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6/2/2007

David Lamelas

Monika Spruth Philomene Magers, Munich

Early Works

"Anticipating our contemporary state of singularity and suspended surveillance, Lamelas' work confounds any attempt to maintain a distinction between real and fictional temporalities, or between "actualities" and "fiction"."
(Stuart Comer, "David Lamelas: The Limits of Documentary“)

Monika Sprüth Philomene Magers present a series of late 1960s and 1970s works by the artist David Lamelas (born in Buenos Aires, 1946). Drawing attention to two large scale film and media installations, the exhibition reconstructs seminal conceptual work from this period to address the conditions under which the object of mass media comunication and images are produced and decoded. To consider what it means to exhibit not the image, but its mediation, Lamelas work focuses on the media and the way that it shapes reality.

David Lamelas is one of the pioneers of Conceptual Art and the related practice of institutional critique, which developed during the 1960s and 1970s. Linked to the most important trends of Conceptualism in Europe, his work absorbed the cultural circumstances and the artistic contexts that awaited him within each of the cities where he lived. In that sense, it is a document of that vital experiment that continuously occupied him: his own internationalisation. He works with site specific sculptures, installations, films, video-performances, photographs and drawings. Lamelas can be seen as a pioneer of the radical repositioning of sculpture in the 1960s and 1970s that abandoned traditional definitions of sculpture, displacing its materials and modes of production.

In the 1970s and 1960s, situated within an emerging aesthetic of institutional critique (the conditions of spectator behaviour as forms of social experience within the public institution of art), and opposed to the neutrality of minimalist sculpture, Lamelas sought to analyse art as a means of communication, relating it to how information was conveyed by the film and television industry, and to the discourses around public space and media technology. In the light of current discussions on the relationship between cinema, art, media, and politics, his work re-presented thirty years later has lost none of its relevance.

Situation of Time (1967/2007) “Invited to contribute to Experiencias Visuales (1967), at the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella, David Lamels responded to the exhibition site by linking the institutions of culture and industry. He borrowed seventeen televisions sets - the latest models produced by Di Tella Electronics - and placed them on three walls of the room. Tuned to a non-existent channel, they emitted a bright light that took complete possession of the room. By depriving the TV sets of their function as purveyors of pictures and information, Lamelas reduced them to a zero point, a visible remnant generating a kind of white noise, a "static" of pure mediality in time.” Here at Monika Sprüth Philomene Magers, Lamelas reinstalls this work applying the original concept with the latest technology of 2007.
(from: Heike Ander, Works 1962-1976, in: “David Lamelas: A New Refutation of Time”, 1997)

Film Script (1972) concerns the relation between image and the construction of reality. Film Script was one of the first cinematic installations created by an conceptual artist and is one of the most powerful works by Lamelas. The installation captures the manipulation of meaning and the convergence of reality and fiction in the mediascape. Using a 16mm film projector and simultaneously running slide projections as narrative displays, Lamelas work implies that the meaning of an image as information can be changed through editing and suppression.

London Friends (1974) ”Exploring the narrow zone between fiction and reality, David Lamelas invited a number of London friends to a photo studio for a photo-session. He had the photographs taken by a professional (fashion) photographer. In accordance with Lamelas‘ concept, his sujects chose glamorous poses intended to embody the image of fictionalised portraits, Lamelas thus produces a portrait of the London scene as a whole in those days.”
(from: Heike Ander, Works 1962-1976, in: “David Lamelas: A New Refutation of Time”, 1997)

Monika Sprüth Philomene Magers Munich
Schellingstr. 48 - Munich

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