1968
In her September 19, 1968, column for the Village Voice, Jill Johnston, the leading chronicler of the New York avant-garde, provides a quintessential "underground" account of Max Neuhaus's radical transition from the concert hall to the environment.
Johnston describes a "Float-In," or collective listening event, likely related to Neuhaus's early underwater sound experiments or his "Fan Music" project. She captures the social atmosphere of the New York scene in 1968, where art was becoming a collective and immersive experience.
Johnston emphasizes how Neuhaus was dismantling the "performer-audience" hierarchy. Instead of observing a virtuoso percussionist on stage, participants were invited to physically inhabit the sonic space.
As Tom Johnson would do in 1972, Johnston identifies Neuhaus as a spiritual successor to John Cage, but with a more aggressive and technological approach that employed high-decibel fans and electronic oscillators. The "Float-In" concept served as a metaphor for the dematerialization of art—a theme also explored by Dore Ashton in Art in America—in which the artwork is no longer a physical object, but a temporary state of mind.
This 1968 article is a primary source for understanding the countercultural reception of Neuhaus's work, demonstrating that he was as much a figure in the Village underground as he was a Billboard-charting classical musician.