1976
(Untitled) MoMa 1976,
Sound work location: Abby Aldrich Sculpture Garden, Museum of Modern Art, New York City Dimensions: 60 x 20 meters Extant: Summer, 1978
1976
Image: Postcard by Max Neuhaus, MoMa, view of site.
The work at the PS1 in 1976 [untitled] was created with two high tones at the upper pitch threshold of hearing. If you take a tone and gradually raise it up, at one point it disappears. Just below that point where we can't hear any higher, as sound approaches that threshold, I noticed that the threshold wasn't a line, it was an area. It's an interesting area because, in it, the sound is both there and not there.
With this work for MoMA, I knew from the beginning that I had a way to make very low sounds. There was a ventilation chamber beside the building, and I saw that it could be turned into a subsonic loudspeaker. I built it and started tuning. I just took it down, down and down. It could go down to ten cycles per second; we stop hearing sound as sound at about twenty-five, so this is a full octave and a half below where we stop hearing sound. It was the opposite end of aural perception than the work in the "Rooms" exhibition at PS1 – the lower threshold.
I began trying textures, high and medium, but with this incredible bottom end. I soon noticed that some of the lows were actually resonances of the whole garden, and then one day I came back and I said, what is all this? I've got it right here, this is it, I'll just use the inaudible part. It was a nice moment, saying to myself, turn it around, turn it over.
Max Neuhaus
'Sound continued to radiate forth, from the garden of the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1978 and in the stairway of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 1979. In both works the sonic pattern acquired volume, quality and intensity of timbre according to the position of the listener in the garden or on the various levels of the stairway. At times the integration of sound and place reached a point of maximum identity between space and volume, level and surface, such that a continuous sound texture could construct a wall or define a passageway. In other cases, the anti-metaphysical approach leads to a sound that is 'fitting' to the social dimension, a design that results in a 'true' sound, one that serves society, adjusting to it and becoming a usable innovation, beyond its aesthetic and sensory quality'.
Germano Celant
Celant Text complete: r-ngermano-celant-r-nmax-neuhaus-quoted-aural-spaces-1-2-3-in-art-in-america-new-york-october-1987-r-n
Text Carter Ratcliff: art-in-america-review-of-exhibitions-new-york-january-febbruary-1979-max-neuhaus-at-the-moma-sculpture-garden-and-time-square-by-carter-ratcliff-
Matthieu Saladin, The Inaudible as an Effect: Tactics of Sound Erasure in Max Neuhaus, 2020