2000
A proposal for the realization of Max Neuhaus' Time Piece for the city of Bern and a retrospective of his oeuvre as part of its inauguration in January of 2000.
The first installation of this Moment concept in 1989 at the Kunsthalle in Bern, built as a temporary installation to demonstrate the concept, established public confidence in the idea. The proposal now to realize a city-wide work is the next step. The change of century at midnight December 31, 1999 provides the ideal moment for its inauguration
The work's sound/silence will emanate from selected high points within and around Bern. In a preliminary phase, these will be surveyed and selected, and a prototype of one of the sound source electronic systems will be designed and built. These two activities establish the scope of the work -- the number of locations and type of sound system required for each. It is only after this that the overall cost of the work can be determined This phase can be realized through Neuhaus' organization Acoustica SA for a cost of Sfr 50.000. It must begin this summer in order for the work to be ready in time for the inauguration at the turn of the century.
A description of the Time Piece concept (Moment) for translation, follows along with an outline of the eight sections of the retrospective and a proposal for an accompanying publication as well as a project schedule.
Moment
Historically the most important function of sound in communities has been as a signal. Sound has been used for simultaneous communication among the inhabitants of communities in both eastern and western civilizations, since antiquity. In Europe, by the late 700s, more than a thousand years ago, the church bell had become a definitive force in communities. It not only announced church services, but also deaths, births, fire, revolt and festivals. It was such a strong unifying force that the limits of the community itself were defined by its range -- if you lived beyond where you could hear it, you lacked the daily information necessary to be a participant in society.
A sound signal is a communicator, the first form of broadcasting, a medium that carries information to people in many different places simultaneously.
This is a form of unification.
I call one group of my sound works Moment or Time Pieces. They are artworks which take the form of communal sound signals. The basic idea of these works though, is to form the sound signal with a silence rather than a sound.
Instead of a bell which begins with a sudden clang and gradually dies away - this concept is precisely the opposite: the sound is introduced gradually, beginning inaudibly it grows slowly over a period of minutes and, at its height, suddenly disappears.
The long subtle emergence of the sound causes it to go unnoticed. It becomes apparent only at the instant of its sudden disappearance, creating a sense of silence. In this silent moment, for a few seconds after the sound has gone, a subtle transparent aural afterimage is superimposed on the everyday sounds of the environment.. a spontaneous aural memory or reconstruction perhaps, shared by all who notice it, engendered by the sound's disappearance.
The idea of making a sound experience by removing a sound may seem strange at first, but in fact it occurs occasionally in daily life. My favorite example is the coffee grinding machine in a cafe. When the machine is first turned on in a noisy cafe most don't consciously notice it -- talking just seems to become a little more difficult. That is quite amazing in itself, because the sound is quite loud. It is also an expected event in the cafe, though, and the mind simply adjusts for it and goes on with what it has been doing. But, when the coffee grinding is finished and the sound suddenly stops, the space is suddenly enveloped in an aural vacuum -- what seems like a moment of complete silence occupies the cafe even though it is actually still very noisy. I love the contradiction of that moment.
The nature of that silence is formed by the nature of the sound which produces it. In the case of the coffee grinding machine it is a sense of relief when it stops: the sound is hard and harsh. It is possible to change the sensation of the silence by changing the nature of the sound. Instead of harsh and grating the sound can be warm and rich, instead of loud, it could be subtle. I shape the afterimage's character by shaping the sound's character, building it within its community, by ear.
The range of our emotional responses to sound is infinite.
When set up on an hourly or daily basis, these periodic public silences become integrated into the life of their communities -- they become unifiers, spiritually tying together a community's diverse places and activities momentarily throughout the day.
These artworks are neither makers of announcements nor keepers of time, as such. They are reinstatements of the joining force of aural signals and extensions of their history.
Max Neuhaus
Retrospective Exhibition
Kunsthalle Bern
15 January - 15 March, 2000
Sections
Place
Moment
Performance
Networks
Passage
Walks
Water
Invention
Publication
In 1993 Neuhaus began work on a ten volume set of small publications which would encompass his oeuvre. The first three of these - two introductory volumes and the volume on the Place works - were published as Max Neuhaus, sound works; volume I, inscription; volume II, drawings; volume III, place (Ostfildern-Stuttgart:Cantz 1994) For this exhibition plans to continue this publication and with the collaboration of Harald Szeemann, complete the remaining seven volumes.