2002
Times Square 1977

Sound Work Location: Pedestrian island between 46th and 45th Streets, New York City, 1977Dimensions: triangle 6 x 12 meters

 - the Sound Work  remains until 1992, to be reinstalled in 2002 as a permanent piece in the Collection of Dia Art Foundation.

Max Neuhaus’s Times Square is a rich harmonic sound texture emerging from the north end of the triangular pedestrian island located at Broadway between 45th and 46th Streets in New York City.

Originally installed at this site from 1977 to 1992, the Times Square Street Business Improvement District (BID), and Christine Burgin collaborated with MTA Arts for Transit and Dia to reinstate the project in May of 2002.

Visitors and residents in Times Square may experience the artwork 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

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Time Square

The aural and visual environment is rich and complex.  It includes large billboards, moving neon signs, office buildings, hotels, theaters, porno centers and electronic game emporiums.  Its population is equally diverse including tourists, theatergoers, commuters, pimps, shoppers, hucksters and office workers.  Most people are in motion, passing through the square. The island, as it is the junction of several of the square's pathways, is sometimes crossed by a thousand or more people in an hour.

The work is an invisible unmarked block of sound on the north end of the island.  Its sonority, a rich harmonic sound texture resembling the after ring of large bells, is an impossibility within its context.  Many who pass through it, however, can dismiss it as an unusual machinery sound from below ground.

For those who find and accept the sound's impossibility though, the island becomes a different place, separate, but including its surroundings.  These people, having no way of  knowing that it has been deliberately made, usually claim the work as a place of their own discovering.

Max Neuhaus