COMMA 36: David Lamelas
26 May - 02 Jul 2011
COMMA 36:
DAVID LAMELAS
26 May - 2 July, 2011
For COMMA at Bloomberg SPACE, David Lamelas has been given the entirety of the gallery to invest. On his first visit he immediately noticed the specific architectural features of the place: the large monolithic volume amplified by a large window at street level, filling the space with daylight, and the adjacent second space with a square-shaped balcony circling a vast panoptical atrium revealing the surrounding offices of Bloomberg LP.
Lamelas's subsequent response to this space was to explore anew the seminal work that he made in 1966 at the Instituto di Tella in Buenos Aires, titled Connection of three spaces, aka Extension of a limited spatial volume. This piece, initially proposed in response to the specific context of the space, revealed the influence that architecture could exert on a work of art. Here at Bloomberg SPACE, Lamelas is particularly interested in the existence of two radically different possibilities for experiencing the work: visitors to the gallery will most probably have only a single encounter with the work whereas employees at Bloomberg will come into contact with the piece repeatedly throughout the duration of the exhibition.
David Lamelas's elliptic structures
The dwelling is inhospitable because it seduces us, as does the book, into a labyrinth. The labyrinth here is an abyss: we plunge into the horizontality of a pure surface, which itself represents itself detour to detour. 1
For COMMA at Bloomberg SPACE, David Lamelas has been given the entirety of the gallery to invest. On his first visit he immediately noticed the specific architectural features of the place: the large monolithic volume amplified by a large window at street level, filling the space with daylight, and the adjacent second space with a square-shaped balcony circling a vast panoptical atrium revealing the surrounding offices of Bloomberg LP.
Lamelas's subsequent response to this space was to explore anew the seminal work that he made in 1966 at the Instituto di Tella in Buenos Aires, titled Connection of three spaces, aka Extension of a limited spatial volume. This piece, initially proposed in response to the specific context of the space, revealed the influence that architecture could exert on a work of art. Here at Bloomberg SPACE, Lamelas is particularly interested in the existence of two radically different possibilities for experiencing the work: visitors to the gallery will most probably have only a single encounter with the work whereas employees at Bloomberg will come into contact with the piece repeatedly throughout the duration of the exhibition.
The front space features an internally illuminated frosted glass model of the wall opposite the huge window. Guided by a skirting of metal running along the walls, the viewer is then directed through to a second space, which has reduced lighting along the sides of an open corridor consisting of two planes of frosted glass. On leaving this second space, the viewer is left to look over and into the vast atrium to gaze at an illuminated glass panel suspended in space.
Lamelas's decision to investigate and remake this work forty-five years later demonstrates the bearing his interest in architectural interventions and the deployment of object-based installations as primary structures still has on his current practice. Connection of three spaces is about the possibility of preventing the viewer from experiencing, grasping, and understanding an object at the same time. It therefore enforces a process of the fragmentation of an art object in space and time, of its dispersion through the twofold movement of space and the expansion of visual experience through temporality. The work will, therefore, exist only in the viewer's memory image, in the void left by the absence of the work's unity and continuity.
Lamelas moved to London in 1968, two years after making Connection of three spaces, to follow the famous post-graduate sculpture course taught by Anthony Caro, Phillip King and Barry Flanagan at St. Martins School of Art. With its exploration of space through the deployment of metal planes, the production of non-monolithic volumes that defied the forces of gravity, Caro's work was emblematic of a particular moment in the development of British sculpture. As the writings of Clement Greenberg of the late fifties and early sixties suggest, Caro was concerned with the pictorial qualities of sculpture and its ability to draw in space, away from the monumentality and compactness of previous sculptural traditions. Caro's sculptural practice tended to focus on visual or physical aspects of perception, while questioning sculpture's ability to embody certain psychological states. In clear contrast to Caro's approach, Lamelas developed the body of work, already started in Buenos Aires, which engaged with the possibility of expanding sculpture into a realm of conceptual practice. That meant gradually abandoning the idea of sculpture as object or volume. Sculpture, in Lamelas's work, has become rather a set of relationships with space and time, a situation that could materialize indifferently through film. This exploration of space, using film as a medium, is exemplified in the piece A Study of Relationships of Inner and Outer Space, which was made in London in 1969 for a group exhibition at the Camden Arts Centre. In this piece, the notion of space is broken down into its functional, architectural, geographic, social, and political components, with spatial perception conceived through these expanded subjective dimensions.
