Sound Work Reference: Location: Villa Celle, Pistoia, Italy. Dimensions: 120 x 60 meters
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Image: Max Neuhaus Drawing Untitled
The Villa Celle provided Neuhaus with an important opportunity to engage 'nature' _ that is, nature with a capital 'N'. Granted, a 19th-century Italian garden laid out on principles established for those of 18th century England is not the most Natural place imaginable. In certain ways, it is as artificial as any site in the middle of Manhattan. Nonetheless, the Villa Celle project offered Neuhaus a challenge he usually doesn't have to face _ that of designing a range of sonorities to play off against an ambience created by insects, rustling leaves and the occasional bird. He was far from Times Square, far from any urban buzz of the kind that has done so much to form his ideas about environment, population, and the ways in which works of art can mediate between the two.
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It alters the perception of them but not the sounds themselves. One of my starting premises with each work is the aural nature of the place - the sounds which are already there. In a wooded area, the most consistent sounds are insect sounds, locusts, crickets. They change with time of day and season.
My idea wasn't to make the same sound or to communicate with them, but to make a sound which related to those sounds so that it fit within that context. Not making sound which was a separate thing in that environment, but making a sound so integrated that it shifted and pulled people into hearing the existing sounds in a different way.
Max Neuhaus
Excerpt from Max Neuhaus, “Lecture at University of Miami, 1984”
First published in Max Neuhaus, Sound Works, Volume I, Inscription (Ostfildern-Stuttgart: Cantz, 1994)
Image: Max Neuhaus Drawing Sound Installation
sound mixtures-and terrain.
Collection Max Neuhaus Estate
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The sound installations, completed in the summer of 1983, is at the Villa Celle, near a small Tuscan city called Pistoia. It is an outdoor work. Dense shrubbery hides sound-generating equipment that Neuhaus actually tucks away beneath metal grills or behind the walls of buildings. Yet the grounds of the Villa Celle are not as different from an urban sculpture garden as they look at first glance. The Villa's glades and lawns provide sites to a number of works by contemporary sculptors; further, this is a picturesque garden laid out in the 19th century with the intention of turning a stretch of terrain into a work of art. Setting aside its physical form for a moment, in order to consider the garden as an art-world institution, one could say that its relationship to the sculpture it contains is much like that of a museum building to the works it exhibits. As a consequence, Neuhaus proceeded much as he often has before.
Except from Ratcliff.htm
In, Max Neuhaus: Sound Installation [German, English] (Basel: Kunsthalle Basel, 1983)
-then in Max Neuhaus, Sound Works, Volume I, Inscription (Ostfildern-Stuttgart: Cantz, 1994)
