1966
AMERICAN CAN by Max Neuhaus. 1966-1967

American Can, announcement,1966
Poster 20x25 cm, Sept 1966© The Estate of Max Neuhaus

 -Credit Line - Permissions images can be addressed to ARS: info@arsny.com

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4th Annual New York Avant-Garde Festival, September 9, 6am 'tll midnight, Central Park on September 9, 1966. (first American Can)

Image book published: Douglas M. Davis, The National Observer, The Long, Long Day of Dadaism, Monday, September 19, 1966

Max Neuhaus, »A Max Sampler. Six sound oriented pieces for situations other than that of the concert hall« (1966 – 1968), in: Source. Music of the Avant-Garde Nr. 6 Jg. 3 (January 1969)

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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  commonplace activity, usually associated with melancholic, aimless wandering and purposeless play, seems to have been detoured here by Neuhaus into a constructive  collective action Tellingly, the crowd generated the sound component of the work. It was no longer found sound.

Lynne Cooke

Except from: Lynne Cooke, Location Listening, 2009

Lidl American Can, 1966

Photo Curtesy: Charlotte Moorman Archive

American Can, by Max Neuhaus, “A Feast of Astonishments: Charlotte Moorman and the Avant-Garde, 1960s–1980s” is on view through July 17; travels to New York University’s Grey Art Gallery, Sept. 8–Dec. 10; Museum der Moderne Salzburg Mönchsberg, Austria, Mar. 4–June 18, 2017.

Exhibition American Can, re-creation, The Oval, Ohio State University, Columbus, USA , 11.11.2013