The presentation of Connection of three spaces now at Bloomberg Space not only e-emphasizes the relevance of the work as a conceptual exploration of space through sculpture but also reveals its affinity with Lamelas's constant engagement with cinematographic and literary fictions. Connection of three spaces is an exemplary example in the development of the artist's primary structures, which, following Ferdinand de Saussure's structuralist linguistic approach in affirming that language consists of an interplay of signs that are given identity by their difference to one another, posits the intricate relationship between art and language as a network of differences.
“The verb 'to differ' seems to differ from itself. On the one hand, it indicates difference as distinction, inequality, or discernability; on the other, it expresses the interdisposition of delay, the interval of spacing and temporalizing that puts off until 'later' what is now denied, the possible that is now impossible.”2 Jacques Derrida stresses the ambiguity and instability inherent in the construction of language, thought, and perception.
Connection of three spaces materializes, through sculpture, such a radical play of identity and difference by suggesting that, despite its material structure within the gallery space, the work consists primarily in the occasion of the visitor's perception as a deferred labour of imagination, as well as its repetition through the duration of the exhibition.
In an essay published in 1978 at the occasion of Lamelas's exhibition at CAYC in Buenos Aires, Jorge Glusberg defines Lamelas's work as “an art of language,” stressing through these specific terms the undeniable influence of structuralism and post-structuralism on his practice. “In his work, an act is a phrase, that is, the event as decomposed, dissolved into syntagms, sent back to the subject-predicate relation”3 The conception of the work as a structure or network of elements, which in the case of Connection of three spaces assembles light, weight, time, movement, and information, challenges us to question the relationships, play of tensions and forces at work within this particular topology. To quote again: “But the event is in disarray at the level of its apprehension; its diegetic support does not obey a univocal, absolute sequence, but is always either ahead or behind itself, that is, made relative.”4
This disarray evoked by Glusberg is common to many of Lamelas's works, which engage with the realm of narration through film, text, and photography. Through the disruption of classical narration, Lamelas insists in revealing the points of instability, of delay, and the essential difference between an idea, its materialization, and the event of perception. A seminal example of such works is Lamelas's 'Interview' with Marguerite Duras (1970). Interview shows the fragment of a filmed interview with Duras in her house in Paris. We hear the voice of her interlocutor, Raul Escari, an Argentinean writer then based in Paris, channelling Lamelas's questions. The film is juxtaposed with ten photographs of Duras taken by Lamelas at key moments of the interview and ten text panels that transcribe a selection of Duras's short answers.
The question of narration is approached here through the literary figure of Duras talking about her book Destroy, She Said (1969), the first work she published in the aftermath of the events of 1968. If the allusions to the text remain enigmatic, the interview nevertheless conveys essential elements of Duras's approach to writing and narrative. “For Destroy I already had the characters. I had Elizabeth, Alissa, and I had Thor. But it was not working. During one year I was trying to find a way of writing this novel. And suddenly Stein arrived. He arrived. I heard him scream in a park, in the woods. As soon as he screamed, the novel started.”5 The elusive descriptions of characters and motifs in her text – such as the forest or the scream – begin to echo Lamelas's own broken, repetitive, and often mute narratives in works such as Film Script (manipulation of meaning) (1972), The Desert People (1974), or, more recently, The Light at the Edge of a Nightmare (2001-2005).
