1989
TIME PIECE BERN by Max Neuhaus.
Sound Work Commissioned by Kunsthalle Bern, 12 May 1989 -1993
- first full-scale Time Piece 1993 -
1989
Image: Invite Bern, Max Neuhaus Estate Archive
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TIME PIECE SERIES by Max Neuhaus,
MNE Archive TEXTS, 1980 - 2004.
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The final sonority which I chose for Bern is plausible in its context. Although it sounds like neither it recalls the sounds of both bells and airplanes, two common features in the local aural environment. It is also quite beautiful.
In the course of making proposals for these works, it became clear that the proposal of the idea was much more frightening than it's subtle reality. In 1988, as an example of the reality, I decided to do a short term version of the concept for the Kunsthalle in Bern, Switzerland. The work encompasses a large active plaza, several parks and a pathway through a woods leading down to a river.
Max Neuhaus
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The proposal for a moment piece for Bern has quite a history. I built a model of the idea almost ten years ago at the Kunsthalle here in Bern; it was 'heard' over an area one kilometer in diameter around the building and ran continuously for three years. The plan was to demonstrate the subtlety of the work and then implement it for the city as a whole. Somehow that never happened. Now we plan the full realization and to inaugurate it at the start of the millennium.
Excerpt from Max Neuhaus, Berlin / 26 May 1995
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'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.'
Excerpt from: Max Neuhaus: Discussion with members of the International Academy of Philosophy of Art, Bern, 1998
Max Neuhaus worker, Kunsthalle Bern, 1989
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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.
Excerpt from: Ulrich Loock, Time Piece, Kunsthalle Bern, 1989 (English)
Excerpt From: Ulrich Loock, Time Piece, Kunsthalle Bern, 1989 (German)
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The Kunsthalle in Berne is situated on one of the busiest squares in the town. The noise of trams and cars provided a daily backdrop and setting for the extrinsic sound Neuhaus installed there. The title of the work was Time Piece, Kunsthalle Bern (1989). A few minutes before every hour and half hour, the note fades in, only to break off abruptly on the dot of the hour or half hour. That is to say: the work operates like a clock, marking time by means of silence. What is more remarkable is the use of something that is merely there in order to point up its own absence: what counts is the aftermath of the sound. Most passers-by and museum-goers experience this similarly: the note itself exists in memory. When the note ceases, the auditory sense consciously registers that it has been perceiving something that is suddenly no longer there, and it hankers after the missing tone. In comparison with other aural installations which do consist of some kind of material - sound material, sound texture - the Moment Pieces are genuinely immaterial.
Excerpt from: Doris von Drathen, Max Neuhaus, Jen 25, 2007