my reference iS preJudiced:

dAVid lAmelAS’S puBlicAtion

daniel r. quiles

In November 1970, the Argentine artist David Lamelas produced

Publication, a 5½ by 7¾-inch, thirty-eight-page booklet in Helvetica
typeface without illustrations. Within are thirteen responses by a selec-
tion of artists and critics to three “statements,” listed in the book on an
unnumbered introductory page as follows:

1. Use of oral and written language as an Art Form.

2. Language can be considered as an Art Form.

3. Language cannot be considered as an Art Form.

These statements were given to the previous list of artists and crit-
ics for consideration.

Their responses are published in this book, which constitutes the

form of the work, presented first in Nigel Greenwood Inc Ltd Lon-
don, between the 23rd of November and the 6th of December
1970.

I do not take part in the responses to the statements since, as a

receiver of all the contributions, my reference is prejudiced.

© 2013 ARTMargins and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology doi:10.1162/ARTM_a_00060 31

 David Lamelas. Publication, 1970. Book, 5 1/2 by 7 3/4 inches, thirty-eight pages. Title page
shown in detail on previous page; Lamelas’s statement shown here. Images courtesy of
the artist and the Flasch Artist Book Collection, School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

My choice of the three statements does not imply agreement or

disagreement with any of the three statements.1

Contributions appear in the book in alphabetical order: Keith Arnatt,

Robert Barry, Stanley Brouwn, Daniel Buren, Victor Burgin, Michel
Claura, Gilbert & George, John Latham, Lucy R. Lippard, Martin
Maloney, Barbara M. Reise, Lawrence Weiner. The thirteenth and last
listed in the table of contents, Ian Wilson, is not credited where his
response supposedly begins, on an unnumbered page 31. Page 32 reads
artmargins 2:3

“Oral Language,” followed by two more blank pages.

Publication is proof that by 1970, despite having lived in Europe for

1 David Lamelas, Publication (London: Nigel Greenwood Gallery, 1970), 1.

32
less than two years, Lamelas could solicit opinions about what Craig
Owens terms “the eruption of language into the field of the visual arts”
from a group of established North American and European artists and
critics.2 The texts vary greatly in length, tone, and apparent intent.
Several artists—Lippard, Latham, Claura, Burgin—expound, in philo-
sophically inflected prose, on the ostensible topic at hand: language’s
appropriateness as art or artistic material. Burgin’s text, at three full
pages of single-spaced excursus, is longest. Other artists—Arnatt,
Barry, Maloney, Weiner, Wilson—edit, extend, or mimic Lamelas’s
clipped sentences, sometimes in layouts akin to concrete poetry.
Wilson’s is not the only response whose authorship is uncertain;
Lippard’s text declares itself the “property” of Douglas Huebler (she
claims that he traded an artwork for it), who in turn gives permission
for Lamelas to use it—their correspondence is included. Buren and
Claura’s texts are in both French and English, marking their non-
Anglophone country of origin. Gilbert & George seem to mock the
exercise: “Oh Art, what are you? You are so strong and powerful, so
beautiful and moving.” Others are by turns optimistic (Barry: “I think
that artists will be using language to make their art for a long time”),
obtuse (Maloney: “implicit/in/ the word/as art/entering/escaping/
individual /perception ”), or skeptical. Reise opines, “Today there seems

to be a mammoth bandwagon of believers that if you use oral or written

language your work has a better or easier chance of being thought ‘art’
(usually meaning a historically serious and avant-garde Artform [sic])
than not. To this I say Bullshit.”
Publication lies somewhere between work of art, exhibition cata-
logue, and one-off little magazine. Its title makes reference to the myr-
iad publications that accompanied the emergence of conceptual art
between 1968 and 1970, in which multiple artists would be provided
my reference is prejudiced

with equal space—usually one or two pages—in which to organize

information, yielding a nonhierarchical semblance of collectivity.3

2 Craig Owens, “Earthwords,” October 10 (1979): 122. Lamelas originally traveled to Italy to
show at the 1968 Venice Biennale, afterward moving to London and using it as a base for
traveling around Europe. He would remain there until 1975.
3 For more on conceptual art as an umbrella term for diverse practices, see Alexander
Alberro and Blake Stimson, eds., Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1999), Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962–1969: From the
|

Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions,” October 55 (1990): 105–43,

quiles

and La Monte Young, ed., An Anthology of Chance Operations (New York: H. Friedrich,
1970), 30–34.

33
 Precedents for this format include Seth Siegelaub’s innovative cata-
logues-as-exhibitions in 1969, about which he claimed, “I give every
artist the same available condition, the same money, even, when that’s
possible, when that happens. Everything. And actually the difference
would be the art, or how they relate to it.”4 Other precedents include
new artists’ magazines such as Aspen and Avalanche (first published in
fall 1970) and catalogues for group exhibitions such as Lucy R. Lip­
pard’s “numbers” shows, named for the populations of the cities in
which they appeared; Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become
Form, at Kunsthalle, Bern, curated by Harald Szeemann; Op Losse
Schroeven: Situaties en Cryptostructuren (usually translated as Square
Pegs in Round Holes), at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and Kynaston
McShine’s Information, at MoMA, arguably the most international in
scope, which featured a number of Latin American artists and included
Lamelas in its film program.5
In the above examples, a new generation of artists comprising
those who appear in Publication was repeatedly presented as a demo-
cratic, cosmopolitan group. Appearing after Information, Publication
might be read as a peripheral “late” example of this trend. Yet a closer
look reveals affinities with earlier artistic experiments in Buenos
Aires, the artist’s original context, that have anything but membership
in a preexisting movement or the adoption of an established genre as
their goal. Between the years 1965 and 1968, Lamelas was part of a
group of artists associated with the Torcuato Di Tella Institute and the
influential cultural critic Oscar Masotta, whose writings from the

4 Alex Alberro and Patricia Norvell, eds., Recording Conceptual Art: Early Interviews with
Barry, Huebler, Kaltenbach, LeWitt, Morris, Oppenheim, Siegelaub, Smithson, Weiner
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 35. Siegelaub’s experimental exhibitions
featured artists such as Sol LeWitt, Joseph Kosuth, Weiner, Huebler, Barry, and others,
and included January 5–31, 1969 (in which “the physical presence [of the work] is supple-
mentary to the catalog”), March 1–31, 1969 (in which the exhibition is the catalogue), and
July-August-September, 1969 (a catalogue attesting to simultaneous projects in different
international locations).
5 For an exhaustive review of little magazine production in the 1960s and 1970s, see Gwen
Allen, Artists’ Magazines: An Alternative Space for Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011).
For more on Information, see Ken Allan, “Understanding Information,” in Conceptual Art:
artmargins 2:3

Theory, Myth, and Practice, ed. Michael Corris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2004), 144–68, and Kynaston McShine, Information (exhibition catalogue) (New York:
Museum of Modern Art, 1970). For a detailed record of Lucy R. Lippard’s “numbers”
shows, see From Conceptualism to Feminism: Lucy Lippard’s Numbers Shows 1969–1974
(London: Afterall, 2012).

34
period outline artistic strategies such as “dematerialization.” Masotta
advocated an antagonistic art in which prevailing tendencies or genres
were to be systematically examined, voided from within, and super-
seded. In what follows, I read select works of Lamelas in this spirit,
understanding them as actively critical of his contemporaries both in
Buenos Aires and abroad between 1964 and 1970. I thus contend that
Publication represents one of the first appearances of a specifically
Argentine mode of conceptualism in the international art field. 6
Occluded by its deadpan register, Publication’s ambition was not a
sincere publication-as-artwork but a travesty of “conceptual art”—one
so subtle that Lamelas appeared to be a conceptual artist even as he
advanced his critique. As a case study, Publication is not a conspicu-
ously “peripheral” artwork that stands out against a dominant
milieu, but one that blends in, such that its intervention is almost
imperceptible.

