1967
Image: Can Object by Max Neuhaus
Collection The Estate of Max Neuhaus
stenciled on each can lid: MAX NEUHAUS SEPT 1966
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September 9. 4th Annual Avant Garde Festival. Central Park on the Mall. NYC. Collective performance. Work(s): American Can:
Sound works / Performance / 1966 - September 9. 4th Annual New York Avant-Garde Festival, Central Park. (first American Can)
Event known as American Can, staged during the winter of 1966-67 in Staten Island’s Cloves Lakes Park (New York) and other locations around the city.
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During this first decade of his career ( from about 1966 to 1977) sites that encompassed both relatively neglected and highly trafficked outdoor urban location. most had markedly industrial timbre. Gradually he eliminated all effects of performative, which he saw as the province of music, and began to engage with his audience more collaboratively, as glimpsed in another of Moore's shots, this one taken during an event known as American Can, staged during the winter of 1966-67 in Staten Island's Clove lakes Park and other locations around the city. Participants were invited to bounce or slide the cans that carpeted the ground, though whether they where given additional directions and temporal guidelines is no longer known. A A commonplace activity, usually associated with melancholic, aimless wandering and purposeless play, seems to have been detourned here by Neuhaus into a constructive collective action. Tellingly, the crowd generated the sound component of thr work. It was no longer found sound.
Lynne Cooke, Locational Listening, published in:
Bibliography / Books / 2009 - Max Neuhaus: Times Square, Time Piece Beacon. Eds. Lynne Cooke and Karen Kelley, with Barbara Schröder. New York: Dia Art Foundation.
Photo Credit: Peter Moore
Max Neuhaus, American Can, Clove Lakes Park, Staten Island, New York, Febuary 19. 1967
The instructions for the latter called for a large number of canned products (manufactured or distributed by the American Can company) to cover a ground conducive to sound as the participating crowd bounced, slid, and moved the cans to generate sounds.
"Only American Can, was conceived for realization—or may be realized—by anyone other than myself."—M.N.
Re-creation of Max Neuhaus, "American Can",
The Oval, Ohio State University, Columbus, USA. 11.11.2013,
-Block Museum, Northwestern University, January 16-July 17, 2016
-Grey Art Gallery, NYU, September 8-December 10, 2016
-Museum der Moderne Salzburg, dates TBD (March-June 2017)
American Can and By-Product. September 1966
© Copyright Neuhaus Estate
American Can and By-Product are two works which mark Neuhaus' transition from the performance arts to the plastic arts. Although both are events, they each also resulted in the production of objects.
Max Neuhaus