Dec. 2008
In January
2007 I received an email by Pedro Lagoa announcing a Record Breaking party
in Frankfurt’s Stoltzestrasse, an area close enough to the museums yet also
part of the cities ‘second’ district for prostitution and underworld activity.
An op art survey exhibition was about to open at the Schirn Kunsthalle and
Lagoa's e-flyer for the Record Breaking party came in shape of an op art
12” vinyl. Was it an accident? Well, I was requested to bring the vinyl records
I hated most to the party - only those would get me through the door. The
invite also encouraged the audience to “demonstrate [their] displeasure
[towards the music]” while the tunes played. Some rotations into each track, DJ
team Lagoa and Flemming would “throw the record to the dance-floor to be
destroyed in any way people may want.”
The event reminded me of a “potlatch”, a situation where participants barter
with material wealth or “a ceremonial feast among certain Native American
peoples of the northwest Pacific coast, as in celebration of a marriage or
accession, at which the host distributes gifts according to each guest's rank
or status. Between rival groups the potlatch could involve extravagant or
competitive giving and destruction by the host of valued items as a display of
superior wealth” [1].
Upon arrival in Stoltzestrasse, I found broken records splattered all over the
floor, people were bringing vinyl records in their bags and exchanged them for
alcoholic beverages at the bar. The DJ team (Pedro Lagoa and fellow artist
Martin Flemming) collected the records, stripped them of their covers (which
piled up behind the DJ’s desk) and played a DJ set that was characterized by
chance encounters with the public’s taste and distaste for music. Once in a
while during the set an enthused aficionado would make attempts to rescue this
or the other 12inch before DJ’ Lagoa and Flemming threw them in the midst of
the dancing crowd, who stepped on it and broke it in pieces.
This record breaking party evoked the spirits of Cabaret Voltaire and the DADA
carnival when it took place in the 1910’s in Zurich. Back then it was Hugo
Ball, Jean Arp, Tristan Tzara and others that organized nights of Balalaika
orchestra, cover versions of Mallarmé, recitals of sound poetry hits by
Christian Morgenstern, theatre plays, Arp reading from Alfred Jarry’s Ubu
Roi and other clownish events in a city centre bar holding not more than 60
people.
Pedro Lagoa’s idea for the project was triggered by a couple of “festas de
partir discos”, record breaking parties that he witnessed in a small club in
Alcobaça. Alcobaça, a small town near his native Leiria, in Portugal, is in
fact better known for its monastery, but it was there that he met a group of
young industrial music fans, punks and heavy metal head bangers who tried to
transfer their anger into the act of destruction. During the night, fuelled
with Sagres and Super Bock beer, they must have realized that
their vinyl was too precious to be destroyed. The crowd at a second record
breaking party Lagoa organized in Vienna reacted similarly. Their shared
unwillingness to sacrifice makes one think of Georges Bataille’s notion of the
gift [2],
which is closely related to that of surrender. According to Bataille a
“potlatch” is a fundamental challenge to the necessity and role of rational
capitalist economics. In the ritual destruction of material in the form of a
sacrifice, goods loose their orientation towards a future use and are
consequently free of utilitarian domination. It is a long way to argue that
Lagoa’s work would challenge capitalist economics as such, but the ‘record
breaking party’ seems to bear some significance on our individual behaviours
towards materiality itself and the potential that comes with destruction and
eventual recycling, i.e. the possible potential of destruction to create or
originate something from it - ideas that prevail in Lagoa’s ongoing interest in
the idea of destruction. Since 2007 the artist works on an archive of
destruction, collecting documents that speak about the eradication and
demolition of physical objects and ideas. Lagoa does not make a distinction
between art and non-art and with each public presentation the form and content
of the archive differs thus forming a continuously changing and evolving
organism without fixed rules.
Following the party in Stoltzestrasse, Lagoa was left with broken pieces of
vinyl. At this point the process of subsequent reworking of the resulting
physical materials began. The anthological process of deconstructing music
history had happened during the night. Lagoa’s work refers to a disappearing
medium, and in the first instance comments on the materiality of the vinyl
record, which has been replaced first by the CD and now by immaterial file
sharing. As observed with the aficionados rescuing records from the floor
during the night, Lagoa’s work also comments on the fetish for vinyl,
comparable to the use of 16mm film in the visual art world. Departing from that
point Lagoa develops what can be called a ‘social sculpture’. The fragments
from the vinyl leftovers were ground and melted, bound by a special chemical
liquid and then poured into a cube mould. The dried and cooled result became a
black minimal cube sculpture (approx. 25 cm side). This process reminds of the
major pour pieces (or "rundowns") that American conceptual artist
Robert Smithson executed during his lifetime. Smithson wanted to produce art
that grew out of real places and natural processes. One of his pieces consisted
of pouring asphalt down a hill [3], another of doing something similar with glue [4],
actions that Lagoa recognizes as a sort of potlatch, in the sense of a strong
provocation gesture of an offer that finds no immediate retribution [5]. Not
unlike the pouring pieces each work that comes out of the production cycle
started by the record breaking party is interconnected. The parties and
subsequent outcomes are part of a series of works, independent from each other,
but sharing in common the starting action: the party.
Finally, exhibiting the black vinyl cube together with a list of records that
were handed in by the public and played during the night next to a photograph
documenting the event, Lagoa continues to create a monument for those who
contributed (the artists whose tracks were played but also the attending
audience) to the party. Furthermore the opposing sites of production and
exhibition (party context and white cube) find their continuation in the work
itself: from the roundness of the discs’ form — the most kinetic basic
geometric shape — to the stillness of the square — the most static one. This
relation found also an obvious parallel in the movement from noise to silence.
Lagoa’s enactment of the record breaking party draws reference to relational
art, which according to French critic and curator Nicolas Bourriaud is "an
art taking as its theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its
social context rather than the assertion of an independent and private space" [6] When
accepting the personal archives from those around him for a DJ set, Lagoa not
only serves as agent of social interactions but also “decodes and produces
different story lines and alternative narratives”. He thus complies with
Bourriaud’s concept of postproduction. When the event is over the storyline
freezes into a sculptural moment that proposes a new use for the materials
gathered during the convention. Yet the convention of people remains essential
to the creation of this particular work.
The last metamorphose took place when Lagoa’s record breaking party was
presented in Vienna as part of the project Autonomous Acts curated by
Michael Hall at the local VeSch Raum space on 19 July 2008. The Viennese
audience seemed less hot-blooded than the Frankfurt crowd. The notion of
destruction did not seem to appeal to the local party-goers / gallery visitors,
instead vinyl gems were frequently rescued from the turntables of DJ’s Lagoa
and Flemming. While this event could also be attributed a potlatch atmosphere,
participation of those present did not evolve beyond the traditional role of
the spectator. Refusing to take an active role in the outcome of the party is a
right that assists them, as, according to Lagoa, it is not the intention of the
work to enforce any kind of behavior. Quoting Greil Marcus’ understanding of
Bataille’s conception of the gift [7], the “tribe” in Vienna was not able to answer
another’s provocation and instead ended up showing that they attributed the
most value to property. To be continued, at the next party…
Tobi Maier is a curator and critic based in New York.
[1] The
American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright
© 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2007. Published by
Houghton Mifflin Company
[2] in Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share, two volumes.
New York: Urzone, Inc., 1988
[3] Asphalt Rundown (Rome 1969)
[4] Glue Pour (1970)
[5] Lagoa in an email conversation with the author
[6] in Relational Aesthetics, p.14
[7] in his seminal book Lipstick Traces from 1989.
