1968
Robert Smithson did not discuss Max Neuhaus in his essay "A Museum of Language in the Vicinity of Art." The essay was published in 1968, a period when Neuhaus was shifting his focus from musical performance to site-specific sound installations. While Smithson's writings did not engage with Neuhaus directly, critics and art historians have identified significant conceptual overlaps between their work, particularly in their shared interest in site-specificity and the subversion of institutional art frameworks.
Conceptual parallels between Smithson and Neuhaus
- Site-specificity and space:
- Smithson: Known for his land art projects like Spiral Jetty (1970), Smithson was a central figure in the movement towards site-specific art, where the artwork is intrinsically tied to its location and cannot be moved without losing its meaning.
- Neuhaus: He is recognized as a pioneer in using sound for site-specific installations, famously with works like Times Square (1977). Neuhaus used the unique acoustic and architectural properties of a site to create his works, making the sound inseparable from its location. His work similarly resists the traditional art market's focus on portable objects.
- Subversion of institutional spaces:
- Smithson's "Museum of Language": This essay critiqued the art establishment's tendency to contain and neutralize art through classification and language. It proposed an alternative space for language, an adjacent "museum," to challenge the institutional framework of art and its verbal interpretation.
- Neuhaus's public sound works: Neuhaus moved his art out of the concert hall and into public spaces like streets and stairwells (Times Square, ), bypassing traditional art institutions. His installations are often so subtle that they exist almost outside the typical structures of art consumption, blending into the ambient noise and requiring a different mode of attentive listening. This approach aligns with Smithson's critique of the institutional "museum" and his desire to recontextualize art within the broader environment.
- Smithson: While working with concrete materials, Smithson was concerned with geological time and entropic processes that worked against the static permanence of a museum object.
- Neuhaus: His work is ephemeral and invisible. The art itself is the sound, which is fleeting and constantly in flux with the environment, rather than a solid object. This immateriality is a radical departure from traditional art, much like Smithson's resistance to creating portable, collectible objects.
In essence, while Smithson critiqued the institutional packaging of art through the medium of language, Neuhaus achieved a similar subversion through the medium of sound. Both artists moved away from producing objects for galleries, choosing instead to create works deeply embedded in their physical sites, forcing a reconsideration of how art is perceived, experienced, and discussed.