Max Neuhaus: Finding Absence

By Ethan Swan

Walker Publishing Filed to Design · Part of Sounds of Space

Max Neuhaus, Water Whistle, December 31, 1971. Photo by Fred Haskell. Courtesy Walker Art Center.

“New York, City of Broken Clocks” is a 2023 article by Jesse Coburn that briskly summarizes the current state of civic responsibility through a commonly overlooked feature. Considering the many public clocks in the city—church steeples on the Lower East Side, supermarket wall clocks in Brooklyn, DUMBO’s Clocktower Building—Coburn observed that nearly all of them display the wrong time or have simply ceased ticking. He interviewed Tom Bernardin, president of the nonprofit group Save America’s Clocks, catalogers of over 100 public clocks in Manhattan alone. According to Bernardin, landmark status, historic import, petitions, phone calls, a straightforward sense of public participation: nothing compelled building owners to keep their clocks running. Both Coburn and Bernardin are clear-eyed about the obsolescence of public clocks to the dominance of cell phones, but they are also clear-eyed about the significance of this neglect, this broken promise: “To leave [a clock] perpetually busted,” writes Coburn, “suggests a casual indifference among the landed class to whether their buildings enhance or detract from the public space of the city.” 

This indifference is not unique to New York City; rather, residents of many cities experience it. As described by Franco “Bifo” Berardi, “the post-bourgeois capitalist class does not feel responsible for the community and the territory because financial capitalism is totally deterritorialized and has no interest in the future well-being of the community.” To wit, Coburn charts how the disrepair of public clocks usually coincides with the sale of the clock’s building and a conversion to condos or hotel suites.

But when I think about negotiating a city, even as I rush from meeting to copy shop to grocery store to post office, my panic and frustration are nearly always tempered by art. By the Situationist idea of dérive, the revolutionary potential in aimless wandering, in the unexpected, in seeing things you’d never seen before. In resisting efficiency. The Situationists were motivated by a 1952 study that followed a Parisian university student for an entire year, a student so busy with classwork that, traced on a map, her movements reveal a small, rigid triangle connecting her home, her school, and her piano teacher’s house. I think about my favorite of Raoul Vaneigem’s many slogans: “Who wants a world in which the guarantee that we shall not die of starvation entails the risk of dying of boredom?” I imagine my movements traced on a map, and I cross-cross and add turns in an attempt to escape my own triangle.

Or I think about Margaret Kilgallen’s praise for handmade signs: “On any day in the Mission in San Francisco, you can see a hand-painted sign that is kind of funky, and maybe that person, if they had money, would prefer to have had a neon sign. But I don’t prefer that.” Kilgallen acknowledges the gap between expectation and resource; she understands the yearning for something standard, professionalized. But she also finds the beauty in scrappiness, the endless, wild possibilities once standardized forms are out of reach.

Most of all, I think of Max Neuhaus’s piece, Listen, and the invitation to absorb the city on completely different terms. 

Max Neuhaus (b. 1939, d. 2009) began his career as a percussionist, performing throughout the United States in the 1960s with Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen. In 1968, he released the LP Electronics and Percussion, one of the first recorded examples of live electronic music. But the record came at a time when Neuhaus was losing interest in the performance hall and the studio, resistant to the idea that listening required dedicated space. His 1966 piece, Listen, sought to upend this requirement. As described by the artist: “The first performance was for a small group of invited friends. I asked them to meet me on the corner of Avenue D and West 14th Street in Manhattan. I rubber stamped LISTEN on each person’s hand and began walking with them down 14th Street toward the East River.” Neuhaus described some of the sounds they encountered: the “spectacularly massive rumbling” of a power plant, the speeding of cars on the highway, the street life of residential blocks. 

Writing about it in 1990, Neuhaus framed Listen as a contrast to composers who were inserting everyday sound into their concert hall performances: Luigi Russolo’s Intonarumori (“noise tuner”) built to replicate the clamor of industrialization; the whip, anvils, and sirens of Edgard Varèse’s Ionisation; John Cage’s 4’33”. In Neuhaus’s view, “Most members of the audience seemed more impressed with the scandal than with the sounds, and few were able to carry the experience over into an appreciation of these sounds in their daily lives.” Listen was his way of shifting the act of listening away from the concert hall into everyday life.