Duras says that the kind of destruction at work in Destroy, She Said is “in the first place that of the writer.”6 The writer that she refers to is the writer of the novel, which she has intended to strip of its substance, linear narration and long realistic descriptions. In the words of Maurice Blanchot, it is “as if the writing were staging semblances of phrases, the remains of language, imitations of thought, simulations of being against a fascinating background of absence. A presence that is not sustained by any presence, be it one to come or one that is past; a forgetting that does not assume anything forgotten and that is detached from all memory: without certainties, ever.”7
The motif of destruction echoes Lamelas's dematerialization of sculptural practice and his breaking down of cinematic narrative into fragments. Nevertheless, in the manner of an “intellectual urbanist,”8 Lamelas builds new kind of structures, seamlessly moving between processes of writing and of reading, of construction and decomposition. Through his gestures of repetition and doubling that operate in his sculptural works and filmic investigations, something essential is altered and decentred. The return to Connection of three spaces is therefore undeniably elliptic and through its reinvention, leaves the structure open to play.
Vanessa Desclaux is a curator based in Paris.
1 Jacques Derrida, in “Ellipsis”, Writing and Difference, Routledge, London, 1978, pp 298
2 Jacques Derrida, Différance, 1968. Essay originally published in the Bulletin de la Société française de philosophie, LXII, No 3, July-September 1968, pp 73-101
3 Jorge Glusberg, David Lamelas: Fifteen Years, published by CAYC, Buenos Aires, 1978, pp 7
4 Ibid. (pp 13)
5 Marguerite Duras in David Lamelas, “'Interview' with Marguerite Duras,” 1970 (my translation)
6 An interview with Marguerite Duras, Contemporary Litterature, Vol. 13, No 4, Autumn, 1972, pp 401-422
7 Maurice Blanchot, in Destroy, Friendship, Stanford University Press, 1997 (1971), pp 114-115
8 Alain Jouffroy, David Lamelas, Opus International, No 17, 1970
DAVID LAMELAS
26 May - 2 July, 2011
For COMMA at Bloomberg SPACE, David Lamelas has been given the entirety of the gallery to invest. On his first visit he immediately noticed the specific architectural features of the place: the large monolithic volume amplified by a large window at street level, filling the space with daylight, and the adjacent second space with a square-shaped balcony circling a vast panoptical atrium revealing the surrounding offices of Bloomberg LP.
Lamelas's subsequent response to this space was to explore anew the seminal work that he made in 1966 at the Instituto di Tella in Buenos Aires, titled Connection of three spaces, aka Extension of a limited spatial volume. This piece, initially proposed in response to the specific context of the space, revealed the influence that architecture could exert on a work of art. Here at Bloomberg SPACE, Lamelas is particularly interested in the existence of two radically different possibilities for experiencing the work: visitors to the gallery will most probably have only a single encounter with the work whereas employees at Bloomberg will come into contact with the piece repeatedly throughout the duration of the exhibition.
David Lamelas's elliptic structures
The dwelling is inhospitable because it seduces us, as does the book, into a labyrinth. The labyrinth here is an abyss: we plunge into the horizontality of a pure surface, which itself represents itself detour to detour. 1
For COMMA at Bloomberg SPACE, David Lamelas has been given the entirety of the gallery to invest. On his first visit he immediately noticed the specific architectural features of the place: the large monolithic volume amplified by a large window at street level, filling the space with daylight, and the adjacent second space with a square-shaped balcony circling a vast panoptical atrium revealing the surrounding offices of Bloomberg LP.
Lamelas's subsequent response to this space was to explore anew the seminal work that he made in 1966 at the Instituto di Tella in Buenos Aires, titled Connection of three spaces, aka Extension of a limited spatial volume. This piece, initially proposed in response to the specific context of the space, revealed the influence that architecture could exert on a work of art. Here at Bloomberg SPACE, Lamelas is particularly interested in the existence of two radically different possibilities for experiencing the work: visitors to the gallery will most probably have only a single encounter with the work whereas employees at Bloomberg will come into contact with the piece repeatedly throughout the duration of the exhibition.
