2002
2002 Archive corrispondence Max Neuhaus Estate
The MCA story is below.
>Why do you date your Chicago MCA installation 1979-89, when the >museum staff and witnesses say it was sounding until the old museum >location was closed (1996)? Is it because it was temporarily unplugged?
I invalidated the work in 1989 after a multitude of sins on the part of the museum i.e. The museum agreed when I completed it that the work would never be turned off and that no other artwork would ever be shown in its space, but violated this agreement many times over the ten year period.
The final straw came when I walked into the museum unannounced around Christmas of 1989 and found electronic music coming out of the work's speaker system. A brochure at the front desk announced that the results of an electronic music contest were being played in the stairwell over the work’s speakers - the equivalent of say letting art students have a graffiti contest on your Richard Serra - after ten years they still hadn't gotten past the point of thinking of the work as a very expensive hi fi system which, since they had bought it, they could do what they liked with.
I then realized that they never would get beyond that point and that it was best to put the piece out of its misery - conceptually at least - using my last weapon, I declared it no longer valid.
Certainly it was the right thing to do considering what they did at the end - physically destroying the work along with all the other site specific works in their collection to get an extra million dollars by selling the building.
They never got it: they even asked me if I would make a new work for them out of the pieces.
Max Neuhaus