Across 10 years, Neuhaus performed Listen 15 times, eventually stripping the work down to its critical elements: “Saying nothing, I would simply concentrate on listening and start walking.” Neuhaus paid careful attention to the participants, and his observations validated his intentions: “At first,” he explained, “they would be a little embarrassed, of course, but the focus was generally contagious. The group would proceed silently, and by the time we returned to the hall, many had found a new way to listen for themselves.” The final iteration of Listen took place at the University of Iowa in 1976, a “silent parade” with hundreds of students rambling through the town. While Neuhaus recalled the students’ delight at the opportunity to abandon the lecture hall for the outdoors, the professors who had invited him were offended by Neuhaus’s ideas. “The faculty was so enraged that, to a man, they boycotted the elaborate lunch they had prepared for me after the lecture.” Neuhaus wasn’t at all deflated, recalling that he quite happily ate a lot of meat and potatoes at this lunch. But he also noted that the incident prompted a nationwide blacklist, ending his occupation as a university lecturer. 

Listen was a helpful method for re-training a relationship to sound, for asserting that our sense of place relies on what we hear as much as what we see. As a kind of counterbalance to the receptive activity of Listen, Neuhaus began developing work that used sound to build a new perception of place, work that shaped the sonic landscape as much as it sensed it. This open-form public art is presented in shared, accessible spaces. Acknowledging a connection to the physicality and “dimensions variable” expansiveness of installation art, Neuhaus chose the term “sound installation” to describe his pieces, the first to use this phrasing. Unlike installation art, Neuhaus’s interventions introduce no visible components to their settings. His installations take the landscape and architecture as they are, introducing audio through hidden or disguised speakers, recalibrating or destabilizing the locations through sound.  

The sound is primarily encountered by chance, and oftentimes misapprehended as a fluke, something unintentional. Of his 1977 piece Times Square, Neuhaus said, “The piece isn’t meant to startle, it’s meant for people who are ready to discover. In fact, I never do a work where everybody stops and notices it, I want at least 50% of the people to walk through it without noticing it.” The piece has no label, no sign indicating the location of the work. As pedestrians cross the sidewalk at Broadway and 46th Street in Manhattan, they pass over a metal subway grate. A ringing tone vents up from the darkness beneath this grate, the product of a massive speaker and the resonation of the tunnel itself. The effect can be ominous, heard as a baleful moan. It can be dismissed as a part of the subway’s roar. It can succumb to the sheer volume of tourists and street performers and traffic. And it can envelop the listener so completely the entire churn of Times Square vanishes, the chatter and squeal and pitch all erased by the coursing resonance. 

Neuhaus understood how the absorption of this sound would constantly shift. In a 2002 documentary about the piece, the artist stands atop the subway grate, gesturing to the crowds: “Right now, in the middle of the day, in the middle of Times Square, it’s subtle. But if you come here at 7 o’clock at night, when the buses are gone and the tourists are gone, it’s overwhelming. In the same way that a piece of physical sculpture changes with light, this piece changes with its acoustic surroundings, its aural surroundings.” This is the foundation of his thinking. For Neuhaus, these various possibilities are the heart of his work, not the tone itself. “The sound in these works is not the work,” he confirms. “It’s the site, which I’ve transformed into something else with sound.” Times Square offers the delight in discovery inherent in Listen, but without Neuhaus’s guidance or presence.

Following Times Square, Neuhaus created a series of commissions for arts institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; DeAppel, Amsterdam; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. In 1980, Neuhaus undertook his first-ever commission by a city government. Organized by the Walker Art Center, this untitled piece was installed in Como Park, St. Paul, Minnesota, in the largest greenhouse in Minnesota. Neuhaus described the Beaux–Arts greenhouse as an “incredibly beautiful space,” reiterating that the purpose of his work is not to improve or beautify its environment, but instead to transform our experience of it. Neuhaus was drawn to the space in part because of its audience: “not a museum public or a concert hall public.” An array of 64 loudspeakers projected single tones, combining to form, in the words of minimal composer Tom Johnson, “unpredictable melodies on four pitches.” Johnson described the “directionality” of the sounds, his awareness of his own movement through the building and the sense of surround. Neuhaus revealed that two years of planning went into the installation, taking particular advantage of the greenhouse’s curved glass walls. “The curved surfaces,” explained Neuhaus, “Focus sound the way lenses focus light.” Rather than ornament this incredibly beautiful space, Neuhaus chose to guide visitors to a greater awareness of its architecture.

While Times Square and the Como Park sound installation work by introducing new sounds to their environments, a different branch of his installation work explores sonic absence. For me, this body is the most affective of Neuhaus’s work. The shock of awareness, provoked through sudden removal, maps the heartbreaking intersection between loss and gratitude. This shock pulls the awe and reconsideration of Times Square through the wistful reach of Listen, offering enough delight and acknowledgement to understand what’s been lost, to hear the sounds that we no longer access.