After _______, We _______

Lamelas has been characterized as a lone creator, if not a “nomad”: a
stateless traverser of different contexts, continually adding to a cohesive
oeuvre from the late 1960s to the present. “In his case,” writes Inés
Katzenstein, “each move was not about ‘establishing oneself’ perma-
nently but about inventing a temporary base from which to observe
the surface of the real as an outsider and to use it as a new point of
departure.”7 She also points out that Lamelas’s early work in Europe
­“synthesized” approaches from Buenos Aires, correcting a prior

6 In my forthcoming book, Ghost Messages: Oscar Masotta and Argentine Conceptualism,

I argue that this operation is one of the key achievements of Argentine conceptualism.
In Argentina, arte conceptual came into wide use only in the 1970s (and even then, it
competed with terms such as arte de sistemas). See Simón Marchán Fiz, Del arte objetual
my reference is prejudiced

al arte de concepto: Las artes plásticas desde 1960 (Madrid: A. Corazón, 1972). I use the
term in the spirit of the landmark 1999 Global Conceptualism exhibition: a worldwide
shift from object to idea that “coincided with broadly destabilizing sociological and
technological trends propelled by large historical forces. . . .” I agree with some recent
commentators, however, who have argued against the exclusive association of Latin
American conceptualism with activism and political content. See Luis Camnitzer,
Jane Farver, and Rachel Weiss, eds., Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s
(New York: Queens Museum of Art, 1999), vii, and Zanna Gilbert, “Ideological
Conceptualism and Latin America: Politics, Neoprimitivism and Consumption,”
re·bus 4 (2009): 1–15.
7 Inés Katzenstein, “David Lamelas: A Situational Aesthetics,” in David Lamelas: Extranjero
|

=foreigner=étranger=Ausländer (exhibition catalogue) (Buenos Aires: Fundación Olga y

quiles

Rufino Tamayo: Malba–Colección Costantini, 2006), 76.

35
 ­ verview by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, who argues that even while in
o
Argentina, Lamelas’s chief aim was to critique US minimalism, rather
than his Argentine contemporaries, as an early exponent of institu-
tional critique:

Lamelas—from the beginning of his work—was . . . engaged with

a notion of sculpture that would transcend the sculptural myths of
a purely phenomenological definition of space and material solidity
through an emphasis on a radically different definition. Sculpture
would now have to become a construct demarcating social, spatial,
and object relations under historical circumstances, where these
were primarily governed by the universal presence of spectacular-
ized signs, by an increasingly globalized regime of administration,
and by the industrial production of communication. 8

For Buchloh, this ambitious project of demystification positioned

Lamelas in an international conversation from the outset. “[T]he first
question,” he writes, “is how the work of Lamelas, as one of the most
advanced artistic positions to emerge in the late 1960s, could have been
formulated in a Latin American metropolis outside the hegemonic cen-
ters. . . .”9 The language here is important: “one of the most advanced
artistic positions” not merely in Argentina, or any specific milieu, but
everywhere. This implies a larger, ongoing process of “advanced” art
via antispectacular critique, rather than through medium specificity, to
which any artist anywhere can, in theory, contribute, regardless of
nationality or location. In contrast, Katzenstein insists on the impor-
tance of Lamelas’s geographical movement, locating an autobiographi-
cal register in his deadpan conceptualism: “[S]ince Lamelas left
Argentina in 1968 and in spite of his supposed ‘conceptual objectivity,’
his work has been a means of documenting his successive sojourns
(his successive ‘lives’ as a foreigner) . . . the work always aspires to be
the document of a period and to record this life experiment—to which
the artist aspired—which is about becoming international.”10
My own study aims to reconcile Buchloh’s and Katzenstein’s posi-
tions—to synthesize critical antagonism and nomadic wandering—by
artmargins 2:3

8 Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Sign and Structure in the Work of David Lamelas,” in Neo-
Avant-Garde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 312.
9 Ibid., 306.
10 Katzenstein, “David Lamelas,” 76.

36
understanding Lamelas’s approach as deeply indebted to Masotta’s aes-
thetics. An intellectual closely involved in the Buenos Aires art world
between 1964 and 1968, Masotta not only wrote and lectured but also
took on an organizational role in the development and production of
artworks.11 As Philip Derbyshire has discussed, Masotta disseminated
the work of foreign thinkers to the Argentine public, spearheading a
transition from existentialist to structuralist modes of inquiry.12 In
September 1965 he gave a series of lectures on pop art in the United
States, published in book form as El “pop-art” two years later. Masotta
characterizes pop as a “semantic” exploration of mass-circulated
images, both investigatory and critical of the popular image received as
a “Gestalt,” or problematically uncritical whole. One of the strategies
Masotta pinpoints in Warhol in particular is “discontinuity,” a term
taken from Roland Barthes’s writings on experimental literature,
which consists of breaking up the work of art into discrete units so that
instantaneous or unified reception is impossible. In Warhol, this is an
effect of reproduction. “His multiplications,” Masotta writes, “do not
pretend to express, but, I would say, to signify . . . that is that they want
to make us feel the presence of the code. . . . In Warhol . . . intention opens
onto a field of logical relations, that is to say: onto a code; or indeed that
called a structure.”13 In reproducing the advertising or celebrity photo-
graph, Warhol’s silkscreens break up the process of reception of the
source imagery so that the viewer attains “apperception” about their
“code”: the way they are made legible, and convincing, for a mass audi-
ence.14 Pop art here is understood as a set of self-critical images about

11 See Ana Longoni, “Estudio preliminar: Vanguardia y revolución en los sesenta,” in

Revolución en el arte: Pop-art, happenings y arte de los medios en la década del sesenta
(Buenos Aires: Edhasa, 2004), 9–105, and Longoni and Mariano Mestman, “After Pop,
my reference is prejudiced

We Dematerialize: Oscar Masotta, Happenings, and Media Art at the Beginnings of

Conceptualism,” trans. Linda Phillips, in LHN, 156.
12 See Philip Derbyshire, “Who Was Oscar Masotta?,” Radical Philosophy 158 (November–
December 2009): 11–23, and Daniel Quiles, “Response to Philip Derbyshire’s ‘Who Was
Oscar Masotta?,’” Radical Philosophy 164 (November–December 2010), http://www.radi
calphilosophy.com/extras/who-was-oscar-masotta-response-to-derbyshire.
13 Oscar Masotta, El “pop-art” (Buenos Aires: Columba, 1967), 64–65, my translation.
14 “[Apperception] refers always, in spite of differences in context, to the idea of a reflexive,
highly intellective principle proper to certain mental operations. . . . [T]he manner in
which Warhol elects to ‘flee’ from the image consists in obligating the spectator to under-
take different acts of consciousness to capture a single image. . . . [W]arhol commits him-
|

self to the discontinuous, which institutes a principle of discontinuity at the point at which
quiles

the consciousness of the spectator waits to catch the aesthetic object through a unique,
continuous, totalizing act of consciousness.” Ibid., 64–65.

37
 images, whose subjects are not what appear to be represented (prod-
ucts, celebrities, news articles), but where and how they function and
circulate. The book’s title is a textual variant of this very operation.
Placing “pop-art” in quotation marks promises a report on cutting-edge
foreign art for Argentine readers, while nonetheless placing this very
terminology under scrutiny. The genre is treated not as an inarguable
fact, but as a phenomenon identified and labeled by art critics, an effect
of its own reportage. Masotta admits in his introduction that when he
wrote the lectures, he had seen pop art only in magazines—it was
always already mass media content. Turning peripheral distance into
productive skepticism, El “pop-art” emulates its object, aspiring to a
self-critical art criticism.
Masotta’s involvement in the art world reached its apogee in 1966.
He hosted reading groups that introduced a generation of artists,
including Roberto Jacoby, Eduardo Costa, Marta Minujín, and possibly
Lamelas, to Jacques Lacan, Barthes, and Marshall McLuhan, among
others.15 A series of experimental artworks related to happenings and
the mass media, including three by Masotta himself, followed that win-
ter and spring.16 Happening para un jabalí difunto (Happening for a Dead
Boar), carried out by Costa, Raúl Escari, and Jacoby in August 1966,
typifies the group’s approach: news of a fictional happening was dis-
tributed to a selection of newspapers and magazines, followed by an
explanation of the deception as well as the aims of the project. The
implicit argument was that as long as it was reported upon and read
about, a happening need not even take place. The artists understood
Happening para un jabalí difunto as representative of a new genre: arte
de los medios de comunicación, or “media art.”17

15 Lamelas explains his connection to the Di Tella group in a 1972 interview with Lynda
Morris: “I was not working in isolation. . . . 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.” Heike Ander, Anke Bangma, and
Barbera van Kooij, eds., David Lamelas: A New Refutation of Time (exhibition catalogue,
Kunstverein München) (Düsseldorf: Richter, 1997), 13. Minujín claimed to have attended
the groups in an interview in New York in 2010. See Daniel Quiles, “1,000 Words: Marta
Minujín on Minucode,” Artforum (New York), April 2010, 156–59.
artmargins 2:3

16 Reports and analyses (by critics as well as sociologists) of some of these projects—
Happening para un jabalí difunto and Minujín’s Simultaneidad en simultaneidad, among
others—are collected in Oscar Masotta, ed., Happenings (Buenos Aires: Jorge Alvarez,
1967).
17 Eduardo Costa, Raúl Escari, and Roberto Jacoby, “Un arte de los medios de comunicación
(manifesto),” in Masotta, Happenings, 119–22.

