Record: The Space Between

In 1971 Antonio Dias self-published Record: The Space Between, a vinyl LP audio project produced in an edition of just 180 copies, numbered and signed by the artist. Both the cover and the LP itself were unconventional: the vinyl record was enclosed in a padded brown-paper mailing envelope – rather than in a traditional paperboard jacket – to which Dias affixed a photograph and a rubber-stamped title, a gesture toward mail art, which was emerging as its own distinct medium at that time. The album went to become internationally influential and has been included in important surveys of the record as a medium, yet it remains a work more frequently referred to than actually heard.

The idea for Record: The Space Between, the artist said, ’emerged from waiting for the birth of my daughter. From the room next to where my wife was in labour, I could hear two alternating sounds: her breathing and the tic-tac of a clock. I imagined a way to show this situation, and it could only be through the recording of a LP.’ Dias structured the record to feature one of those two sounds on each side: side A features a ticking alarm clock; side B is a recording of the artist drawing and expelling breath between intervals of silence, producing a transfixing continuum. Although it is his sole audio work the LP represents a profound moment of artistic experimentation: a meditation on the idea of space constructed by time and sound.

MoMA’s reissue of this early work, just a few months following the artist’s death, takes on an unexpected commemorative interpretation, invoking both the continuous breathing that sustains life and the ticking of our biological clocks. As a document of life and death, Record: The Space Between could be said to engender an imaginary immortality or, perhaps, a state neither existence nor nonexistence – a space between