Max Neuhaus

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Max Neuhaus (b.1939 in Beaumont, TX) was a renowned percussionist and interpreter of contemporary music in the 1960s who moved on to pioneer artistic activities with sound. He has created numerous sound works (including sound installations) that have extended sound as an autonomous medium into the domain of contemporary art.

In the early sixties, he toured America as a percussion soloist and gave solo recitals at Carnegie Hall and in European capitals. The world of the percussionist is one focused on sound timbre; Neuhaus traveled with one thousand kilos of percussion instruments to perform his solo repertoire. He extended this palette of sound color by inventing several early electro-acoustic instruments. His solo album recorded for Columbia Masterworks in 1968 stands as one of the first examples of what is now called live electronic music.

Neuhaus went on to pioneer artistic activities outside conventional cultural contexts and began to realize sound works anonymously in public places, developing art forms of his own. Utilizing his sense of sound and people's reactions to it gained after fourteen years as a musician, he began to make sound works which were neither music nor events and coined the term 'sound installation' to describe them. In these works without beginning or end, the sounds were placed in space rather than in time. Starting from the premise that our sense of place depends on what we hear, as well as on what we see, he utilized a given social and aural context as a foundation to build a new perception of place with sound. With the realization of these non-visual artworks for museums in America and Europe, he became the first to extend sound as an autonomous medium into the field of contemporary art.

He has continued his activities in music with his Networks or Broadcast Works, virtual architectures which act as forums open to anyone for the evolution of new musics. In the first Public Supply in 1966, he combined a radio station with the telephone network and created a two-way public aural space twenty miles in diameter encompassing New York City, where any inhabitant could join a live dialogue with sound by making a phone call. Later, in 1977 with Radio Net, he formed a nationwide network with 190 radio stations. The current project, Auracle, constructs a twenty-four hour a day global entity for live interaction with sound over the Internet.

In his Moment works, a series of large scale sound works for whole communities, he utilizes the cessation of sound to create a periodic sense of silence throughout the community, both marking time and creating reflective moments. The most recent of these is a commission from the Dia Art Foundation for the Dia:Beacon Museum in Beacon, New York.

Over the last four decades, he has created a large number of sound works for various environments, including permanent works in the United States (Times Square in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago) and Europe (CAPC Musée d'Art Contemporain, Bordeaux, France; the AOK Building, Kassel, Germany; the Castello di Rivoli, Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, Italy; and the Kunsthaus Graz, Austria), along with numerous short-term works in museums and exhibitions (the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Clocktower in New York City; ARC, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Centre National d'Art Contemporain, Grenoble, France; the Kunsthalle Basel and the Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland; Documenta 6 and 9, Kassel, Germany; and the Venice Biennale, Italy), and numerous one-person exhibitions of his drawings.

His interests are diverse. He designs the sound generation and projection systems which realize his work, himself. He has originated new concepts of aural urban design, and utilized his knowledge of sound technology and the psychology of sound to design a more humane and safer set of sounds for emergency vehicles. He has begun a ten-volume series of retrospective books on his oeuvre with the publication of Max Neuhaus: Sound Works, vols. I-III (Ostfildern-Stuttgart: Cantz, 1994).