Max Neuhaus: Drawings
July 2, 2000 - October, 2000

Long Island City, NY (June 7, 2000)- P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center presents Max Neuhaus: Drawings, works by the American artist Max Neuhaus (b. 1939), renowned for his work with sound since the early 60's.

Curated by P.S.1 Senior Curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, this exhibition presents a number of drawings produced by Neuhaus since 1990 from a group which he calls "the drawing after".

Max Neuhaus' drawings are complements to his sound works. They range from the almost diagramatic to elegant arrangements of color and tone. Among other things, they articulate Neuhaus' interest in "making sounds which occupy physical shapes."

The exhibition focuses on "drawings after" some of Neuhaus' most well-known works including "Fan Music," originally installed on Manhattan rooftops in 1968, "Walkthrough," created for a New York City subway station in 1973, and "Times Square", installed in New York's Times Square from 1977 to 1992.

Max Neuhaus was renowned for his interpretation of contemporary music while still in his twenties. In the early sixties, he gave solo recitals at Carnegie Hall and toured America and Europe as a percussion soloist.

Neuhaus travelled with one thousand kilos of percussion instruments to perform his solo repertoire. He broadened his palette of sound color by inventing 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. He made sound works that were neither music nor events and coined the term 'sound installation' to describe them. In these works without beginning or end, sounds are placed in space rather than in time. Neuhaus became the first to extend sound as a primary medium into the field of contemporary art. Starting from the premise that our sense of place depends on what we hear, as well as in what we see, he utilized a given social and aural context as a foundation to build a new perception of place with sound.

Over the last thirty-three years Neuhaus has created a large number of sound works for various environments in the US and abroad: Times Square in New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago; Domaine de Kerguehennec, Locmine, France; CAPC Musee d'Art Contemporain, Bordeaux, France; The AOK Building, Kassel, Germany; Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland and Castello di Rivoli, Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, Italy; The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, and P.S.1’s Clocktower Gallery in New York City; ARC, Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Centre National d'Art Contemporain, Grenoble, France; Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland; Documenta 6 and 9, Kassel, Germany; and the Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy. His drawings have been exhibited in various solo shows since 1983.

The drawing after

It is only after finishing a sound work and experiencing it with distance

that I make its circumscription drawing.

This drawing, two panels, a visual image and a handwritten text, integrates

two traditional forms of communication to circumscribe something both

invisible and indescribable.

The image is not the drawing nor is the text: the drawing is what they

synthesize together. When read in parallel, they evoke a central idea of

the sound work, a point of departure and a reference for reflection.

M.N.

Max Neuhaus: Drawings is made possible thanks to the support of Lisson Gallery, London