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Over the past six years Max Neuhaus has installed two ongoing sound works in New York: a reprise of his long-running public installation Times Square (1977-92, 2002-), and Time Piece Beacon (2006-), a recent work made for Dia’s Hudson Valley exhibition space. After over two decades of producing works primarily in Europe, Neuhaus’s return to the US — where he produced much of his seminal work in the ’60s and ’70s — has been long overdue. With the inauguration of Sound Figure in Houston, a new work commissioned by the Menil Collection, and a related exhibition of his Circumscription Drawings, a survey of Neuhaus’s stateside strategic interventions in public space and art spaces seems timely.

Early on, Neuhaus abandoned a musical career as a virtuoso percussionist specializing in performing experimental music by Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage. Instead, he began to make his own works, moving beyond the categories of performer and composer to become an artist. His first work, in 1966, began with him stamping the word listen on the palms of his audience and leading them on sound walks throughout New York City. Other initial projects laid the ground for his long-term investigations of what he calls "Moment" (works that can be heard from many locations, and that examine and subvert the role of time in generating and perceiving sound), and "Place" (works that take the temporal essence of a sound or sounds and construct them as a body or entity that can be apprehended in a highly focused physical location). "Moment" and "Place" are two of eight "Vectors" that the artist uses to group his various works and activities. Others include "Walks," "Performance," "Invention," "Networks," "Passage," and "Sensation."

Times Square, Neuhaus’s longest-running piece to date, is one of his "Place" works. Sound-generating equipment is secured within a subterranean chamber in an easily overlooked traffic island at the convergence of Broadway, Sixth Avenue, and 46th Street. Twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week, a thickened mass of tones rises from the sidewalk grating that covers the island. Standing above, one can almost see the form of the work passing through the grating and pushing up into the air. While Times Square’s sound does not change, the combination of its electronically generated and architecturally modified sound with the neighborhood’s varied ambience creates a transformative series of natural, mechanical, and electronic sound events that reflects the modernist desire to treat urban sounds as equal (if not similar) to music. As a public intervention, Times Square’s placement in a transient space filled with human and automotive traffic removes predictable framing devices: the boundaries between the work and the Doppler-effect whooshes of passing vehicles blur, opening up Times Square to surrounding sounds and individual possibilities for rethinking aural perception.

Further upriver, at Dia:Beacon’s former Nabisco-box printing factory, is Time Piece Beacon, a "Moment" work. It cycles through a sounding that recurs hourly during the day. Neuhaus assembled Time Piece Beacon — in his words — as "the sound of the building." He sees it as not quite an architectural structure, but rather a signal that is formed through silence. A few minutes before the start of every hour, a brightly sounding, formless entity gradually emerges from the top of the museum and spreads in all directions. As its loudness grows, the sound partially vibrates through upper-floor gallery walls and enfolds visitors outside. As trains pass by on or off schedule, and as neighboring sounds mingle alongside it, the piece develops into a larger and larger figure that billows seemingly evermore outward — and its location becomes increasingly indeterminate. It radiates away from the building and becomes something like the weather, or a sort of omnipresent force of announcement. Finally, at the beginning of each hour, it suddenly collapses into silence, leaving an afterimage effect. This effect is uncannily tuned to the arboreal and river-borne soundscape that surrounds it — with its approach and subsequent erasure, it enhances the listener’s hearing of Dia:Beacon’s campus.