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.
HEIKE ANDER
WORKS/WERKE 1962—1976
All quotations are from David Lamelas during conversations with the author in Brussels, in April 1996.
Alle Zitate sind von David Lamelas und entstammen mehreren Gesprächen, die im April 1996 in Brüssel mit der Autorin geführt wurden.
EL GRITO (THE SCREAM), 1962
‘Since I was very young I was never interested in small living-room paintings. I wanted to break with traditional painting by making huge paintings. At the Academia des Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires, everybody was doing canvases of just 20 by 20 cm, while I was buying rolls of paper, spreading them as long as the wall and painting on the wall or the floor. While studying I also made hundreds of drawings in black ink on paper, most of which consisted of simple black lines on a white surface. Through those drawings I went through many different periods: I had my action painting days, I had my neofigurative, postfigurative, and abstract days and I also did a lot of objects. I was interested in the idea of the object: in something that is not a sculpture, is not a drawing, is not a table – in something that is in-between.’
This photowork shows a woman’s face shot from below and blown up to superhuman size. Her eyes, nose, and the scream of her wide-open mouth stand off against the lightness of the surrounding plane and find no support in the contours of a face that seems spread out flat to the edges of the picture plane. The deformation generated by these disembodied features is heightened by a compressed version of the same picture placed underneath the first with the two seamlessly melting into each other.
This work from David Lamelas’s days as a student directs the gaze at fragmented pictorial information, which was to become a characteristic feature of his image-in-space objects as well as his analyses of the assignment of meaning and the processes of manipulation in his films of the seventies. It also prefigures the negation of artistic signature inasmuch as Lamelas delegated the production of the photograph. He pursued this method of working with professional photographers and camera people in subsequent photographs and films.
EL GRITO (DER SCHREI), 1962
‘Seit meiner frühesten Jugend haben mich nie kleine Wohnzimmer-Gemälde interessiert. Ich wollte mit der traditionellen Malerei brechen, indem ich