David Lamelas is considered as one of conceptual art’s pioneers. Having emerged in the 1960s and 70s, he has produced an impressive body of work of films and videos. Therein he constantly challenges and undermines our conventional understanding of how meaning is produced and information is transmitted. In his first films already, Lamelas experimented with the constructedness of narration. His particular interest has been directed at the question of how signification is produced and controlled. By taking single shots, and hence doing without editing or montage, he effects a sense of continuous documentation rendering the cinema verité quality of immediate testimony.
Lamelas was born in Argentinia in 1946 and was originally trained as a sculptor. When he represented his country at the Biennale in Venice with the piece Office of Information about the Vietnam War on Three Levels: The Visual Image, Text and Audio in 1968, he obtained international recognition. It was in Venice when he also got acquainted with the Antwerp-based gallerists of “Wide White Space” as well as with Marcel Broodthaers. These contacts helped him to precipitate his move to Europe. He eventually studied on a sculpture scholarship at the St Martins School of Art in London. By incorporating textual and photographic material, he consequently expanded the notion of sculpture. Simultaneously he also started working with film. Out of a desire to “produce sculptural forms without any physical volume”, the core concerns of his work solidified: the formal engagement with time, space and language.
During the following years Lamelas has lived and worked alternately in Europe and America. As a result of these relocations, the constant quest to understand new cultural spheres as well as to assimilate them in his films, has emerged. Fuelled by his changing domiciles, the interest in diverse local identities has lent his work’s typical conceptualist stringency also warmth and a cordial humour. The engagement with alterable residences has moreover led to a fundamental preoccupation with the space/time interface. “Space has a reality, it exists,” he has observed, yet he has also asserted that “time doesn’t exist, our consciousness constructs it. Time is a fiction”.
David Lamelas started with a series of experimental films named Time As Activity in Düsseldorf in 1969. He filmed the scene with a fixed camera at three different sites. That is to say that the camera did not track any single event, and in this sense did not attempt to capture any particular action, but rather centred on recording the city’s flux. The audience is thus confronted with a filmic situation in which it does not need – or is not allowed – to follow a classic narration, but is asked to construct a storyline on its own account. In this sense, the work’s openness aims not at a univocal, definite and conclusive statement. In fact, it rather exposes the conditions for the production of meaning and leaves enough room to the public for its own thoughts and associations.
David Lamelas has been working on this project – which, in addition to Düsseldorf, he has also realised in Berlin, Los Angeles, Warsaw and this year in New York – for almost 40 years by now. By their almost scholarly array, the 16mm films convey city views that lead to considerations on different levels. Apart from the architecture and the animation on the streets, it also becomes apparent how time elapses in the distinct cities, and how it is lived and experienced by the local residents. David Lamelas has just realised a Time As Activity on site in St. Gallen, which will be shown together with the series’ other, already existing pieces.
The Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen is very pleased to be in the position to actualise a monothematic exhibition on Time As Activity. The art world’s interest in David Lamelas, who presently lives in Los Angeles and Buenos Aires (and who thus takes on some sort of an outsider perspective on the West-European and American art world on the basis of his local provenance), has constantly grown during the last couple of years. In this vein, Lamelas is increasingly noticed and cited in professional circles as one of the still living exponents of the 60s art generation. The show Time as Activity permits now on the one hand to point to the series’ continuity, and on the other hand to create a vivid and concrete reference to St Gallen. By the exhibition’s design, the openness of Lamelas’ work is accentuated once more, and the local context is integrated into a larger unity.