Image: Max Neuhaus, MoMa post card by Max Neuhaus, view of site, 1976
MNE-TEXT MOMA (Untitled) by Max Neuhaus.1978 ©
MNE-PRESS, MOMA .pdf
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“The sound creates a space for itself with definite boundaries. You can only hear it within a few feet. But the main audible effect is not so much hearing it as hearing what it does to everything around it. It kind of slices up the sounds of that fountain splashing over there, for instance.”
Max Neuhaus
An earlier work, in the sculpture garden at the New York Museum of Modern Art (1978), amplified visual orientation through space in yet another way. Here Neuhaus installed a subsonic loudspeaker in a grille-covered chamber beneath the pavement. The sonority remained inaudible, but its specific subsonic frequency affected the sounds normally heard in the garden. The effect was stronger in particular spots, so that a visitor would start noticing aural “landmarks” while moving about. Carter Ratcliff described the experience:
After a while, certain pitches associated themselves with certain points – the ear found aural equivalents for the landmarks (works of sculpture, trees and shrubs, a fountain) by which the eye had already charted the garden.
So one’s visible map was augmented and in subtle ways changed by this new one, which was audible...., yet a map of the work’s sound patterns never comes into focus. Ear and eye interact as one moves through the installation, achieving something very like an equality. That’s why it is impossible to translate the aural aspects of these works into terms exclusively visual. They cannot be mapped....
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