38
 Masotta’s 1967 lecture “Después del Pop: Nosotros desmaterializa-
mos” (After Pop, We Dematerialize), one of his final texts on art, is in
part a manifesto for a new, exclusively Argentine art founded on the
ruins of the happening. Written several months prior to Lucy Lippard
and John Chandler’s better-known “On the Dematerialization of Art,”
Masotta’s text shares their understanding of “dematerialization” as a
development in a historical process of modernism, but with a different
emphasis. Whereas the North Americans theorize a “zero point” of
Greenbergian self-criticism carried beyond medium specificity,
Masotta’s essay is a theory of the avant-garde: successive artistic move-
ments outmoding one another in direct imitation of media obsoles-
cence. The text is preceded by two quotations, the first from Jean-Paul
Sartre’s essay “Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s
Phenomenology”: “‘He devoured her with his eyes.’ This sentence and
so many other similar ones illustrate quite well the enthusiasm com-
mon to realism and idealism according to which knowing is eating.”18
The second cites El Lissitzky in 1926, arguing that the book as a
medium will one day be eclipsed by the telephone and radio.19 Masotta
understands the avant-garde as developing the new by effectively
devouring, and thereby obsolescing, dominant genres or media, as hap-
penings did with paintings or theater:

I will say that an avant-garde work must have . . . recognizable

in it a certain susceptibility and completed information about
what is happening on an art-historical level, that is to say,
about what is happening in art in reference to what has been
done before and to what is perceived should happen afterward. . . .
That it not only open up a new range of aesthetic possibilities . . .
but that it simultaneously, and in a radical way, negate something.
my reference is prejudiced

For instance, the Happening with regard to painting, or the

Happening with respect to traditional theater. . . . That this
relationship of negation (with regard to what the work negates
of that which has preceded it) not be whimsical, but that it reveal
something fundamental about the very core of what is negated.

18 Masotta, “After Pop, We Dematerialize,” 208. For the original Spanish, see Masotta,
|

“Después del Pop: Nosotros desmaterializamos,” in Conciencia y estructura (Buenos

quiles

Aires: Editorial Jorge Alvarez, 1968), 218–44.

19 Ibid., 208–9. See also El Lissitzky, “The Future of the Book,” New Left Review 1 (1967):
39–44.

39
 In this way, the passage through or overcoming of theater or
painting by the Happening would be a “logical consequence”
of something already latent in theater or painting demanding
to be manifested.20

Masotta’s notion of “passage through” suggests three stages through

which new avant-gardes appear. Artists might first take up or practice a
dominant trend (Buenos Aires artists such as Marta Minujín produced
happenings between 1963 and 1966, to great fanfare), then “negate,”
or void it from within (Happening para un jabalí difunto was alternately
titled Anti-Happening), and ultimately found a new genre based on
what remains after this critique (media art, “dematerialized” in terms
of both art object and event).

I can affirm that there was something within the happening that
allowed us to glimpse the possibility of its own negation, and for
that reason the avant-garde is built today upon a new type—a new
genre—of works. These works might be termed “anti-Happen-
ings,” but there is a problem inherent in that designation: it makes
a completely new aesthetic manifestation depend upon a genre,
like the Happening, that is no longer new. 21

Masotta’s “dematerialization” historicizes apperception: images about

images, happenings about happenings, media about media, each
demystifying and obsolescing the last.22 Its logic implies that media
art will itself be eclipsed in turn, even as its traces persist in what
comes next.

Signaling, Situations, Information

Early in his career, Lamelas made sculpture, a medium Masotta rarely
addressed.23 Yet it is evident from his descriptive titles that Lamelas

20 Masotta, “After Pop, We Dematerialize,” 212–13.

21 Ibid., 213.
22 See Alexander Alberro, “Media, Sculpture, Myth,” in A Principality of Its Own: 40 Years of
Visual Arts at the Americas Society, ed. José Luis Falconi and Gabriela Rangel (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 160–79.
artmargins 2:3

23 Masotta does consider Jim Dine and George Segal’s sculpture in El “pop-art,” along with
Argentines Rubén Santantonín, Emilio Renart, and Juan Stoppani, but in each case he
argues that the artist is either working with images or commenting on the context of the
artist’s found objects. His discussion of Segal compares the artist’s casts with illustra-
tions of masks in Claude Levi-Strauss’s book Structural Anthropology. Masotta, El “pop-
art,” 21–29, 98–109.

40
was equally interested in the linguistic properties of sculptural pro-
cesses or effects. On an undated page of Lamelas’s notebooks from the
period, for example, there is a list of translations of the Spanish word
corte, or cut: “cut, abscission, break, chop, court, edge, excision, gash,
incision, interruption, nich [sic], notch, set, severance, shape, slit,
stitch, tailoring.”24 One of Lamelas’s earliest geometric abstractions,
Pieza conectada a una pared (Work Connected to a Wall), installed at
Galería Guernica in 1964, features two column-like extensions
propped against the wall, leading down to a polygonal floor sculpture.
The work is brightly multicolored, recalling Marta Minujín’s inhabit-
able mattress assemblages of the early 1960s, one of which,
¡Revuélquese y viva! (Wallow Around and Live!), won the Di Tella’s
Premio Nacional in that same year. For Minujín, colors are an invita-
tion to the viewer to interact with the mattresses; visual liveliness paral-
lels other forms of sensory stimuli.25 In Lamelas’s case, Pieza conectada
a una pared invites not touch or entry, but observation of the sculpture’s
relationship to the wall and the surrounding space in general. While
the colors do make Lamelas’s sculpture stand out vividly against any
“white cube” setting, they seem extraneous to the work, a trace of two-
dimensional painting awkwardly mapped onto a now fully three-
dimensional practice.
In 1966, Lamelas introduced a new material into his work:
thin, rectangular metal plates that can be laid flat against the ground.
Señalamiento de tres objetos (Signaling of Three Objects), first shown
in a park in Buenos Aires that year and reinstalled in Hyde Park in
London in 1968, used the plates to encircle, in a photograph of
the London version, a deck chair, a lamppost, and a tree. 26 Running
together, the plates act as frames that are broken, or porous. They
­function as dotted lines—in Masotta’s sense, “discontinuous” or self-
my reference is prejudiced

interrupting—that isolate found objects. The serial repetition of

24 David Lamelas Papers, Getty Research Institute, Special Collections, Los Angeles.
25 Experiencia, a term connoting both “experience” and “experiment,” featured in the lan-
guage around Minujín’s installations at the Di Tella. Jorge Romero Brest, writing about
her La menesunda environment in 1965, enthused that it was a source of “intensifying
experience/beyond gods and ideas/feelings/mandates and desires. . . .” See Listen, Here,

Now! Argentine Art of the 1960s: Writings of the Avant-Garde, ed. Inés Katzenstein (New
York: Museum of Modern Art, 2004), 107–10. Lamelas was credited as an assistant on
|

this project, speaking to his close association with Minujín.

quiles

26 This is the translation in Ander, Bangma, and van Kooij, David Lamelas: A New
Refutation of Time, 37.

41
 David Lamelas. Señalamiento de tres objetos (Signaling of Three Objects),
originally 1966. Steel plates placed around objects in public space,
dimensions variable. Photograph of second installation, in Hyde Park, London.
Image courtesy of the artist.

i­dentical units (as Buchloh observes, a clear reference to both pop and
minimalism) is integrated with the surrounding environment in such
a way as to become a functional element of assignation. The Spanish
word señal connotes both “signal” and “sign,” and implies a connection
between the act of bringing attention to and the conversion of a specific
object into a generalized sign, much in the way that the specific indi-
vidual pictured in the chair in the photograph is converted into “man
in a chair” via aesthetic framing. 27
A letter in the David Lamelas Papers addressed to Marta Minujín,
dated November 24, 1966, sent from El Club de Directores del Arte,
invites her to a “spectacle” titled “La Musicosa” featuring a roundtable
afterward titled “¿Qué nombre le damos a esto?” (What name do we
artmargins 2:3

27 Buchloh, “Sign and Structure,” 313. Buchloh is discussing a slightly later work from the
same moment, 28 Placas ubicadas en dos formas no convencionales (1966–67), which fea-
tured square instead of rectangular plates. Installed in the Museo Nacional de Bellas
Artes in Buenos Aires in 1968, the plates drew attention to the institution’s hallways.

