Event known as American Can, staged during the winter of 1966-67 in Staten Island’s Cloves Lakes Park (New York) and other locations around the city.
During this first decade of his career ( from about 1966 to 1977) sites that encompassed both relatively neglected and highly trafficked outdoor urban location. most had markedly industrial timbre. Gradually he eliminated all effects of performative, which he saw as the province of music, and began to engage with his audience more collaboratively, as glimpsed in another of Moore's shots, this one taken during an event known as American Can, staged during the winter of 1966-67 in Staten Island's Clove lakes Park and other locations around the city. Participants were invited to bounce or slide the cans that carpeted the ground, though whether they where given additional directions and temporal guidelines is no longer known. A A commonplace activity, usually associated with melancholic, aimless wandering and purposeless play, seems to have been detourned here by Neuhaus into a constructive collective action. Tellingly, the crowd generated the sound component of thr work. It was no longer found sound.
Lynne Cooke text p.33 Locational Listening
Ed. "Times Square, Max Neuhaus, Time Piece Beacon" (2009) Dia Art Fundation, New York
Photo Credit: Peter Moore
Max Neuhaus, American Can, Clove Lakes Park, Staten Island, New York, Febuary 19. 1967
The instructions for the latter called for a large number of canned products (manufactured or distributed by the American Can company) to cover a ground conducive to sound as the participating crowd bounced, slid, and moved the cans to generate sounds
