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LYNDA MORRIS

INTERVIEW WITH DAVID LAMELAS, LONDON, DECEMBER 1972*

LYNDA MORRISWhat was it like to be an art student in Argentina in the mid-1960s?

DAVID LAMELASI was not working in isolation. I had the same sort of information as an art student in London. An important function was fulfilled by the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires. The director, Jorge Romero Brest, organized exhibitions in the middle and late sixties which included the work of many major European and American artists. The Instituto Di Tella, where I showed my work regularly, was about a crossover of ideas. There I was involved with a group of about ten people, who were mostly working in other disciplines. Between 1966 and 1968, there was increasing emphasis on intellectual theory. There was a dialogue between the disciplines of philosophy, social science, psychology and epistemology. This created a climate of knowledge that foreshadowed the thinking we now define as conceptualism. People from other backgrounds introduced other methods of thinking and opened up many new approaches.

LMCan you tell me about your work?

DLThe last piece I made in Argentina before leaving for London was an installation [Situación de tiempo (Situation of Time)]. On opposite walls of a large, dark room I placed seventeen television sets thirty inches apart from each other. The sets were turned on but not tuned into a program. You could only see the snow effect and hear an electronic sound. At this point, I was interested in non-descriptive, non-physical art pieces.

LMThe medium and the context are the form. The works contain no information beyond the apparatus by which information is conveyed.

DLA television set is an inanimate object when it is switched off. It is only looked at because of the information it conveys when it is switched on. In a similar, but different vein, in 1966 I invited people to attend a performance of a piece of mine in a cinema, [Pantalla (Screen)]. On the screen there was absolutely nothing to see, just the continuous flickering of a blank film. In a related work, [Límite de una proyección (aka Light Projection in a Dark Room)], in a bare, dark room I showed a beam from a spotlight directed at the floor. The beam became a physical object. Another work [Proyección (Projection)] I made at this time consisted of two slide projections. It was shown in a gallery that was about twice the size of the ICA in London. The space was completely empty; all one saw were projectors projecting blank slides.

LMYou came to Europe for the 1968 Venice Biennial?

DLThe Venice Biennial piece, entitled Office of Information about the Vietnam War at Three Levels: the Visual Image, Text and Audio was devised in Argentina. In a small office, I had a telex receiving all information about the Vietnam War through a news agency. Newspapers and TV stations get information about many subjects, but I just wanted information on one subject, so I chose the Vietnam War. The information was read out through a microphone as it arrived on the telex in my room at the Biennial. The telexes themselves were hung on the walls. By the end of the Biennial I had four months worth of telexes.

LMDid you choose the Vietnam War as an intentional social or political comment?

DLI was interested in using information relevant to everyone but not connected with art. I did not make a statement about the Vietnam War but about the way people receive information. The Venice Biennial coincided with what was probably the most critical time in the Vietnam War.

In 1967, I had won a scholarship to go to England, so after the Biennial, I went to St. Martin’s School of Art. I was very disappointed to find out that Jan Dibbets, Richard Long and Gilbert & George had been studying there the year before I arrived.

LMDid your move to England impose changes on your work?

DLOf course a move like that does change your work, but it is in terms of a different development rather than changing the basis from which you work. I was aware of what was happening in Europe and was already working with that knowledge. I had always considered London the ideal place for me to work because of what I knew about the artists working there. It was not because of the work of an individual or even a group. It had more to do with the diversity of what was taking place, the sense of freedom. For the exhibition Prospect in Dusseldorf, in 1968, I made an analysis of the elements by which information takes place [Analysis of the Elements by which the Massive Consumption of Information Takes Place]. For this work I taped the radio in London for six hours and then divided the material into three tapes of different length: firstly, News and Information; secondly, Publicity; and thirdly, Music. Next to the tapes was a table with the newspapers and magazines published in Dusseldorf during the course of Prospect.

LMDid the tapes provide a structure of information that could then be applied to the information on the exhibition?

DLThere was also a four-minute filmloop showing a close-up of someone opening a carton of milk and pouring it into a glass. The film represented an activity. People could consider spoken information, written information and visual information. The second piece I made in London was a film called Study of the Relationships between Inner and Outer Space for the Camden Arts Centre in 1968. It was also shown at the Konzeption-Conception exhibition in Leverkusen [1969].

LMWhat was the background to this piece?