42
give this?), wherein the topic “¿La publicidad es un arte o el arte es
publicidad?” (Is publicity/advertising an art, or is art publicity/advertis-
ing?) was to be discussed.28 This text reflects the content of Masotta’s
lectures and roundtables at the Di Tella at this moment, even if
Lamelas did not produce an explicitly media art work until the

David Lamelas. Situación de tiempo (Situation of Time), 1967. Seventeen televisions,

dimensions variable. Photograph of original installation view, Centro de Artes Visuales,
Instituto Torcuato Di Tella, Buenos Aires. Image courtesy of the artist.

following year with Situación de tiempo (Situation of Time), featured

in the group exhibition Más alla de la geometría: Extensión del len-
guaje artístico-visual en nuestros días (Beyond Geometry: Extension of
Visual-Artistic Language in Our Time), which opened at the Di Tella in

28 Ibid.

43
 1967 and traveled to the Center for Inter-American Relations in New
York in 1968.29 Seventeen televisions were arranged on stands in a hor-
izontal line stretching along three walls of a darkened gallery. The tele-
visions were switched on but received no signal and played only static.
Buchloh and Nicolás Guagnini argue that Situación de tiempo is deeply
critical of both the universalizing ambitions of minimalist seriality as
well as the Di Tella’s bid for visibility in the international context. The
cue, for both writers, is its lack of content or message: the fact that,
essentially, nothing is “on.” As Guagnini writes, “in Lamelas’s
Situation of Time, there is really nothing to see, nothing to project,
no metaphors, no spectacle, and nothing to be identified with or to
identify. . . . There are no universal pictures or a program to tune into
in Situation of Time—there is only a ruin of the universal.”30 Noting that
the televisions Lamelas used were made by SIAM, the Di Tella’s parent
company, which funded the institute’s many cultural events and initia-
tives, Buchloh sees the work’s resemblance to the darkened space of a
movie theater or concert hall as a reference to the pervasion of art dis-
play by aspects of entertainment: “[I]n a gesture of seemingly neutral
self-reflexivity, Lamelas ingenuously collapsed the corporate sponsor’s
technological contribution into a critical reflection of the structural
changes occurring within the cultural institutions of the public
sphere.”31 Mirroring his internationalist understanding of “advanced
art,” Buchloh leaves the location of this “public sphere” ambiguous.
Given that arte de los medios masivos emerged in Buenos Aires specifi-
cally, however, is it not also possible to read Situación de tiempo as a
response to media art itself?
Not surprisingly, there was a vogue for television among the
media artists. Masotta’s El mensaje fantasma (The Ghost Message),
July 16 and 20, 1966, consisted of street posters announcing a televi-
sion broadcast that, four days later, informed the viewer that it had
been announced by the posters. The message was about the conditions

29 Jorge Romero Brest, Beyond Geometry: An Extension of Visual-Artistic Language in Our

Time/Más alla de la geometría: Extensión del lenguaje artístico-visual en nuestros días (exhi-
bition catalogue) (Buenos Aires: Centro de Artes Visuales, Instituto Torcuato Di Tella,
artmargins 2:3

1967; New York: Center for Inter-American Relations, 1968).

30 Guagnini, “A Situation of Time: Despite Geometry, Beyond the Universal,” in Falconi
and Rangel, Principality of Its Own, 193.
31 Buchloh, “Sign and Structure,” 319.

44
of the broadcast itself, rendering it a “ghost,” beyond which the cir-
cuit—the loop from the street to the television—was apparent.
Minujín, who in 1964 had broadcast a happening live on television,
produced Simultaneidad en simultaneidad (Simultaneity in
Simultaneity) between October 13 and 24, 1966, at the Di Tella:
it was an ambitious, multiphase project that aimed to broadcast a
simultaneous international happening, with Allan Kaprow and
Wolf Vostell directing New York and Berlin components, directly
into the homes of a selected group of participants. The transmission
did not work, though, and the artist merely broadcast footage of the
other artists’ previous works. A second phase, however, did succeed,
in which members of the Argentine media were assembled in the
Di Tella and recorded on closed-circuit televisions set in rows much
like those of Situación de tiempo. Broadcast on television in July 1967,
Jacoby’s Parametros (Parameters) was a blank screen over which a
gently mocking voice-over suggested that the viewer turn to a different
channel depending on how much his or her set cost and described
viewers’ real-time reactions to the broadcast: “This is not an ordinary
situation for you. But you can get used to it if it is not like that.”32
Messages completely evacuated, the televisions in Situación de
tiempo are conduits for the mass media, so recently heralded as the
basis for the most advanced avant-garde position. Here, they are pre-
sented with all the muteness of abstract sculpture. Blank screens evoke
the limitations of media art: claustrophobic tautology in Masotta’s
El mensaje fantasma; a false promise of technological advances in
Minujín’s Simultaneidad; an uncertain appeal to viewer agency in
Jacob’s Parametros. With respect to the latter, neither Buchloh nor
Guagnini notes that the original photograph of Situación de tiempo pub-
lished in the catalogue for Más alla de la geometría is only of nine televi-
my reference is prejudiced

sions.33 Five are against a far wall, with two more flanking on either
side. This leads to two possible interpretations: either the accounts of
the materials making up the original work are inaccurate, or what we
see is little more than half of the work. In the latter scenario, it is pre-
sumable that the seventeen televisions surrounded the entire space,

32 Roberto Jacoby, Media Art/Arte de los medios 1966–68 (CD-ROM), produced by Cristian
|

Dios, Isaac Salmún, and Lee Towndrow, trans. Andrés Pacheco (2004).
quiles

33 Brest, Beyond Geometry.

45
 such that three walls had five televisions in total and the entrance to the
room was flanked with two on either side. This means that viewers,
individually or collectively, would have been surrounded and illumi-
nated by the televisions, in an electrified version of Lamelas’s own
Señalamiento de tres objetos. This provides a possible explanation for the
“situation of time” in the title: it is that of viewers designated by the
televisual glow. This gesture might be understood as a critical reread-
ing of arte de los medios de comunicación, in which the audience’s pre-
sumed—and perhaps idealized or fetishized—transformation is the
proving ground of manipulations of content and technology. Could
Lamelas, in using vacated apparatuses to identify the most crucial com-
ponent of the genre, be critiquing Masotta’s group in a similar way that
they identified the mass media’s presence at the heart of the
happening?34
Lamelas’s use of empty media for the assignation or “signaling”
of viewers would be even plainer the next year, in an untitled work
shown at the Di Tella’s ill-fated Experiencias ’68 group exhibition.
Light from two empty slide projectors was cast onto gallery walls, creat-
ing illuminated areas onto which viewers could cast their shadows. In
shifting from the televisions’ glow in Situación de tiempo to projected
light and the indexical trace, Lamelas used viewers’ bodies as a starting
point for films that would comprise the bulk of his output in the next
decade.35 Experiencias ’68 became a pivotal step in the politicization
of art in the region when a different contribution in the group exhibi-
tion, Roberto Plate’s El baño (The Bathroom), was censored. Plate had
installed a fake bathroom in the gallery space, and viewers had
responded by adorning it with antidictatorship graffiti. The remaining
artists in the show destroyed their works and carried them into the
street in protest, effectively severing their ties with the Di Tella, the

34 Claire Bishop has recently addressed Masotta and other Argentine artists’ interest in par-
ticipation in this period. See Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of
Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2012), 105–28.
35 For the most exhaustive account to date of Lamelas’s filmic practice, see Eric de Bruyn,
“Reading Film,” in David Lamelas: En lugar de cine/In Place of Film (exhibition catalogue)
artmargins 2:3

(Granada: Centro José Guerrero, 2011), 159–210. De Bruyn argues that the Experiencias
’68 projection installed a “zero of form” (this terminology recalls Lippard and Chander’s
“dematerialization”) in the midst of this politically charged, content-driven exhibition.
He writes, somewhat cryptically, “The zero degree in Lamelas’s work operates as a point
of relay that sets the relational elements of the medium in a state of constant play and
variation” (185).

