itself that repeatedly increases in volume and ends. The listener does not actually become aware of the place of the sound until the moment of its subtraction. The place manifests itself at the moment of apparent silence in which all the sounds that are already there all the time are perceived as though purified, cleansed of the effect of a sound that has been faded in gradually and not noticed initially. Neuhaus makes an analogy between the experience he constructs in a Moment Work and a familiar everyday experience: when an electric coffee grinder is switched on in a café it goes unnoticed because it is a sound that is generally expected in such a place, even though the sound is loud and makes conversation difficult. But when the machine is switched off again, there is a sense of silence, even though the place is still loud. ¹³ What is noticed at the moment the sound stops and how that moment is perceived depends on the characteristics of the added sound, which is why Max Neuhaus speaks of shaping silence. „...I was building a sound for its afterimage. The sound I was building is not the thing I was building; I was building the thing that happens when the sound disappears. As early as the 1970s, Neuhaus developed an alarm clock that woke the sleeper by breaking off a sound. 

¹²                              Max Neuhaus, Time Piece Series, in: Max Neuhaus, Two Sound Works 1989, Kunsthalle Bern, Kölnischer Kunstverein, 1989, p. 8

¹³                              Max Neuhaus, Notes on Place and Moment, op. cit. p. 99 ¹⁴ ibid., p. 100