Megaphones of Prague by Louis Armand

LOUIS ARMAND: THE MEGAPHONES OF PRAGUE
installation + text (1996-present)

The Megaphones of Prague is an ongoing text + installation project which was initiated in 1996 in conjunction with Prague's Twisted Spoon Press. It incorporates text, photography, physical + sound installation, as well as site specific works. Exhibition of the work has taken place in numerous venues, including as part of a large scale solo exhibition of Louis Armand's work at Galerie ArtNatur in Prague, October 1999.

The project began with the publication of a series of critical observations about the (then) prevalence of Prague's megaphones-a phenomenon encountered in many European cities, but particularly in central and eastern Europe. In Prague, many of these megaphones date back to the First Republic, and served to provide (as a number of them still do today) community announcements. During the devastating 2002 Prague floods, air-raid sirens and subway megaphones could be heard throughout the day and often through the long blackouts at night.

During the Nazi occupation, the occupying forces used the megaphone system to announce the death-lists, among other things. Transcripts and archive recording of the original broadcasts from the Interior Ministry are employed as part of the project's sound installation. A large part of the project entails the researching and recovery of original texts, recordings and archival footage of the megaphones within various historical contexts. During the communist period and the Warsaw Pact occupation in 1968, the megaphones again served various informational and propagandistic functions. But whilst the Nazis published and announced the lists of their victims as part of a programme of terrorism, the communist regime used the megaphones to promote a type of official silence with regards to the fate of those taken away to the secret police headquarters on Bartholomeska.

During the last ten years, the massive refurbishment of central Prague has led to the gradual removal of most of the city's megaphones. Many remain, often out of use, in the suburbs. Others adorn metro exits, where the styles of successive eras overlap--megaphones of all shapes and sizes. One megaphone installation, situated outside Prague's Jiriho z Podebrad metro station, measures 50cm in diameter and weighs over 35 kilos. Most of the project's installations have retained the original features of the megaphones in situ, while a number have been painted in strong monochromatic colours, or emblazoned with bold graffiti, rendering the names of the engineers who designed them, the events they have come to represent, and the names of those individuals whose deaths were broadcast over them.

Of the remaining original megaphones, several are prominently situated in the city centre--among them a group of three overlooking Kinsky square on which David Cerny's notorious Pink Tank (a painted Russian T-34, commemorating the Soviet "liberation" of Prague) was formerly located, and just down the road from Prague's new Futura Centre for Contemporary Art. But the megaphones are not merely an urban phenomenon, they may also be found, still, in quite isolated villages. "One of the most surreal experiences that has arisen so far in the course of this project occurred during a visit to a Jewish cemetery outside the village of Luze, in the company of one of the curators of Prague's Jewish Museum. On a cold, snowy day, as we stood in silence reading the barely legible inscriptions on the gravestones, a polka suddenly blared out of nowhere. On a wooden pole, tangled among the branches of a sycamore overhanging the cemetery wall, an old megaphone had, for no apparent reason, crackled into life--and after a couple of minutes, it once again fell silent. Kafka himself could not have invented a more disturbing and disturbed 'event.' Its very meaninglessness seemed weighted with meaning. Of something oppressive, cracked, and wholly unpredictable, indifferent in the absolute to a human sense of order in the universe."

The objective of the project is ultimately to create an aesthetic and social memorial to a particular, and possibly unique, chapter in the history of industrialisation. It charts the use and function of a technics of communication and social organisation/control, within a conflicting history of de-humanisation and social evolution. By turns malevolent and beautiful, the megaphones of Prague are emblematic of something beyond a simple human-technology binary. As well as charting the vectors of power described by the architectural and social function of the megaphones--the pervasive and ubiquitous presence of the disembodied voice and their role within the hegemonisation and stratification of society--the project also seeks to explore the "purely" structural and aesthetic aspects of the megaphones: both in their physical reality and in their metaphoric and metonymic relations to all that they have come to stand for (and all that may yet be superimposed onto them by way of a retrospective critical apparatus).