46
 David Lamelas. Office of Information About the Vietnam War on Three Levels:
Visual Image, Text, and Audio, 1968. Office furniture, telex machine, microphone,
tape recorder, live attendant, dimensions variable. Photograph of installation view,
LXXXIV Biennale de Venezia, Venice. Image courtesy of the artist.

institution that had supported Masotta and more generally the cause
of advanced art in Argentina.36 In Experiencias ’68 both Lamelas’s
and Plate’s works offered open-ended interactive experiences that
could have ranged from relative passivity to political expression, yet
their different implications are telling. Situación de tiempo and the
Experiencias ’68 projection effectively bathe viewers in the light of con-
tent-less media, such that a kind of self-recognition or cognition is
made possible. Plate, on the other hand, facilitated anonymous political
my reference is prejudiced

expression, allowing viewers to literally fill his installation with con-

tent. If Plate offered a scandalous, temporary form of liberation,

36 The break between radicalized Argentine artists and art institutions, leading to the
important collaborative project Tucumán Arde, is well documented in two seminal studies
by Argentine art historians. See Andrea Giunta, Vanguardia, internacionalismo y política:
Arte argentino en los años sesenta (Buenos Aires: Paidós, 2001), 333–84, translated by Peter
Kahn as Avant-Garde, Internationalism, and Politics: Argentine Art in the Sixties (Durham,
|

NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 243–90, and Ana Longoni and Mariano Mestman,
quiles

Del Di Tella a “Tucumán Arde”: Vanguardia artística y política en el ’68 argentino (Buenos
Aires: Editorial Universitaria de Buenos Aires, 2008), 95–300.

47
 Lamelas confronted the radical uncertainty of leaving things in the
hands of the audience.
Unlike many Argentine artists in 1968, Lamelas never directly
addressed the Onganía dictatorship that had taken power in 1966.
His first work abroad, however, Office of Information About the
Vietnam War on Three Levels: Visual Image, Text, and Audio, installed
at the Venice Biennale from June 15 to October 15, 1968, was some-
thing of a riposte to the message-based “political art” that came to
dominate the Argentine context after Experiencias ’68.37 The “office”
consisted of a live attendant sitting at a desk, who recited the latest
news about the Vietnam War in six different languages as it came
in via the Italian wire service Agenzia Nazionale Stampa Associata’s
telex feed. The attendant’s voice was amplified by a speaker system,
and the information was printed on a teletype machine. An audio
recording produced from the daily recitation of the news was compiled
into a sixty-day archive of the exhibition.38 Throughout his career,
Lamelas frequently organized his work into three distinct components
(Señalamiento de tres objetos being just one example), but at Venice,
this discontinuity was for the first time expressly informational,
breaking up any content about the hot-button political topic of the
day into different “registers,” two of which were linguistic (anticipating
the “oral and written communication” of Publication’s first prompt).39
Where, however, was the third, “visual” iteration? A possible answer
lies in the close resemblance of Office of Information to another
work by Roberto Jacoby, Mensaje en el Di Tella (Message in the Di Tella),
which had also been featured in Experiencias ’68 in Buenos Aires.

37 The original title was to have been Information Complex on a Subject Selected from the
Three Levels of the Image (Visual, Writing, Sound), but Lamelas altered it to explicitly men-
tion the war, to be an “office” instead of a “complex,” and to leave the object of the “three
levels” ambiguous (it is unclear whether the office or the Vietnam War is parsed into
three levels), as opposed to deriving them from “the image.”
38 See Buchloh, “Sign and Structure,” 321–23; Katzenstein, “David Lamelas: A Situational
Aesthetics,” in David Lamelas: Extranjero =foreigner=étranger=Ausländer (exhibition cata-
logue) (Buenos Aires: Fundación Olga y Rufino Tamayo: Malba–Colección Costantini,
2006), 77; and “Reality Rush: Shifts of Form, 1965–1968,” in Beyond Geometry:
artmargins 2:3

Experiments in Form, 1940s–1970s, ed. Lynn Zevelansky (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2004), 192–94; and the David Lamelas Papers.
39 Costa, Escari, and Jacoby, “Un arte de los medios de comunicación (manifesto),” 122;
English translation by Eileen Brockbank in Katzenstein, Listen, Here, Now!, 224.

48
Roberto Jacoby. Mensaje en el Di Tella (Message in the Di Tella), 1968.
Two posters and telex machine transmitting news from the events of May 1968 in France.
Photograph by Oscar Bony of original installation, Centro de Artes Visuales,
Instituto Torcuato Di Tella, Buenos Aires. Image courtesy of the artist.

Mensaje en el Di Tella was also composed of three elements: a text

by Jacoby reproduced on a large black bulletin board, a teletype
machine connected to the leftist news agency French Press feeding
up-to-the-minute reports about the May 1968 riots in France,
and a photograph of a Black Panther holding a sign protesting the
Vietnam War. 40
Both Lamelas’s and Jacoby’s works use telex machines to introduce
political realities into the space of the exhibition, but their tenors are
different. Jacoby’s text exhorts avant-garde artists to be “propagandists”
my reference is prejudiced

for “new concepts of life,” and his news feed and photograph attest to
urgent struggles just outside the Di Tella’s walls. Yet no clear “mes-
sage” prevails as to precisely how to imbricate the avant-garde with
such global radicalism. Office of Information, on the other hand,
reduces the heterogeneity of its content, subtracting both the artist’s
voice and the image. Indeed, the only “visual image” is that of the
|

40 Ana Longoni, ed., Roberto Jacoby, El deseo nace del derrumbe: Acciones, conceptos, escritos
quiles

(Barcelona: Ediciones de La Central, 2011), 116–19.

49
 office itself, suggesting a Magrittean game in the title such that infor-
mation, and not the Vietnam War, is what is visible. Rather than hold
open the possibility, as Jacoby does, that art and politics might some-
how be bridged, Lamelas drains the Vietnam War of urgency. The dis-
tance the information travels irrevocably severs it from its source. It
becomes data to be recited and collected, rather than an outrage justify-
ing a coalition. Images from the war are not to be found in Office of
Information, but an “image” of information distribution devices in
midfunction.
It is with this hollow semblance of an Argentine “political work”
that Lamelas appeared in Europe—every bit the artist who, as he
claimed, did “not address intellectual or sociological problems.”41 With
Situación de tiempo and Office of Information, he had followed Masotta’s
prescription to the letter, eviscerating arte de los medios de comunicación
in favor of affectless conceptual art in a variety of guises.

Indexical Europe
Lamelas remained abroad after the Venice Biennale, settling in London
and taking courses at St. Martin’s School of Art with John Latham,
Barry Flanagan, and others. He was far from an advocate for “Latin
American artists abroad” in the vein of David Medalla. 42 “I was not par-
ticularly conscious of my own national identity,” he claims in a more
recent interview. “Because of my youth I was not set in my ways and I
tried to become as English as possible.”43 He exhibited all over Europe
between 1968 and 1970, showing at Galerie Yvon Lambert in Paris and
Wide White Space Gallery in Antwerp, where he appeared in a group
show with Joseph Beuys, Marcel Broodthaers (whom he met at Venice),
and Christo; he also showed on Wide White Space’s behalf at the
Konrad Fischer–organized Prospekt ’68 at Städtische Kunsthalle

41 David Lamelas, “My Approach to Work in 1968,” trans. Eileen Brockbank, in Katzenstein,
Listen, Here, Now!, 247.
42 The Philippine artist David Medalla, whose own work explored kinetic art in a manner
not unlike Hans Haacke’s early 1960s experiments, edited Signals magazine, a major
artmargins 2:3

source of information on Latin American art in 1960s Europe. With Guy Brett, he was
one of the most active supporters of Latin American art in London at this time.
43 “Interview with David Lamelas,” in John Roberts, ed., The Impossible Document:
Photography and Conceptual Art in Britain 1966–1976 (London: Camerawork, 1997),
135–36.

