1978
(Untitled) Stiching DeAppel, 1978

Imagine: Circumscription Drawing by Max Neuhaus, 1993

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From September 27 through 30, De Appel exhibited a sound installation by Max Neuhaus. On the last day of the exhibition, an event took place in the Marnixbad: Under water music(s) / Water whistle. Visitors had to bring their bathing suits. Neuhaus: 'I became interested in making sound underwater when I realized that one hears in a completely different way in water. Sound travels much faster and further, we hear not only with our ears but also with our foreheads; our whole sense of sound location is changed.

-Text in newspaper Art In America, (page 159):

In his waterworks Neuhaus describes the amniotic sublime--an underwater topography whose invisible contours invite exploration.

Parkway piece's suggestion that a sound-topography could be perma-nent.

Neuhaus didn't perform on the whistles, he only tended them, yet that task required him to play a distant variant on the concert soloist's role. After Water Whistle XVII came four versions of Under. water Music, the last presented in Amsterdam in 1978. Since then, he has avoided even the most oblique resemblance to a performer, save when he lectures or plays the art-visionary in a meeting with art-bureaucrats. It is an astonishing renunciation, considering how swiftly he succeeded on stage, though we (and especially we Amer-icans) like to believe that sudden career switches are always possible and nothing remarkable. Thus we reinforce our illusions about personal freedom. Why shouldn't Neuhaus have left music for sound in the late '60s, a time when even the most violent change could feel routine? But his move counts as daring. To grasp its audacity, we might hazard an answer to an obvious question: how did a nice boy like Max Neuhaus, on track to stardom in the world of tux-clad music, end up in a racy milieu like the art world?

It may have bored Neuhaus to distraction to set up and break down his van-load of percussion instruments night after night, but he admits that he performed this task--and his music-in a pleasant and reassuring zone of contemporary life. Avant-garde composers try to disrupt the familiar repertory, and they succeed, yet 18th- and 19th-century "classics" retain an authority with no art-world coun-terpart. A figure like Beethoven provides the ship of culture with effective ballast. By comparison, Ingres and Delacroix look like odd birds chasing one another through the spindrift.

Pollock has sent Picasso to the periphery of art-world vision (at least in New York), and Warhol may do the same to Pollock, yet no postwar composer has dislodged Dvorak, never mind Mahler, from

the center stage before which most contemporary concertgoers prefer to arrange themselves. The world of serious music resists the present; surely that gives its standard offerings a part of their appeal. However tumultuous the emotions aroused by a familiar symphony, its familiarity comforts. To Neuhaus, that comfort felt like an oppressive coziness. Discontented in the nostalgic hierarchy where he labored as a virtuoso, he fled to the art world's unstable, wide open spaces.

The 1960s led Minimalist imagery to blankness: a sheer and uncomposed visibility equivalent to the audibility, the sheer sound, Neuhaus works with. He inflects his material, sometimes in complex patterns, but never transforms it. So his sounds are always sounds, not music, as paint is always paint on Robert Ryman's canvases. I mention Ryman because Jean-Christophe Amman has compared his white paint textures to the smooth sonic textures Neuhaus spread through a large white room at the Basel Kunsthalle in 1983. In discussing Neuhaus, Pierre Restany offers a European counterpart:

Yves Klein's monochrome canvases.

Klein's nubbly blue reminds Americans that over the past three decades Europeans have contributed their share of esthetically charged blanks. Figures like Klein and Piero Manzoni also point to Europe's part in providing such Americans as Ryman and Brice Marden with their first enthusiastic audiences. Neuhaus has split the last ten years about equally between the Continent and the States, always looking beyond art-world borders for a new site to...

Sound Work, Stichting DeAppel, September 27–30, 1978