On the Road

An interview with Ian White about 30 years of work that explores ideas of time, text and travel; place, politics and friendship

David Lamelas was born in Buenos Aires in 1946. In 1968 he left Argentina for London and then in 1976 moved to Los Angeles, establishing a relationship between his artistic practice and the social and cultural centres in which he lives. His work consists of eloquent displacements and representations of time, place, information and institutions through a wide variety of media. At the 1968 Venice Biennale he exhibited Office of Information about the Vietnam War on Three Levels: The Visual Image, Text and Audio, in which an ‘office’ received the latest news on the war from Italy’s largest agency; this was recorded and read aloud to visitors. The drawing series Los Angeles Friends (Larger than Life) (1976) and the 35mm film The Desert People (1974) are included in ‘Los Angeles, 1955–1985: Birth of an Art Capital’ at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris until 17 July. The Tate has recently acquired his work Time (1970), in which people in a queue tell their neighbour the time at one-minute intervals. Solo shows this year include MC Gallery, Los Angeles and Secession, Vienna. This conversation took place this April in Paris.

Ian White: I saw your work in ‘Los Angeles, 1955–1985: Birth of an Art Capital’ at the Pompidou Centre and thought it was extraordinary that the show forces a linear way of understanding LA, as told through a series of art movements. It struck me as ironic that you’ve often been defined by your displacement, yet you’re included in a show that is so geographically specific.

David Lamelas: I never experienced LA in a linear way because the city is not linear; it’s made up of different communities, social classes and art groups. But for me it is a very important show.

IW In what way?

DL Because I understood what was happening when I arrived there – it made me reconsider my time in Los Angeles and my move from London to LA. Strangely, the two pieces of mine in the show were created in London. The Desert People (1974) was created in my mind in London, and the second work, Los Angeles Friends (1976), was conceived a year earlier in London and realized as a piece called London Friends. I was living in London very happily in the early 1970s and was offered a show in LA, but it was cancelled and I was shattered. I called Jack Wendler and explained the situation, and he very nicely sent me some money. Then I was invited to stay at the house of two collectors, and little by little I got involved with all the people that were represented in my work Los Angeles Friends, and I produced the movie.

IW Did you work with a crew?

DL Yes. I re-invented myself as a film director and didn’t tell anybody I was an artist. In LA I realized it was the way to go, so I played the role of a film director with a budget, even though it was half-fictionalized, and because of that I managed to have a Hollywood crew.

IW The Desert People opens like a glamorous Hollywood movie or a TV series, and then it cuts into a more documentary format and has a spectacular ending.

DL In London I made a film called Film Script (Manipulation of Meaning) (1972), which is about the phenomenon of how narratives evolve in the viewer’s mind. The original idea of The Desert People was very conceptual; it was to have two films that were unrelated, but because of the editing the viewer will believe that a story is unfolding. I wanted it to be a sort of fake documentary about a group of people recounting their experiences of visiting a Native American reservation. In a way the spectacular ending is the denial of any narrative. On the one hand, you see people travelling somewhere; on the other, you have interviews with people explaining what happened when they spent five weeks with the Pappagos. But going there, they all die in a car crash. So their narrative was not possible because they were dead! At that time, apart from Hollywood movies I had seen as a child, I knew very little about American cinema. When I arrived in LA I watched television for three weeks – all the latest movies, as if I was in training to understand Hollywood syntax. I was playing with differences in the way the camera works within a fictional movie and in documentaries.

IW I see The Desert People as saying something about art history. Is critiquing art history important to you?

DL Well, it’s more about criticizing relationships between so-called popular culture and high culture. In London people didn’t quite know how to look at my work; they thought it was not art because I had made a film that looked like a commercial movie, even though the content was totally non-commercial. But also it was a criticism of how communication systems present fact and fiction.

IW And do you think that art is a part of that?

DL Of course, yes. I cannot escape from art, because that’s all I know about. I have been interested in popular culture but always as a language, a form to analyse and observe. I realized when I moved to LA that movies are entertaining. But I’m not an entertainer, so how do I deal with the shadow of this powerful industry? The other thing I found difficult when I moved to LA was not being able to explain who I was as an artist. I felt in the middle of the desert. In London or Paris or Dusseldorf it was taken for granted who I was. In London my peer group was Barry Flanagan, Victor Burgin, John Stezaker and John Latham, but in LA I had no peer group. There were a few Conceptual artists in LA, but they were also in the desert. LA still is a very anti-intellectual culture. They don’t like Conceptual art. A few years ago there was a good show there called ‘Reconsidering the Object of Art’, but it was very criticized in LA by the artists and the media, to the point that I got insulted by a non-Conceptual artist in a coffee bar because I was in the show. But one of the things that really interested me about LA when I was in Argentina in the mid-1960s was that I was dealing with similar concerns to some LA artists without realizing it – about light and space, for example. But then I decided to go to London, because I felt the same way about British culture of the 1960s.

IW So there’s almost a sense of a schizophrenic self at play in your work, in terms of feeling very close to a number of disparate centres of activity?

DL Yes, exactly. You make your choices, but it’s also interesting that both London and LA have a rich popular culture. When I went to London, I went to St Martin’s, but I also wanted to go to the King’s Road to see the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and David Bowie. Somehow I fitted into so-called high culture, as opposed to popular culture, but it’s not because I didn’t try.

IW I relate a lot of your work back to an understanding of the institution of art and using it as a way of thinking about it either metaphorically or analytically.

DL Even as a child, I remember looking at newspapers or going to the movies and trying to understand the phenomenon of information.

David Lamelas