50
Düsseldorf. 44 In just two years, Lamelas was deemed “European”
enough to be included in Art Concepts from Europe at New York’s
Bonino Gallery, an Argentine gallery.
Lamelas’s work in these first years abroad divides into two seem-
ingly contradictory approaches. On the one hand, in works such as
Time as Activity (1969), Film 18 Paris (1970), and Gente de Milano
(1970), he used sixteen-millimeter film for the first time to document
objects, people, and places in the deadpan manner of Ed Ruscha,
Douglas Huebler, and structuralist film, foregrounding the “index”
of “straight” photography that conceptual artists relied upon both to
document remote actions or projects and to interrogate the media they
were using. 45 On the other hand, he began to incorporate fiction, most
clearly in False Information about Oxford (1968): incorrect facts on
little pieces of paper scattered about the Christ Church College garden
at Oxford University. The use of falsehoods recalls the hoax at the cen-
ter of Masotta’s Happening para un jabalí difunto, but unlike the latter’s
presence within the mass media, False Information about Oxford
suggested that lies could be isolated and considered for their own
aesthetic content.
As Rosalind Krauss and others have observed, fiction was also
central at this time to Marcel Broodthaers, whom Lamelas met at
Venice and with whom he remained in contact. 46 Certainly
Broodthaers’s fictional museum-as-artwork, Musée d’Art Moderne,
Département des Aigles, Section XIXe siècle, which opened on September
27, 1968, in his Brussels home, is a critical double of an already exist-
ing form, in this case the institution, in the Masotta vein—yet it also
exceeds this model. Rather than no message (Situación de tiempo) or
a message emptied of ideological import (Office of Information), the
my reference is prejudiced

44 For more on art & project, Op Losse Schroeven, and Wide White Space, see Christophe
Cherix, ed., In and Out of Amsterdam: Travels in Conceptual Art, 1960–1976 (exhibition
catalogue) (New York: MoMA, 2009). Thanks go to Paige Johnston at the Flasch Artist
Book Collection at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, who drew attention to their
holdings in European conceptualist publications in this period.
45 Rosalind Krauss, “Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America,” October 3 (1977):
68–81. For more on “photoconceptualism,” see Matthew S. Witkovsky, Light Years:
Conceptual Art and the Photograph, 1964–1977 (exhibition catalogue) (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2011).
|

46 Rosalind Krauss, “A Voyage on the North Sea”: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition
quiles

(New York: Thames and Hudson, 1999).

51
 multiple iterations of Musée d’Art Moderne and the lavish assemblages
of different materials seem to give in to the idea of the museum’s actual
existence. In a letter to Lamelas dated October 31, 1969, in his signa-
ture “Anglais” font, with the letterhead of the Musée’s Section
Litteraire, Broodthaers writes,

Mon Cher Lamelas,

1. Conceptual artists are more rationalists rather than mystics . . .

etc . . . . . . . . . . . .

2. Comme je tiens à défendre un sense de la réalité plutôt que la

théorie et le rêve . . .

3. Musée d’Art Moderne. Section Littéraire. Département des

Aigles.

4. Dans l’une de mes dernières lettres datée du 25 août 69, placée

encore sous le signe du XIXème siècle et addressée aux organisa-
teurs d’une exposition en cours à Leverkusen, au lieu de . . . ces
chemins, ces mers, ces nuages commme ceux d’une liberté et
d’une justice. Il faut lire ceci: . . . ces chemins, ces mers, ces
nuages comme ceux d’une répression et d’une absence.

Parce que la réalité du texte et le texte réel sont bien loin de former
un seul monde.

5. Qu’est-ce qu’un artiste étranger?47

Rachel Haidu has recently argued that Broodthaers’s abandonment of

poetry focused his artistic career on insufficient substitutions or
exchanges, as in visual or linguistic representation (one thing falsely

47 David Lamelas Papers. The French sections read, “2. As I have to defend a sense of reality
rather than theory or the dream. . . . 4. In one of my last letters, dated August 25, 1969,
artmargins 2:3

still under the sign of the nineteenth century and addressed to the organizers of the
current exhibition at Leverkusen, instead of . . . those paths, seas, clouds, like those of
freedom and justice, it has to be read this way, those paths, those seas, those clouds, like
those of a repression and an absence. Because the reality of the text and the real text are
quite far from forming a single world. 5. What is a foreign artist?” My translation.

52
standing in for, or representing, the other). 48 In his letter, Broodthaers’s
assertion that there is discontinuity between “the reality of the text”
and “the real text” is immediately followed by skepticism about the cat-
egory of the “foreign artist.”
If Lamelas was debating the merits of his cosmopolitan identity
with European artists, he relied on a fellow Argentine who had recently
moved to Paris, Raúl Escari, to help write Self-Awareness (1969). Via
omission, this self-assessment effectively severed Lamelas from his
original context—which is ironic, given that Escari had coauthored
Happening para un jabalí difunto.49 The text opens, “Fiction is one
of the most used elements in creative fields. . . . Any ‘work of art’
contains a mystery of elaboration/production which starts before
the work itself; that is, the artist or person who carries out something
in a ‘specialized field.’”50 A later section written by Escari concurs:
“[I]n the case of David Lamelas: the work—as effect, product—
disappears and what springs up in its place is the activity (the
artifice) of its production. Thus, labor becomes the unthought of [sic]
in the ‘aesthetic field.’”51 Lamelas and Escari have here shifted the
terminology of Masotta and Jacoby from “publicity” to “labor,” but
the logic is the same: a demystification of the artistic process whereby
an ordinarily hidden conditioning factor is unveiled and converted
into material. In adding, “I am in favor of the creation of works that
can create consciousness,” Lamelas could be paraphrasing Masotta
in El “pop-art.”
In positing a link between “consciousness” and fiction, however,
Lamelas suggests a parallel connection between indexicality and
nonobjective information, a trajectory explored by another of his
films of this moment, A Study of the Relationships between Inner
my reference is prejudiced

48 See Rachel Haidu, The Absence of Work: Marcel Broodthaers, 1964–1976 (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2010), xv–105. Haidu examines Exposition littéraire autour de Mallarmé:
Marcel Broodthaers à la Deblioudebliou/S, Broodthaers’s exhibition at Wide White
Space—of which Lamelas was likely aware, given his association with the gallery and
communications with the Belgian artist—in which Broodthaers playfully writes the gal-
lery’s commonly used abbreviation, WWS, phonetically.
49 Two artworks, including Happening para un jabalí difunto, are credited to Escari, two
fewer than even those credited to Masotta—an illustration of the transdisciplinary activ-
ity of Buenos Aires intellectuals in this period.
|

50 Ander, Bangma, and van Kooij, David Lamelas: A New Refutation of Time, 15, 18.
quiles

51 Ibid.

53
 and Outer Space (1969).52 This film begins with a voice-over that
methodically describes the physical features of the Camden Arts
Centre, the film’s sponsoring institution, as images of these features
are shown. Museum workers, who recite their names and occupations
for the camera, are included in this review of institutional conditions,
representing the labor that allows the institution to function. The
film gradually ­broadens its scope to list the geographical location
and transportation and “information” networks of the gallery’s city,
London, as if empirically tracking every possible factor related to
the institution. At the end of the film, however, passersby in the
street are shown being interviewed by an off-camera presence,
sometimes with bizarre or provocative survey questions, such as
how they would feel about a “Negro” landing on the moon. This
focus on ordinary individuals seems to loosen the strictures of report-
age, opening onto the opinions and whims of both subjects and
interlocutor.
Antwerp-Brussels (People and Time) (1969), a series of photographs
of local artists, dealers, and collectors, is more firmly in the artist’s doc-
umentary vein: Lamelas, Broodthaers, Anny de Decker (who co-ran
Wide White Space), dealer Kasper König, and others are set against
urban backdrops in both cities. Each individual is identified by text
underneath his or her photograph, centered and shot at middle dis-
tance, incorporating the city around him or her. Like the initial series
of talking heads in the gallery in Inner and Outer Space, interview sub-

52 Intentionally or not, the wording of the title A Study of the Relationships between Inner and
Outer Space recalls that of Andy Warhol’s prior film Outer and Inner Space, 1965, the lat-
ter’s first use of both video and double-screen projection. Two films of Edie Sedgwick
being videotaped while a monitor to her right conveys real-time feedback—her own medi-
ated image—run side by side, while the proximity of the shots to her face periodically
zooms in and out again. If the title juxtaposes Sedgwick’s “outer” appearance and “inner”
subjectivity, the film radically reinterprets the term “space.” Douglas Crimp argues, “We
don’t see this outer and inner space as space . . . rather we follow the spatial demarcation
in time: we map the . . . space mnemonically.” See Douglas Crimp, “Spacious,” October,
no. 132 (Spring 2010), 12. If Lamelas was engaging Warhol by using a similar title, per-
haps he sought to further the latter’s critique of cinematic space, in this case via informa-
tion. The dry, male British voice-over divides the space inside and outside the Camden
Arts Centre into categories A and B, sub-numbered 1. specific measurements (for both
artmargins 2:3

gallery and city), 2. activities (for the gallery) or outer regions (for London) and 3. staff of
the gallery and the sets of interviews with passerby. Interviews about the moon land-
ing—a simple pun on “outer space”—correspond to the Camden Arts Centre as much as
any social interaction in London or its surrounds. A logical, informational mapping of
space is instantiated and undermined.

