Two new installations for Max Feed, Frac Franche-Comté, Besançon, France October 9-December 30, 2016
From the press release:
Max Feed
A collective exhibition on the work and legacy of Max Neuhaus
October 9 – December 30, 2016
Frac Franche-Comté
Besançon (France)
Artists in the Exhibition
Seth Cluett, Trisha Donnelly, Nina Katchadourian, Myriam Lefkowitz, Simon Ripoll-Hurier, Sébastien Roux, Matthieu Saladin, Oleg Tcherny, Olivier Vadrot and Max Neuhaus.
Curated by: Daniele Balit
Second part of the exhibition
Mix Feed, with Samon Takahashi at the Institut Supérieur de Beaux Arts de Besançon, from November 10, 2016.
About the exhibition
Max Feed is the first collective exhibition drawing on Max Neuhaus’s work and legacy. The exhibition celebrates his career, fifty years after LISTEN, his manifesto-work that marked the beginnings of his experimentation inviting the audience to listen to the post-industrial soundscape of New York. Regarded as the “father” of sound installation, Neuhaus gave up his career as a percussionist and performer in the mid-1960s to focus on creating “aural topographies” – a term referring to installations within both the public sphere and the neglected areas of museums and galleries, giving rise to “social situations” in dialogue with daily life.
Max Feed brings together some thirty studies and drawings, some of which are on display for the first time, as well as a substantial body of archival documents. The selected works relate particularly to Neuhaus’s activity in France. Visitors will also be able to discover two rarely activated sound works: Silent Alarm Clock, an alarm clock created in 1979 that wakens the sleeper with silence, and Five Russians, a sound work originally designed in 1979 for the Clocktower Gallery in New York, reconstructed for the first time following only once before at the Outpost Gallery in 2015.
Max Feed seeks to address Neuhaus’s art, over and above the conventional practice of resorting to his drawings. Nine artists have therefore been invited to resonate with his pioneering work, mostly with new productions. This involves questioning the idea of legacy, not in the sense of an unequivocal transmission, but rather as a releasing of multiple processes, giving rise to a transformative and retroactive action. Indeed, the exhibition’s title touches upon the notion of feedback, taking the name from a device created by Neuhaus in 1966 (the Max-Feed) for experimenting at home with the effects of feedback on radio and television broadcasts.
Thus, Myriam Lefkowitz probes the listening body in greater depth with the aid of choreographic pulses, while Olivier Vadrot guides that body through the language of design and scenography. Trisha Donnelly silently explores the aural garden principle, while Nina Katchadourian reorients the experience of the urban environment by playing on the fragile boundary between natural and artificial sounds. The pieces by Seth Cluett are an invitation to set oneself likewise at the border between two areas, exterior and interior, by focussing on the translational relationship between territory, architecture and sensory experience. Oleg Tcherny slips into the folds of a seemingly motionless time in order to sway perception. Simon Ripoll-Hurier has us listen to listening itself; Sébastien Roux adds a further layer of refractions between different mediums and languages, and Matthieu Saladin casts doubt on what is fitting to the act of listening.
Through a multiplicity of sensorial experiences and mediums, Max Feed is an invitation to foster the ability to reorient attention. The exhibition is a commitment to a mindful practice acting on ordinary experience – whether in the transformation of perceptive landscapes or in the greater awareness of individual acts within a community.
Max Feed
October 9 – December 30, 2016
Frac Franche-Comté
Besançon
France
Hours: Wednesday–Friday 2–6pm,
Saturday–Sunday 2–7pm
T +33 3 81 87 87 40
contact@frac-franche-comte.fr