The front space features an internally illuminated frosted glass model of the wall opposite the huge window. Guided by a skirting of metal running along the walls, the viewer is then directed through to a second space, which has reduced lighting along the sides of an open corridor consisting of two planes of frosted glass. On leaving this second space, the viewer is left to look over and into the vast atrium to gaze at an illuminated glass panel suspended in space.
Lamelas's decision to investigate and remake this work forty-five years later demonstrates the bearing his interest in architectural interventions and the deployment of object-based installations as primary structures still has on his current practice. Connection of three spaces is about the possibility of preventing the viewer from experiencing, grasping, and understanding an object at the same time. It therefore enforces a process of the fragmentation of an art object in space and time, of its dispersion through the twofold movement of space and the expansion of visual experience through temporality. The work will, therefore, exist only in the viewer's memory image, in the void left by the absence of the work's unity and continuity.
Lamelas moved to London in 1968, two years after making Connection of three spaces, to follow the famous post-graduate sculpture course taught by Anthony Caro, Phillip King and Barry Flanagan at St. Martins School of Art. With its exploration of space through the deployment of metal planes, the production of non-monolithic volumes that defied the forces of gravity, Caro's work was emblematic of a particular moment in the development of British sculpture. As the writings of Clement Greenberg of the late fifties and early sixties suggest, Caro was concerned with the pictorial qualities of sculpture and its ability to draw in space, away from the monumentality and compactness of previous sculptural traditions. Caro's sculptural practice tended to focus on visual or physical aspects of perception, while questioning sculpture's ability to embody certain psychological states. In clear contrast to Caro's approach, Lamelas developed the body of work, already started in Buenos Aires, which engaged with the possibility of expanding sculpture into a realm of conceptual practice. That meant gradually abandoning the idea of sculpture as object or volume. Sculpture, in Lamelas's work, has become rather a set of relationships with space and time, a situation that could materialize indifferently through film. This exploration of space, using film as a medium, is exemplified in the piece A Study of Relationships of Inner and Outer Space, which was made in London in 1969 for a group exhibition at the Camden Arts Centre. In this piece, the notion of space is broken down into its functional, architectural, geographic, social, and political components, with spatial perception conceived through these expanded subjective dimensions.
The presentation of Connection of three spaces now at Bloomberg Space not only e-emphasizes the relevance of the work as a conceptual exploration of space through sculpture but also reveals its affinity with Lamelas's constant engagement with cinematographic and literary fictions. Connection of three spaces is an exemplary example in the development of the artist's primary structures, which, following Ferdinand de Saussure's structuralist linguistic approach in affirming that language consists of an interplay of signs that are given identity by their difference to one another, posits the intricate relationship between art and language as a network of differences.
“The verb 'to differ' seems to differ from itself. On the one hand, it indicates difference as distinction, inequality, or discernability; on the other, it expresses the interdisposition of delay, the interval of spacing and temporalizing that puts off until 'later' what is now denied, the possible that is now impossible.”2 Jacques Derrida stresses the ambiguity and instability inherent in the construction of language, thought, and perception.
Connection of three spaces materializes, through sculpture, such a radical play of identity and difference by suggesting that, despite its material structure within the gallery space, the work consists primarily in the occasion of the visitor's perception as a deferred labour of imagination, as well as its repetition through the duration of the exhibition.