54
jects turn out to be the institutional substrate of the work itself, in this
case the international art network that makes the work possible.
Lamelas works within a European art circuit—and, formally speaking,
within its indexical, austere modes—while also signaling that system.
In an echo of Masotta’s engagement of his French and North American
source material several years before, Lamelas’s status as foreigner, if
disavowed, is sublimated into perpetual critical distance.

Through the Fish-Eye Lens

Publication appears to expose a typical activity of artists in a network:
mutually beneficial conversation.53 There were several preliminary ver-
sions that were altered in the final project, such as an actual roundtable
discussion, a recording of which would be typed in the catalogue.54
Lamelas’s notes include a drawing of a table with positions marked for
the different participants, next to which he wrote, “A situation pro-
duced for me about a certain specific subject . . . arts matter.”55 The
final version kept a trace of this earlier idea by placing six copies of the
publication on a round table, as though at the places of different partici-
pants.56 A closer look at three responses, one of which was not included
in the final version, provides a better picture of the artist’s precise aims
for Publication.

53 Lamelas explored the topic of conversation in Interview with Marguerite Duras, also in
1970, which juxtaposed three versions of an interview between the writer and Escari:
film, photographs, and text. Discontinuity here disallows the filmic illusion of access to
the writer (indeed, the still photographs speak to the hidden reality of film). Here it is the
“artist interview,” and perhaps Lamelas/Escari’s shared desire to speak with a French
intellectual of importance, that is signaled. It is not the content of the interview but its
structure that is under consideration. See “‘Interview’ with Marguerite Duras,” 1970,
Luxonline, http://www.luxonline.org.uk/artists/david_lamelas/interview_with_margue
rite_duras.html.
54 “Publication (1970),” David Lamelas Papers, box 2, folder 1. This recalls a 1967 unreal-
my reference is prejudiced

ized proposal by another Argentine sculptor turned conceptualist, Margarita Paksa’s

Mesa redonda: Esto es un juicio (Round Table: This Is a Judgment). Paksa sought to stage
an artist panel at the Di Tella, in which prerecorded responses would be played back
while a spotlight would shine on each artist, who would remain silent. See Margarita
Paksa, “Mesa redonda—Esto es un juicio,” in Sobre el discurso de mi (Buenos Aires:
Fundación Espigas, 2003), 43–44.
55 David Lamelas Papers, box 2, folder 5. The original plan was to gather the participants in
a single space to discuss the three “statements”: “round table . Six persons to take part.
Three statements to be considered: 1. Use of oral and written language as an Art Form.
2. Language can be considered as an Art Form 3. Language cannot be considered as an
Art Form. A tape is to be taken of the complete discussion. From this tape, a text will be
|

made. The complete text will be available in a catalogue form.”

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56 Ander, Bangma, and van Kooij, David Lamelas: A New Refutation of Time, 74.

55
David Lamelas. Publication, 1970. Book, 5 1/2 by 7 3/4 inches, thirty-eight pages.
Contribution of Lawrence Weiner, pages 29–30. Image courtesy of the artist
and the Flasch Artist Book Collection, School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Lamelas’s opening statements in Publication closely resemble

Lawrence Weiner’s canonical text, originally written in 1968, and
included in Siegelaub’s January 5–31, 1969 catalogue:57

1. The artist may construct the piece

2. The piece may be fabricated

3. The piece need not be built

Each being equal and consistent with the intent of the artist, the
decision as to condition rests with the receiver upon the occasion
of receivership.58

57 The exhibition featured Lawrence Weiner, Robert Barry, Douglas Huebler, and Joseph
Kosuth at a rented office space in New York in January 1969, where catalogues were
artmargins 2:3

placed in a kind of waiting room at the entrance. Jack Burnham, “Real Time Systems,”
in Great Western Salt Works: Essays on the Meaning of Post-formalist Art (New York: G.
Braziller, 1974), originally published as Jack Burnham, “Real Time Systems,” Artforum 8,
no. 1 (September 1969), 49–55.
58 Lawrence Weiner, “Statements,” in Art in Theory 1900–2000: An Anthology of Changing
Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), 894.

56
 In Publication, Weiner’s contribution repeated these statements
under the word if, adding,

then

1. Language may construct the piece

2. Language may constitute the piece

As all forms of language are consistent with the intent of the artist
the decision as to condition rests with the receiver upon the occa-
sion of receivership

Lawrence Weiner
New York 1970

Weiner published his original statements on multiple occasions during

this period, often with addenda, as in the Information catalogue, where
they are followed by something of a promotional slogan: “Tried and
True.”59 On numerous occasions, Weiner made it clear that only he
could be the author of his works, regardless of the apparent ease of
(re-)creating a work that “need not be built.” “That’s the standard prob-
lem of plagiarism,” he tells Patricia Norvell, “and in 1969 anyone can
copy anything they want, exactly. You can’t really concern yourself with
that. You know, if somebody wants to build a piece of mine physically
and say that it’s theirs . . . that’s fine. I know it’s my art. . . .”60 His
responses in Publication suggest a similar nonchalance regarding the
obvious model for Lamelas’s statements, making it clear that these
statements are subordinate, or mere outcomes, of Weiner’s own origi-
nal authorial act.
my reference is prejudiced

In a 1972 interview, Lamelas described Publication as an example

of “syllogistic form”: deductive reasoning in which two statements
support a conclusion (“A = B; C = A; therefore B = C”). This is a
curious claim, for the three statements in Publication do not function

59 Many of these addenda concern the question of the final presentation of the work. In
1970, for the exhibition Art in the Mind, Weiner adds, “As to construction, please remem-
ber that as stated above there is no correct way to construct the piece as there is no incor-
rect way to construct it. If the piece is built it constitutes not how the piece looks but only
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how it could look.” Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from
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1966–1972 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 74.

60 Alberro and Norvell, Recording Conceptual Art, 102–3.

57
 syllogistically. The first statement, “Use of oral and written language as
an Art Form,” proposes the “use” of two guises of language, oral and
written, as “an art form.” Of course, grammatically correct English
would read “as art forms” (an instance of willful naiveté?). The second,
“Language can be considered as an Art Form,” argues that, presum-
ably, both oral and written language “can” be art. The third, “Language
cannot be considered as an Art Form,” directly contradicts the second.
If the ­pamphlet itself were taken as a work of art, it could be under-
stood as a proof—an inductive one, rather than the deduction implied
in conventional syllogistic logic—for part of statement #1 and all of #2,
but not for #3. The three statements taken together are illogical; they
cancel out their own apparent truth assertions. Weiner’s statements
hew much more closely to a traditional syllogism, essentially proving
that the work of conceptual art “need not be built” (premised on the
fact that the artist may choose to construct his own work, or not). In
order to fold Lamelas’s statements into his logic, Weiner has to leave
out the last, negative claim. “Too much emphasis,” Lamelas argues,
“has been placed upon the statements in the book because of the dia-
lectic implied by ‘language as an art form.’ The question of language is
explicit because it is also the subject of the book, but I was interested in
the context not the subject.”61
Effectively professing his lack of interest in the actual content of
Publication’s responses, Lamelas reprises Masotta’s call to critique a
dominant tendency through a sort of voided copy (the “anti-happen-
ing”) through which context is perceptible (the mass media). It is for
this reason that Publication stages the “conceptual art publication,”
with its alphabetical set of international “artist’s pages,” insincerely.
Lamelas’s statements are not arguments for or against language in art
or conceptual art; indeed, the first statement is illogical, not even a full
sentence. Likewise, the individual responses do not cohere into a whole,
nor do they speak to one another; they are discontinuous and in some
cases directly contradictory. Unlike Siegelaub’s January 5–31, 1969 or
the many other pamphlets, magazines, catalogues, and artists’ books to
which it refers, Publication functions neither as a supplement to an
exhibition nor as a record of collectivity or a window into a “shared con-
artmargins 2:3

61 “Extracts from an interview with David Lamelas,” December 1972, typed text in the
David Lamelas Papers.

