"II.
In recent years, Neuhaus divided his time mostly between Place and Moment works. In the latter group, to which Time Piece Beacon (2005-present) belongs, periodic, almost imperceptible, sonic tones gradually build up over several minutes, then abruptly cease at a designated moment - the hour, in the case of Dia's piece. This sudden absence produces what at first seems to a silence, a silence that to many people proves more audible than was the sound's presence. For, in what is percieved as silence is the ambient sound particular to that site in that particular instant. The last Moment work Neuhaus created, in 2007, was commissioned by the small German town of Stommeln-Pulheim. The arrest of the low, almost inaudible, hum, again created from and in relation to its sonic environment - a site fronting a former synagogue - marks the halachic hours of the Jewish ritual day. Recalling another absence - that of the town's former Jewish population - this work, in addressing historical memory, takes on an overtly memorializing dimension rare in Neuhaus' oeuvre. Previously, issues relating to a site's history concerned him less than its sociopolitics.
As issues of identity and history come to the fore in the Moment pieces, so do notions of community. Whatever sense of collectivity is generated by a Place work like Times Square is a function of serendipity, of coexistence and contiguity; it automatically involves those who recongize and engage with the work. Yet, as Branden Joseph argues, referencing Giorgio Agamben's The Coming Community, this fugitive community implies and entails nothing beyond itself at that moment.: it is built on "adjacency rather than identification with whatever exclusionary ideal." In contrast to the Place pieces, the Moment works operate on two distinct registers. The uninitiated, the casual passersby, attend to the silence, which they experience more in their bodies than in their minds. Howver, for those who become familiar with a Moment piece, and who therefore experience it as a part of their daily soundscape, the sound, too, plays a role. Sometimes consciously, often almost unconsciously, its iteration is registered as each hour approaches.
The regular and frequent whistles from passing trains, counterpoints to Time Piece Beacon's precisely scheduled interventions, are similarly impossible to ignore: they, too, are integral to the sitess sonic texture. Yet, though also periodic, they do not share the invincible regularity - the reliability - of this Moment piece and so lack its deterministic authority. Moreover, their sound is commnonplace and generic, whereas that of Time Piece Beacon is singular. At once unique and instantly identifiable, Neuhaus' piece functions as a timekeeper whose auditorycode imparts identity to the terrain within its sonic reach, effecting a kind of social bond, however rudimentary its basis.
While Time Piece Beacon has a distinctive acoustic signature, its low, ringing harmonic tone has been likened, by the artist himself as well as others, to the sound of bells: it evokes not merely the function but the character and rhetoric of campanology in rural place in times past. As Alain Corbin reveals in his fascinating study Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the 19th-Centruty French Countryside, the ringing of bells traditionally seved multiple roles - in addition to providing an index of collective sensibilities, it fulfilled various communicative agendas: public and private, secular and religious, exceptional and mundane, singular and regulatory, festive and tragic. The unique sound of a hand-cast bell in a clarion ensured that the compass of its reach would identify the community when no other form of communication could range so far so fast and none could prove so resourceful and distinctive. Audible to virtually everyone within its sonic field,it demarcated space acoustically and imparted identity by drawing boundaries to shared territory.
The people who frequent Dia: Beacon could be said to constitute a small, temporary, and quite specialized community, in contrast to, say, the considerably larger, stable, and more diverse citizenry of Graz, Austria, whose town square is the site of another work in the Moment series. By reactivating older notions of community, both works provide an occasion for thinking about the identity, desirability, and viability of community: to its current relevance as well as its historical legacy. In one of his few statements about historical change , Neuhaus argued that by about AD1100, "the church bell had become united with the mechanical clock. The bell no longer just announced special events but provided a communal time base for the general coordination of activities." He noted that today "most of these minute by minute functions have been taken over by radio and television." By his reckoning, this change entailed a loss measurable in terms of the particularity and individuality of place and, hence, of community: "The intrinsic nature of these media generalizes and depersonalized functions," he concluded. His succinct overview contains a clear expression of the sociopolitical dimension at the core of this final series of works and implies a potentially stronger notion of community than that which, pace Joseph, pertains to the Place pieces. For, in addition to confirming the value Neuhaus attributed to any significant work of art in the public sphere, this statement highlights a key function he now required of locational – and even, perhaps, localized – listening."