DLAfter the Office of Information about the Vietnam War, I became interested in social context. I had not made any work for about five or six months. I had planned some pieces, but they were never made. This work consisted of a film and a book of stills from the film. The film analyzed the ‘inner space’ of where it was shown, the Camden Arts Centre, and the ‘outer space’ of the whole of London, showing the means by which people traveled to the Centre.

LMThe activities of people become more specific and increasingly more important in this and your later films. Why did you ask in the later part of this film about the Moon Landing?

DLThe last part of the film was about how information gets through to people, and the Moon Landing happened to be the most important piece of information in the press at the time. But the piece was about London, about the city and its people.

LMYou presented the visitors with a work which asked them to analyze their visit to the Camden Arts Centre, how they received information about the exhibition and how they traveled to it. Then they were asked to consider what effect this had on what they saw at the Centre. How did the piece differ when it was shown in another context?

DLIt became absolutely another piece. In Leverkusen it was documentation rather than the actual work.

LMWhat did you make for Prospect in 1969?

DLA film called Time as Activity. It was also shown at the Wide White Space Gallery in Antwerp. I filmed three places in Dusseldorf – the Kunsthalle, a fountain on a main street, and a cross-roads – for four minutes each from a static position. I was consciously working with time in this piece. The concept was the structure, or deconstruction, of time in Dusseldorf, where the film was made and also shown. We very seldom stand still for four minutes to observe what is happening around us. This work also explores the difference between the real place and watching that place on film in a museum. You compare what you see in the film with your previous knowledge and experience of that place. Viewers always talk about the car breaking down or the way the swans move, neither of which I had any control over when I made the film. The play is between the time it takes to see the piece and the time of each of the sections. It is not about the images, but about getting the viewers to understand the nature of the time they spend watching the piece and the difference in time according to what the images are. Film was just the medium I chose for conveying this.

LMYour works all seem to reflect your concern with providing people with structure rather than information. They are not intended to increase the viewer’s knowledge, but to provide them with a way of looking at their own activities, for self-analysis.

DLWhat is important is that there are no barriers between the viewers’ understanding and what is happening on the screen. It should be obvious and something they are familiar with. The viewer should be able not only to understand the ideas in the film but also to be able to link the film to his own activity of watching it. What happens in the film is a comment on the situation of the person looking at it.

When it was shown at the Wide White Space Gallery, I added three large color photographs of Antwerp and three of Brussels. My next work was a Super-8 film [Gente di Milano (People from Milan)]. The movie camera was fixed in a central point in Milan for four minutes, the actual length of the film. A photograph was also taken of each person who walked in front of the movie camera. 11 photographs of 11 people.

LMThese three pieces, which were all made within two months, help us to see the development in your work over a short space of time.

DLMy following film, called ‘Interview’ with Marguerite Duras was made in Paris. The interview was conducted by Raúl Escari, whom I had instructed to ask specific questions. While the interview was taking place, I photographed her as she was dealing with particularly significant points. In the exhibition, I showed the filmed interview plus taped phrases and ten photographs to emphasize the important moments in the dialogue.

LMWhat did Marguerite Duras talk about?

DLShe spoke mostly about her writing. I thought that she was quite an interesting person to use for an interview as she personified the idea of Parisian culture at that time.

LMThe film brings out her thought structure. You filmed a person who represented a way of thinking that was expressive of a city.

You presented the viewer with the theories they would be taking with them to your exhibition?

DLOriginally I had considered having three interviews with different people. To have one with Roland Barthes was also a possibility, but I was worried about the film becoming didactic.

The next work I made was a book, Publication.

LMLanguage as art is only the subject of the book. In your pieces it is the structure not the subject that is the work. It is not just three questions; there is a syllogistic form. You made a book as an exhibition. You asked people working with language as art three questions about language as art. Their responses are changed by the context in which you collected them, which is your artwork. So your use of other people to make your work is more central to this work than the question of language as an artwork.

DLYes, exactly. But actually few people have been able to understand it that way.

LMPublication doesn’t make any distinction between the writing of critics and the writing of artists. Victor Burgin’s piece is an artwork, but Barbara Reise and Michel Claura write as critics. Artists have adopted recent forms of criticism and influenced its development through their work. Publication produced a transition in your use of language. In your subsequent film, language and action have an equal role, while more recent films have been made without language, just with visual information.

