1989
Time Piece, Kunsthalle Bern, 1989

Image: Invite Bern, Archive Max Neuhaus Estate

'The only work which has been realized on a city scale was in 1989 at the Kunsthalle in Bern where for a distance of one kilometer around the Kunsthalle I added a half-hourly sound character, a texture of sound, a continuous sound, which at every half hour disappeared.  It's a very interesting exercise for someone who has shaped sound for his whole life as I have; it's working on the other face of the coin.  It's shaping sound to shape a silence.'

Max Neuhaus, Berlin / 26 May 1995

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The experience of momentary silence is at the heart of a separate and still rather limited group of works that Max Neuhaus calls "Works of the Moment." One of these was installed at the Kunsthalle Bern in 1989 and remained in operation until 1993. The sound of this work was broadcast in a radius of about 300 meters from four outdoor speakers, one on each side of the building, towards a crowded square, a tree-lined slope, a small park, and a bridgehead. Max Neuhaus describes the work as follows: "A sonic texture is slowly introduced over the course of several minutes, so as not to be directly perceived; but it subtly establishes a sense of a different or imaginary place, acoustically. Once established, this place is removed, juxtaposing the imaginary with the real and exposing the real, in a new way, as a moment of stillness. At the hour and half-hour, a sound that had previously been gradually attenuated stopped. While the work at Parc Lullin in Geneva requires the listener's directional movement to hear the sound increase in intensity and stop to give the effect of silence, in the Moment Works it is the sound itself that repeatedly increases in volume and stops. The listener does not actually become aware of the sound's place until the moment of its subtraction. The place manifests itself in the moment of apparent silence in which all the sounds that are already present at any given moment are perceived as purified, cleansed by the effect of a sound that has been gradually attenuated and initially unnoticed. Neuhaus makes a An analogy between the experience he constructs in a Moment Work and a familiar everyday experience: when an electric coffee grinder is turned on in a café, it goes unnoticed because it's a sound generally expected in such a place, even though the sound is loud and makes conversation difficult. But when the machine is turned off again, a sense of silence is perceived, even though the place is still noisy. 13 What is noticed when the sound stops and how that moment is perceived depends on the characteristics of the added sound, which is why Max Neuhaus speaks of giving shape to silence. "...I was constructing a sound for its afterimage. The sound I was constructing is not the thing I was constructing; I was constructing what happens when the sound disappears." As early as the 1970s, Neuhaus developed an alarm clock that woke sleepers by interrupting a sound