(Lynne Cooke, 'Locational Listening' in Max Neuhaus: Times Square, Time Piece Beacon. New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2009. p.37-9)
Last Wednesday i went to the AGNSW to watch Stephen Vitiello/Lawrence English perform a sound piece in the main entrance space of the interior quadrangle. There was a rectangular table setup with sound equipment/laptops/etc and seating formed in a rectangular grid around the performance set. Speakers were positioned behind the rows of rectangular forming chairs, with camera men dispersed in the same vicinity both shooting footage and photos of the performance. People walking around their footsteps, and whispering mixed with Vitiello's field recordings of the Kimberley. What fascinated me about the sound from the performance was not only its immersive quality but its ability to simulate and sonorously magnify nature definitively transforming and transcendence of the space. A sonorous energy vibrated into the audience pushing the work along, almost meditatively the sound opens out into a synaesthetic experience giving the Kimberley WA a distinct identity and in the process senses overload – my own imagining of a visual, olfactory, spatial dimension (coinciding with the sonority) of a place that I'd never seen let alone heard before. Then the soundscape would resonate from the punctuation, metronome like, of a bell, jolting me out of a meditative state. The institutional site for that one moment was transformed into 'nature' into a kind of pure sound as representation and narrative. The above, again, quite lengthy quoted passage from Lynne Cooke's essay on Max Neuhaus made me think of how an institutional site can be like transferred in its confinement and temporal/spatial setting into 'another'. Another place that maintains levels of interplay, and identification - how a place takes on a different socio-cultural-political persona, 'Audible to virtually everyone within its sonic field, it demarcated space acoustically and imparted identity by drawing boundaries to shared territory. [...] At once unique and instantly identifiable, Neuhaus' piece functions as a timekeeper whose auditorycode imparts identity to the terrain within its sonic reach, effecting a kind of social bond, however rudimentary its basis. [...Neuhaus]By his reckoning, this change entailed a loss measurable in terms of the particularity and individuality of place and, hence, of community [...]'. (Cooke, 2009. p37-9)
In recent years, Neuhaus divided his time mostly between Place and Moment works. In the latter group, to which Time Piece Beacon (2005-present) belongs, periodic, almost imperceptible, sonic tones gradually build up over several minutes, then abruptly cease at a designated moment - the hour, in the case of Dia's piece. This sudden absence produces what at first seems to a silence, a silence that to many people proves more audible than was the sound's presence. For, in what is percieved as silence is the ambient sound particular to that site in that particular instant. The last Moment work Neuhaus created, in 2007, was commissioned by the small German town of Stommeln-Pulheim. The arrest of the low, almost inaudible, hum, again created from and in relation to its sonic environment - a site fronting a former synagogue - marks the halachic hours of the Jewish ritual day. Recalling another absence - that of the town's former Jewish population - this work, in addressing historical memory, takes on an overtly memorializing dimension rare in Neuhaus' oeuvre. Previously, issues relating to a site's history concerned him less than its sociopolitics.
As issues of identity and history come to the fore in the Moment pieces, so do notions of community. Whatever sense of collectivity is generated by a Place work like Times Square is a function of serendipity, of coexistence and contiguity; it automatically involves those who recongize and engage with the work. Yet, as Branden Joseph argues, referencing Giorgio Agamben's The Coming Community, this fugitive community implies and entails nothing beyond itself at that moment.: it is built on "adjacency rather than identification with whatever exclusionary ideal." In contrast to the Place pieces, the Moment works operate on two distinct registers. The uninitiated, the casual passersby, attend to the silence, which they experience more in their bodies than in their minds. Howver, for those who become familiar with a Moment piece, and who therefore experience it as a part of their daily soundscape, the sound, too, plays a role. Sometimes consciously, often almost unconsciously, its iteration is registered as each hour approaches.
The regular and frequent whistles from passing trains, counterpoints to Time Piece Beacon's precisely scheduled interventions, are similarly impossible to ignore: they, too, are integral to the sitess sonic texture. Yet, though also periodic, they do not share the invincible regularity - the reliability - of this Moment piece and so lack its deterministic authority. Moreover, their sound is commnonplace and generic, whereas that of Time Piece Beacon is singular. At once unique and instantly identifiable, Neuhaus' piece functions as a timekeeper whose auditorycode imparts identity to the terrain within its sonic reach, effecting a kind of social bond, however rudimentary its basis.