DLPersonally, it was very healthy for me to do Publication. I subsequently took a break and went to Argentina, in 1971, where I made Reading Film from ‘Knots’ by R.D. Laing. Just before leaving for Argentina, I made a film called Reading of an Extract from ‘Labyrinths’ by J.L. Borges, which was based on short quotes from the essay ‘A New Refutation of Time’ from Borges’ Labyrinths.

LMWhat criteria did you use to choose one passage rather than another from Labyrinths?

DLLabyrinths had always interested me and I had often wanted to do something with it but I never knew how. After Publication I wanted to work on writing, in some other form. I chose the phrases which for me represented my understanding of Labyrinths.

LMReading of an Extract from ‘Labyrinths’ by J.L. Borges has no sound, just the image of someone reading. What is being read is presented as a subtitle. You cannot hear it but you can read it simultaneously.

DLIt reflects what Borges is about. I wanted to bring out his silence and perception. But, again, this is about personal experience. The film’s image is what the viewer does when he reads the subtitles. It is a mirror reflection of the viewer watching the film. This is a very Borgesian idea. He never expresses anything but himself, yet at the same time also you.

The Laing film is absolutely different from the Borges film. Again, it is related to what Laing himself is about. First it shows the text, eight pages from Laing, and then someone reading the same text with sound. You read the text; then it is read to you.

LMOne is a story, the other an analysis, but both rely on self-knowledge. I can see the distinction between Borges and Laing, and the difference in the use of language in the two films, but where do they connect to each other?

DLThey were both starting points that took me into two different ways of handling the same problem, a problem about reading. It is not about the distinction between Borges and Laing. The distinction between the two films is a distinction in my way of understanding. That is how the films connect. When I returned to London the first work I made was Film Script in 1972. It consisted of a slide projection and a film. What I wanted to bring out in this work was the many possible permutations of a set of slides as opposed to the consecutive order of a film. The slides and film worked with a beginning and an end, but there was a random structure. A later presentation in Italy was much better. The film and three cassettes of slides all started with the same image and all lasted exactly the same amount of time.

LMThe original presentation of Film Script was at Nigel Greenwood’s Gallery in London, where it had been filmed. You are no longer emphasizing the place but the presentation of the film.

DLFirst you plan the context a work is to be shown in. Then you find the best possible form to make it in. But once it is made, it becomes possible to introduce new qualifications, which are closer to the original intention than the original plan. This involves a development I could not have understood beforehand. It is a classical idea of art. I did not devise it; it just happened and I am happy about it.

LMWhile we were making Film Script, in which I was the actress, you talked about a scene from a movie such as John Schlesingers Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971), about scenes which do not give any information but create the feeling of the film.

DLIn all movies you have scenes which just connect and do not contain any information, like a genre piece.

LMLast summer [1971], you showed a film called Cumulative Script, at Gallery House. In this piece, the repetition of events is made within the framework of the film, not as external information as in the slides in Film Script.

DLThe structure of this film is complex. I edited together two films, the original and a copy. But you need to see the film or have it explained in a diagram to be able to understand how its repetition works. The film is divided into six scenes. The first scene is shown and then repeated with the second scene; then the second scene is repeated, then the third scene and so on. Except, it is not always exact. Sometimes I start halfway through a scene and end before the end of it.

LMThe repeat of the film is markedly bluer. Was it necessary to make a deliberate distinction in the repeat?

DLI wonder because it involves a qualification that I am not sure people need. I now think it would be more interesting not to make that sort of distinction.

LMWhen watching the film, one follows people; they go to a place, meet, an activity takes place, and they go away.

DLI am not suggesting that the activities are important, but people, or figures, are central to this film.

I was interested in the structure of the storyline. I was interested in the structure of the meeting. It was important to have a clearly recognizable story before it went through the various repetitions so that people could reconstruct the events for themselves.

In Cumulative Script something actually happens. Two people meet, but no reason is given as to why this happens. Most contact with people is like this. You observe what they are doing on a bus or in the streets, or playing in the park. You observe far more about actions you know nothing about than you do with people you know, because then you are part of their action.

LMWhenever I refer to subjects in your work, you refute the importance of the subject. Your subjects are analogies selected from many possible analogies, and one has to see through the limitations of the analogy to understand the work.

DLIn this interview I have said many things which relate more to our conversation than to my work. This is not a negative statement because it is an attitude which is already there in the work. It is impossible for me to make definitive statements. A piece is defined by the person who looks at it.

* Extracts of this text were published in Art Press (Paris), no. 3 (March-April 1973), 14-15.