In an essay published in 1978 at the occasion of Lamelas's exhibition at CAYC in Buenos Aires, Jorge Glusberg defines Lamelas's work as “an art of language,” stressing through these specific terms the undeniable influence of structuralism and post-structuralism on his practice. “In his work, an act is a phrase, that is, the event as decomposed, dissolved into syntagms, sent back to the subject-predicate relation”3 The conception of the work as a structure or network of elements, which in the case of Connection of three spaces assembles light, weight, time, movement, and information, challenges us to question the relationships, play of tensions and forces at work within this particular topology. To quote again: “But the event is in disarray at the level of its apprehension; its diegetic support does not obey a univocal, absolute sequence, but is always either ahead or behind itself, that is, made relative.”4
This disarray evoked by Glusberg is common to many of Lamelas's works, which engage with the realm of narration through film, text, and photography. Through the disruption of classical narration, Lamelas insists in revealing the points of instability, of delay, and the essential difference between an idea, its materialization, and the event of perception. A seminal example of such works is Lamelas's 'Interview' with Marguerite Duras (1970). Interview shows the fragment of a filmed interview with Duras in her house in Paris. We hear the voice of her interlocutor, Raul Escari, an Argentinean writer then based in Paris, channelling Lamelas's questions. The film is juxtaposed with ten photographs of Duras taken by Lamelas at key moments of the interview and ten text panels that transcribe a selection of Duras's short answers.
The question of narration is approached here through the literary figure of Duras talking about her book Destroy, She Said (1969), the first work she published in the aftermath of the events of 1968. If the allusions to the text remain enigmatic, the interview nevertheless conveys essential elements of Duras's approach to writing and narrative. “For Destroy I already had the characters. I had Elizabeth, Alissa, and I had Thor. But it was not working. During one year I was trying to find a way of writing this novel. And suddenly Stein arrived. He arrived. I heard him scream in a park, in the woods. As soon as he screamed, the novel started.”5 The elusive descriptions of characters and motifs in her text – such as the forest or the scream – begin to echo Lamelas's own broken, repetitive, and often mute narratives in works such as Film Script (manipulation of meaning) (1972), The Desert People (1974), or, more recently, The Light at the Edge of a Nightmare (2001-2005).
Duras says that the kind of destruction at work in Destroy, She Said is “in the first place that of the writer.”6 The writer that she refers to is the writer of the novel, which she has intended to strip of its substance, linear narration and long realistic descriptions. In the words of Maurice Blanchot, it is “as if the writing were staging semblances of phrases, the remains of language, imitations of thought, simulations of being against a fascinating background of absence. A presence that is not sustained by any presence, be it one to come or one that is past; a forgetting that does not assume anything forgotten and that is detached from all memory: without certainties, ever.”7
The motif of destruction echoes Lamelas's dematerialization of sculptural practice and his breaking down of cinematic narrative into fragments. Nevertheless, in the manner of an “intellectual urbanist,”8 Lamelas builds new kind of structures, seamlessly moving between processes of writing and of reading, of construction and decomposition. Through his gestures of repetition and doubling that operate in his sculptural works and filmic investigations, something essential is altered and decentred. The return to Connection of three spaces is therefore undeniably elliptic and through its reinvention, leaves the structure open to play.
Vanessa Desclaux is a curator based in Paris.
1 Jacques Derrida, in “Ellipsis”, Writing and Difference, Routledge, London, 1978, pp 298
2 Jacques Derrida, Différance, 1968. Essay originally published in the Bulletin de la Société française de philosophie, LXII, No 3, July-September 1968, pp 73-101
3 Jorge Glusberg, David Lamelas: Fifteen Years, published by CAYC, Buenos Aires, 1978, pp 7
4 Ibid. (pp 13)
5 Marguerite Duras in David Lamelas, “'Interview' with Marguerite Duras,” 1970 (my translation)
6 An interview with Marguerite Duras, Contemporary Litterature, Vol. 13, No 4, Autumn, 1972, pp 401-422
7 Maurice Blanchot, in Destroy, Friendship, Stanford University Press, 1997 (1971), pp 114-115
8 Alain Jouffroy, David Lamelas, Opus International, No 17, 1970