58
 versation.” Neither, despite Lamelas’s origins, is it a node in an interna-
tional network of artists with potential implications for political activity,
as was the case with the Information catalogue. 62 Rather, Publication
merely resembles such publications, as subtly distinct from them as the
difference in fonts between the street poster and the television broad-
cast of Masotta’s El mensaje fantasma.
Consider the final response: the “Oral Language” section by
South African artist Ian Wilson, one of the most radical proponents
of Lippardian “dematerialization.” Wilson stopped sculpting in 1968,
and from that point on made work exclusively consisting of unrecorded
and untranscribed conversations. 63 The two white pages that follow the
words “Oral Language” seem to stand in for speech as opposed to writ-
ing, recalling the artist’s November 1970 entry in the Amsterdam-
based art & project series, which was completely blank. Yet the pages’
very blankness also recalls another convention of conceptual art publi-
cations: the mini-“open work,” a space for the reader to add his or her
contribution, marked by the inclusion of blank pages. The catalogue for
Information offers an example of this, at the end of McShine’s essay:
“blank pages for the reader/please provide your own text or images.”64
Wilson’s nod to the “birth of the reader,” however, feels as perfunctory
as the rest of the catalogue’s deceptively empty democratic gestures.
Katzenstein notes the similarity of Publication to books by the
­austere French press Gallimard; is it possible that Lamelas chose this
format precisely for its austerity? “I left the conceptual movement,”
he told Katzenstein in 2004, “because it seemed to me that it was very

62 In his catalogue essay for Information, McShine writes, “The material presented by the
artists is considerably varied, and also spirited, if not rebellious—which is not very sur-
prising, considering the general social, political and economic crises that are almost uni-
my reference is prejudiced

versal phenomena of 1970. If you are an artist in Brazil, you know of at least one friend
who is being tortured; if you are one in Argentina, you probably have had a neighbor who
has been in jail for having long hair, or for not being ‘dressed’ properly.” See Kynaston
McShine, “Introduction to Information,” in Alberro and Stimson, Conceptual Art, 212.
63 Lippard, Six Years, 179–83. Lippard prints a July 1970 conversation between Wilson and
Robert Barry about the oral communication works that took place in the Bronx, but does
not note whether it was ultimately published. This exchange in particular anticipates
both Lamelas’s three statements and his refusal to “take part” in responses: “RB: Would
you say the art exists in the differences between oral communication and written com-
munication? IW: I would say that it was possible to dissociate myself from print. I don’t
accept the responsibility for print” (181–82). See also Edward Allington, “About Time,”
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Frieze 92 (2005), http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/about_time/.

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64 McShine, Information, 142–43.

59
 limited visually. I was always interested in visual luxury.”65 Publication
is caught between the first, or emulative, and second, or antithetical,
stages in Masotta’s model of avant-garde supersession. It rides a
­tenuous line between a “sincere” conceptual publication and an
empty shell thereof. Lamelas’s discursive proximity to Masotta,
embodied in Europe by his collaboration with Escari, is most important
to consider in ­relation to the idea of producing the avant-garde from the
­periphery. While Masotta never explicitly stated this dilemma, it was
implicit in his model, given where he was in relation to New York or
Paris; the emulation of the first stage of “dematerialization” inevitably
involved the imitation of models from intellectual centers, with the cri-
tique gradually producing a novel local genre. With Publication,
Lamelas was folding this critical marginality into the seemingly neu-
tral “international” work.
There were several potential contributors to Publication who,
for different reasons, did not end up in the final version. Seth
Siegelaub, who would have conferred on Publication a direct link
to his own art publications, declined, writing Lamelas that he no
longer wanted “a relationship to art.”66 Hanne Darboven also demurred,
listing the three numbers but writing nothing next to them: “I am
very busy doing my own work and hope you will understand.”67
Lamelas omitted what would have been the fourteenth response,
by Marcel Broodthaers, ostensibly because it was late: a rudimentary
drawing of a fish with an undefined punctuation mark for an eye,
marked with a Département des Aigles stamp. Handwritten text sur-
rounding the fish also features this mark, which could be an apostro-
phe, comma, or single quotation mark. At top left, the drawing reads
“Marcel Broodthaers?” The upper half of this question mark closely
resembles the fish-eye. At top left also, Lamelas’s statements are
reprised, but only as fragments (“Use of oral and written language as
an Art Form” is abridged to “Use of oral . . .”). Beneath the fish, the text
reads “1, Oral Fish Eye,” “2, No,” and “3, Yes” (the apostrophe/comma/
quote is substituted for a period after each number, as with the rewrit-
ten statements).
artmargins 2:3

65 Katzenstein, “David Lamelas,” 80. While the undecorated rectangular border does recall
the layout of Gallimard covers, the font is different.
66 David Lamelas Papers.
67 Ibid.

60
 Why would Lamelas not have included his friend’s quizzical
response, which would have only added to the list of prominent names
attached to Publication? “The fish-eye was a blind spot because it was
covered by a comma,” writes Katzenstein, arguing that Broodthaers
was critiquing the project’s exclusive focus on language at the expense
of the visual. 68 In this interpretation, Broodthaers’s reference to the
photographic fish-eye lens analogizes linguistic distortion. A comma
can become an eye, and indeed an apostrophe or a quotation mark,
a radical uncertainty or instability that lurks in the material signifiers
of language itself. What if the fish-eye is read as a quotation mark?
The latter would situate the ability to quote—to copy, to mimic, to
appropriate—in this “fish-I” itself. Broodthaers and Lamelas, after
all, shared common ground in taking up and emptying out institu-
tional forms. Broodthaers was not only pointing out the obfuscated
nonlinguistic visual in Lamelas’s critique; he was also critiquing
Lamelas’s very use of close resemblance as yet another linguistic
operation, “conceptual” in the sense of Publication’s opening
statements.
David Lamelas, as I have argued here, utilized his entry into the
international milieu of conceptual art as an opportunity to draw atten-
tion to artistic networks and cast suspicion on the motives of apparently
neutral trends in collective exhibition practice. In an art field that had
recently seen the institutionalization of international conceptualism,
Lamelas’s status as a foreigner paradoxically led to opportunities for
camouflage and subterfuge, allowing him to test an approach that had
yielded new directions for art in his previous context. Yet, as hinted
at by Broodthaers, Publication also suggests the danger of turning
Masotta’s method into a rule or formula: guaranteeing the new via
­critique renders the triumphant new genre radically unspontaneous,
my reference is prejudiced

forever premised on that very thing to be transcended. Hence also

the problem in Masotta’s original hope that the artist could play art
­historian, knowing what had come before and divining that which
was to come: the desire to identify a genre, perhaps even placing arbi-
trary limits on it (conceptual art as strictly linguistic, or defined by
its publications), might not match the radical expansiveness of “concep-
tual art.” Yet “Después del Pop: Nosotros desmaterializamos” was not
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68 Ibid.

61
David Lamelas. London Friends (details), 1973.
Photographs of Mary Kahl and Zou Zou and Lamelas.
Image courtesy of the artist.

only about the discarding of the old, but also about the production of
the novel—the confidence that critical engagement can be generative
of new practice. Consider how Lamelas extricated himself from concep-
tual photography: in 1973, the artist reprised Antwerp (People and
Time) with London Friends, in which he photographed himself and his
companions as if they were celebrities in fashion shoots or magazine
spreads. 69 Content’s irrelevance here has opened up a space for fiction,
which would guide Lamelas’s work for the remainder of the decade.

69 Buchloh, “Sign and Structure in the Work of David Lamelas,” in Neo-Avant-Garde and
Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975 (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2003), 335, sees this phase of Lamelas’s work as a critique of “myth” in the
culture industry. This arises in Buchloh’s discussion of a different series of photographs,
Rock Star (Character Appropriation), 1974, which also featured Lamelas in character
artmargins 2:3

(playing a rock star) for the camera. I would emphasize instead the more open-ended
implications of dress-up in London Friends—these subjects’ transformation from mem-
bers of Lamelas’s network to fictional characters. If a polemic against capitalism can be
intuited here, it is one that subsists alongside a play of subjective desire as well, one that
would be canonized with the Pictures Generation several years later.

62