Among the original project texts treating the megaphones as an aesthetic subject, several focused upon the gendered image of the megaphone as "fleur du mal" (in the language of Baudelaire). Coupled with the literal air-raid sirens, the megaphone thus came to be seen as a type of "Siren," and the historical odyssey traced out through the lives of the people and location of Prague, to assume Homeric qualities-both epical and comedic, in the manner of Joyce, Kafka, or Gunter Grass. The project installations played between a literalised placement of actual megaphones (or "found' megaphones) within a social space--simulating the "original' effect of archived broadcasts (rendered now as ghostly "emanations")--and more figurative use of sculptural modifications, exploiting the expressive and aesthetic qualities of the megaphone itself. By juxtaposing the effects of uneasy presence coupled with the implied absence beyond the disembodied voice, alongside the quality of serial manufacture and the megaphone's ubiquity within the social-urban environment, it was intended to explore the inherent contradictions within the view of technology (and of "mechanical reproduction") as prosthesis. Rather than as an extension or possible replacement of the human, technology represents here a "condition" of humanity--whose programmatics, even in their most inhuman realisation, are nevertheless all too human.

© louis armand, 2002

www.louis-armand.com

THEIR MASTER'S VOICE: ROD MENGHAM ON
LOUIS ARMAND'S "MEGAPHONES OF PRAGUE"

There are still a few, here and there, in squares such as Namesti Miru and I.P. Pavlova, reminding the passer-by with a jolt of the ways in which social space was controlled less than 15 years ago, of the anonymous voice of officialdom, projecting its designs into every corner of the city. The individual devices belie their function, coming in all shapes and sizes--anything but standard issue. In one respect they are more out of place here than in any other city, since the cultural history of Prague is dominated by an iconography of alleys, hideaways, dark labyrinths and places to get lost in, rather than of open spaces and boulevards hospitable to crowds.

The central figure of 19th-century Czech literature is that of the solitary wanderer, the chodec, who discovers the secret recesses of each of Prague's quarters. Come the 20th century, Franz Kafka drew the map differently, inserting this isolated figure within a geography of dread, showing how the reach of the authorities extended to every last passageway, culvert and piece of wasteland. The successive bureaucracies of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and postwar communism took possession of the city of the alchemists and seized the right to speak for it, with a disembodied voice that's the ultimate expression of power and whose interests are dislocated from those it claims to represent--the megaphone is the icon of the nomenklatura, political ventriloquists who speak not with the people but in their stead. At the same time this mechanization of the voice is intrinsic to a more clandestine tradition associated particularly with the area around the castle: with a belief in the golem, with a desire to create automata, with the dream of assembling a creature from disparate body parts.

This rather more sinister genealogy was given official sanction by the paranoid collector and Prague-based 16th-century Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, who employed teams of magicians and who was delighted by any apparatus that simulated and displaced the human. Its artistic correlative can be found in the paintings of the Milanese artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo--sent to Prague in 1570 to design an elaborate pageant--whose output was devoted to curious amalgams of objects that mimicked the lineaments of the human figure.

Today the electric wiring has been torn from every last speaker still in position, but it makes no difference: the megaphones of Prague are forever earthed into a history, a memory reservoir, a cultural power supply. Easier to remove than the more obvious memorials to a future that never happened, they are nowadays mostly ignored, immobile, gently swaying with each change in the direction of blustering winds.

[*Written in Prague, June 2002, during a visit with photographer Marc Atkins on the occasion of an exhibition of Marc Atkins's photography at the British Council, "Equivalents," curated by Louis Armand. Mengham & Atkins spent several days documenting Armand's project, which has been on-going since 1996. This text first printed with an image by Atkins in Frieze magazine, 2003.]

READ MORE ON THE "MEGAPHONES OF PRAGUE" PROJECT

SEE MEGAPHONES SLIDESHOW AT WWW.MYSPACE.COM/PRAGUE_THEOREM