ART-PRESENTATION: David Lamelas

David Lamelas has a restless and peregrinating artistic practice that addresses the parameters of time and space. He has investigated these topics in a range of Post-Minimalist installations, performances, photos, and films since his participation in Argentina’s nascent avant-garde during the early 1960s. Lamelas is best known for the structuralist films and media installations he produced in London and Los Angeles during the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, which questioned art’s capacity as both a means of communication and a medium for creating self-awareness.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Sprüth Magers Gallery Archive

Key to these projects was Lamelas’s interest in relating techniques and systems used by the film and television industry to the burgeoning discourse on public space and media technology. His installation “Office of Information about the Vietnam War at Three Levels: The Visual Image, Text, and Audio” (1968), for example, helped establish the practice of bringing real-time information (news reports and television footage) into the space of the gallery. David Lamelas for his solo exhibition at Sprüth Magers Gallery in Berlin brings together a range of important film and sculptural works dating from 1966 to 1993 that thrive with antagonisms of space and language, the limit of art’s temporality, as well as its potential for providing new models of knowledge and self-awareness. In addition, a thoughtful reconsideration of his 1970s “Reading Films” is presented in a new multimedia installation, “Mon Amour”. In the room that the installation is presented the left and right-hand walls bear a series of charcoal drawings whilst a projector screen stands at the far end. It features a filmed view of a screenplay. As the film steadily scrolls through the blurred text, only the words Elle and Lui are legible within the vague outline of a dialogue. Lamelas has seemingly reversed the developmental process of a narrative film, from work of literature, to screenplay, to cinematic form. He deconstructs the script in its original written state, obscuring its narrative function so that its meaning derives from its presentation as a purely linguistic and spatial structure. The single bulbs illuminating each charcoal drawing emit the soft light of a candle to evoke a hallowed atmosphere. The works are made as wall drawings on projection tissue and are created on-site by the artist. “Untitled (Falling Wall)” is a colossal 20 by 7 metre wall. Three layers of wooden joists and beams increasing in size are angled down from the wall to the floor preventing the wall from collapsing into the gallery space. The beams dissect the interior space into anatomical sections that disturb the holistic volume of the ‘white cube’. The sculpture evidence the artist’s observation that artworks are often legitimised by the context in which they are displayed. Two works are in the main room, “Time As Activity: Düsseldorf “(1969), and “Film 18 Pairs IV 70” (1970) demonstrate his use of the medium in experimental representations of time. “Time As Activity: Düsseldorf” is the first installment in an ongoing film series from different city locations. Three-minute episodes, shot in real-time at three public locations and times of day, make up a nine-minute silent film. “Interview with Marguerite Duras” (1970), is a six-and-a-half minute filmed conversation between Duras and the Argentinian writer, Raul Escari, with Lamelas remaining mute behind the camera. They discuss “Detruire dit-elle“ (1969), the first work Duras penned after May ’68. During the interview, Lamelas took photographs of Duras every thirty seconds. Ten of these photographs accompany the film alongside handwritten texts pronouncing her words at the exact moment her picture was taken. By visually isolating the author from her own ideas, Lamelas reconfigures them as spatial and linguistic constructs, not unlike the often-decontextualized phrases and statements of Conceptual Art.

Info:Sprüth Magers Gallery, Oranienburger Straße 18, Berlin, Duration: 20/1-2/4/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.spruethmagers.com