While Time Piece Beacon has a distinctive acoustic signature, its low, ringing harmonic tone has been likened, by the artist himself as well as others, to the sound of bells: it evokes not merely the function but the character and rhetoric of campanology in rural place in times past. As Alain Corbin reveals in his fascinating study Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the 19th-Centruty French Countryside, the ringing of bells traditionally seved multiple roles - in addition to providing an index of collective sensibilities, it fulfilled various communicative agendas: public and private, secular and religious, exceptional and mundane, singular and regulatory, festive and tragic. The unique sound of a hand-cast bell in a clarion ensured that the compass of its reach would identify the community when no other form of communication could range so far so fast and none could prove so resourceful and distinctive. Audible to virtually everyone within its sonic field,it demarcated space acoustically and imparted identity by drawing boundaries to shared territory.
The people who frequent Dia: Beacon could be said to constitute a small, temporary, and quite specialized community, in contrast to, say, the considerably larger, stable, and more diverse citizenry of Graz, Austria, whose town square is the site of another work in the Moment series. By reactivating older notions of community, both works provide an occasion for thinking about the identity, desirability, and viability of community: to its current relevance as well as its historical legacy. In one of his few statements about historical change , Neuhaus argued that by about AD1100, "the church bell had become united with the mechanical clock. The bell no longer just announced special events but provided a communal time base for the general coordination of activities." He noted that today "most of these minute by minute functions have been taken over by radio and television." By his reckoning, this change entailed a loss measurable in terms of the particularity and individuality of place and, hence, of community: "The intrinsic nature of these media generalizes and depersonalized functions," he concluded. His succinct overview contains a clear expression of the sociopolitical dimension at the core of this final series of works and implies a potentially stronger notion of community than that which, pace Joseph, pertains to the Place pieces. For, in addition to confirming the value Neuhaus attributed to any significant work of art in the public sphere, this statement highlights a key function he now required of locational – and even, perhaps, localized – listening."
(Lynne Cooke, 'Locational Listening' in Max Neuhaus: Times Square, Time Piece Beacon. New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2009. p.37-9)
Last Wednesday i went to the AGNSW to watch Stephen Vitiello/Lawrence English perform a sound piece in the main entrance space of the interior quadrangle. There was a rectangular table setup with sound equipment/laptops/etc and seating formed in a rectangular grid around the performance set. Speakers were positioned behind the rows of rectangular forming chairs, with camera men dispersed in the same vicinity both shooting footage and photos of the performance. People walking around their footsteps, and whispering mixed with Vitiello's field recordings of the Kimberley. What fascinated me about the sound from the performance was not only its immersive quality but its ability to simulate and sonorously magnify nature definitively transforming and transcendence of the space. A sonorous energy vibrated into the audience pushing the work along, almost meditatively the sound opens out into a synaesthetic experience giving the Kimberley WA a distinct identity and in the process senses overload – my own imagining of a visual, olfactory, spatial dimension (coinciding with the sonority) of a place that I'd never seen let alone heard before. Then the soundscape would resonate from the punctuation, metronome like, of a bell, jolting me out of a meditative state. The institutional site for that one moment was transformed into 'nature' into a kind of pure sound as representation and narrative. The above, again, quite lengthy quoted passage from Lynne Cooke's essay on Max Neuhaus made me think of how an institutional site can be like transferred in its confinement and temporal/spatial setting into 'another'. Another place that maintains levels of interplay, and identification - how a place takes on a different socio-cultural-political persona, 'Audible to virtually everyone within its sonic field, it demarcated space acoustically and imparted identity by drawing boundaries to shared territory. [...] At once unique and instantly identifiable, Neuhaus' piece functions as a timekeeper whose auditorycode imparts identity to the terrain within its sonic reach, effecting a kind of social bond, however rudimentary its basis. [...Neuhaus]By his reckoning, this change entailed a loss measurable in terms of the particularity and individuality of place and, hence, of community [...]'. (Cooke, 2009. p37-9)
Cooke's essay reminded me alot about Vitiello's AGNSW performance it is hard not to reflect on certain levels and similarities in their works. Sonorous entities (works) that demarcate space and their transferral (mixing in the now) that 'open out' and hopefully direct reflection to concepts of history, identity, temporal, spatial, social, cultural allusion or awakenings.
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