Neuhaus uses a simple mechanism to incite this experience: presenting and removing a sound. An exemplary version of this is Neuhaus’s contribution to the 1983 Whitney Biennial, installed in the museum’s sculpture garden. For the Biennial’s catalogue, Neuhaus contributed a sketch of the sculpture garden and this description of the piece: “A SOUND BEGINS SOFTLY GROWS OVER A PERIOD OF MINUTES AND SUDDENLY DISAPPEARS - BECOMING APPARENT ONLY WHEN IT IS GONE.” Which does describe the piece, but perhaps doesn’t make clear its impact. An apparatus took the sound from the adjacent thoroughfare—Madison Avenue—and piped it into the sculpture garden. At the beginning of each cycle, these added sounds were inaudible. Over the course of 20 minutes, the volume level increased gradually until it matched the volume intensity of the actual street sounds. When the volume reached its peak, it shut off abruptly, a stark drop. As in Neuhaus’s description, most observers didn’t detect the sound’s crescendo, but only noticed it when it was gone. In the sudden undoing of sound, do we long for the return of the street sounds? Do we long for that moment of release, for a street free from street sounds? Could we simply feel grateful for the opportunity to acknowledge the presence of this sound in our lives, and consider how it affects us? Or do we reconsider our exposure to sound entirely? Neuhaus says “YES” to all this.

Writing about Neuhaus’s untitled contribution to Documenta VI (1977), Wulf Herzogenrath declared, “Art transports our imagination back into a reality which has developed in a different direction.” This untitled piece was installed outdoors, in a small clearing between works by George Trakas and Robert Morris. A large tree stood at the center of this clearing. In this tree, Neuhaus hid eight speakers, each projecting clicks at the ground, reflected in a way that made it seem as if the sound emanated from the grass. Herzogenrath observed that the sound “represented something which had almost ceased to exist—the sound reminiscent of the quiet snapping of a twig.” Years of horror movies burdens this sound with pursuit and terror for many of us, but Herzogenrath is able to imagine a friendly face, a surprise encounter as the result of this snap. Again, Neuhaus is most invested in the spectrum of possibility offered by this sound and all the experiences it suggests. But I can’t help but project a yearning onto the sound, the desire for an encounter, a crossed path in this empty, interstitial space.

Bell for Sankt Cäcilien, 1989, makes the most overt gesture of longing in Neuhaus’s work. Installed in Cologne, Germany, the piece addresses a grassy rectangular park bordered by the Kölnischer Kunstverein, Sankt Peter Köln Catholic Church, and the Schnütgen Museum of Medieval Art. The Schnütgen Museum opened in 1956, but its building, the Romanesque Church of Sankt Cäcilien, dates to the 12th century. The church originally had a grand doorway opening up onto the park, but the renovations required by the Schnütgen saw it completely bricked up. At an invitation from the Kunstverein, Neuhaus created his Bell after repeated visits to Cologne and endless hours spent in the park. Two speakers, mounted on adjoining rooftops, aim toward this sealed entrance. These speakers announced the turn of every hour with a recording of a bell. Neuhaus designed his bell to sound irregular, lingering, off-key, electronically processing the sound to a higher frequency, and extending the after-ring to an unnaturally long time. Describing the piece, Neuhaus wrote, “it’s plausible but at the same time it’s not plausible.”

Kunstverein staff recall visitors hearing the bells and instinctively looking up at the spires, their attempts to reconcile the sound with the empty, bell-bereft towers. Like the Whitney’s traffic or Documenta’s snapped twigs, church bells are heard but rarely, if ever, do we notice them. There is no end to the purpose of a church bell’s chime: the marking of time; the announcement of mass; to warn of a fire; the “joyful noise” to welcome Christmas and Easter; the commemoration of a wedding—“it tolls for thee.” Standing in the shadow of two churches, a bell’s toll is anything but unexpected. But this ghost of a bell sounds wrong and can’t be seen, recognized only in its absence. 

Despite this in-between status, the greatest wonder of Neuhaus’s work is that the pieces never feel like a gag or a prank. The search for the bell doesn’t terminate in feelings of shame, of having been duped. Rather, the feelings expand outward, like a cone, illuminating possibilities—slight differences and shared moments and alternate possibilities and new ways to listen. Perhaps more simply, Neuhaus offers the possibility of listening, of allowing our experience of the city, a building, or even a tree to include sound. Given this generosity, it’s easy to imagine how Neuhaus might’ve responded to the neglect of Manhattan’s clocks, the broken bargain with public space. But I find myself wondering instead how the stilled movement of the clock might interact with the wind, if the hollowed-out mechanisms might offer some new echo, or what reimagining of the constant ticking might offer some new understanding of this shared, crowded, endlessly refreshed space. ▪︎

Discover more perspectives on artists exploring the relationship between sound and the built environment in the ongoing article series Sound of Spaces here.