WRITING
PARALLEL DURATIONS
Max Neuhaus’ Times Square and Joseph Beuys’ 7000 Oaks in conversation.
The sonic lives of sound and nature as entities form the ever-present passage of the world. Times Square and 7000 Oaks ask you to listen (with your ears and your eyes) for everything which the work is not. Composer-musician John Cage framed it most concisely: “Music is permanent; only listening is intermittent.” Max Neuhaus and Joseph Beuys conduct parallel experiments extended beyond the concert hall with their always-open public works. Visiting these sites is an act of experiencing yourself within the fusion of space and time.
Times Square is a low tonal drone hidden in the depths of a NYC subway grate under a pedestrian island in Times Square. The sound rings through the throngs gathered above and the cars passing through. The frequency is noticeably different from the surrounding circus. It has an audio-spatial area of effect, engulfing the conscious and unconscious spectator into its flow of space-time. The sound draws your attention to the shifting surroundings and your implicit duration within the environment/space you are participating in. If you listen closely, you’ll hear the world in movement around, through, and within (possessively) Time’s Square.
Beuys’s 7000 Oaks is a complementary view of the progression of time. The New York rendition is a collection of 38 trees planted near/around 22nd street and 11th Ave over the course of 33 years (five planted in 1988, twenty-five in 1998, and one in 2021). Each is marked by a basalt pillar approximately 4 feet tall. Beuys works with the concept of (re)generation with the planting of each tree, allowing them to grow alongside their unchanging basalt partner. The pairs become a measure of natural time, a “form” which eventually “gives way to (temporal) scale.”
Neuhaus and Beuys create spatio-temporal reference points vis-à-vis object and sound, embedding the body inside flows of space and time, manifesting what Neuhaus calls a “place work” locating the intervention to a particular site. The “place works” reject our societally mechanical view of time in favor of an experiential refocusing toward the body’s lived duration within a site. Both (time) spaces act as a bridge connecting literal and functional sites, allowing for phenomenological passage. This movement, the act of crossing, is precisely where the parallax gap is produced – what Slavoj Žižek describes as “the apparent displacement of an object, caused by a change in observational position that provides new lines of sight.”
In producing such simple arrangements both artists focus intently on spatiotemporal progression by situating the spectator inside a cycle of self/worldly examination. Both 7000 Oaks and Times Square emphasize change through physical bodily movement but more importantly through the body’s movement in time. In terms of the parallax gap, these works do not just shift the viewer from object to subject; they collapse the distinction entirely. As Žižek continues from a Hegelian view, “an epistemological shift in the subjects’ point of view always reflects an ontological shift in the object itself.” The work does not exist fully until experienced, it is always in the act of becoming; implicating the viewer as the site of production as much as the work itself.
This effect is heightened since neither 7000 Oaks nor Times Square signify themselves as art. Max Neuhaus stated that when confronted with his work one may “take it as their own, which is of course perfect.” Discovery is imperative to the experience. Stumbling upon these spaces we discover our surroundings and ourselves within them. In their respective availability these place works operate on an accessible temporal scale which (re)connect us, the subject, to the space which we occupy. They are a familiar site turned unfamiliar, resisting immediate comprehension and throwing us back in our own processes of perception. We find ourselves below our normal thresholds and limits of spatiality and temporality. Quite literally encountering the sublime.
Few interventions sustain the temporal and experiential potential of Neuhaus’ and Beuys’ works while remaining truly accessible. David Hammons’ Day's End and Cameron Rowland’s Memorial For Unmarked Black Burial Grounds at Seward Park continue this legacy but are rare exceptions. We face a shortage of challenging discoverable public works. A walk through midtown's corporate public/private outdoor “galleries” is example enough. Instead of discovery, what we confront now are Debord-esque spectacles: photogenic, branded installations in surveilled spaces designed to generate engagement rather than reflection.
Times Square and 7000 Oaks remind us that public space, like time itself, can be reclaimed. Not through monumental gestures, but through subtle recalibrations of attention. What if public spaces contained sites that invited new ways of seeing, hearing, and being? Imagine a city where every bus stop, park, and alley is a threshold for critical engagements with our environments– a distributed network of heterotopias. This is not public art as decoration, but as public practice. A system where artists function less like cultural producers and more like environmental caretakers. To embrace works like these is to reject public space as a product and insist that public art should challenge perception, demand duration, and refuse to resolve itself into spectacle. To transform a city into a critical laboratory is not just to reshape its visual landscape, but to retune its ear to its own rhythms. Only by learning to listen again can we recover a sense of place within the passage of time.