The work can be described as a large sculpture built on an inclined surface and consisting of a trapezoidal shaped, steel roof under which 3 rows of 8 trees are planted. With time, the trees grow over the structure, almost hiding it, while other trees die because of a lack of light and water, leaving a void. The concept for this work was developed in several drawings and paintings during the 1980s when Lamelas was living in Los Angeles. But it was only on the occasion of an exhibition at the Royal Museum for Fine Arts in Antwerp, commemorating the 500 years of the so-called discovery of the Americas, that the work could finally be realised.

Quand le ciel bas et lourd is a work that deals with the relation between nature and the industrial society as well as with questions of oppression, struggle and censorship. As often in Lamelas’ oeuvre, it combines a conceptual and minimal aesthetic with political issues. Looking at Quand le ciel bas et lourd, two earlier works in particular by Lamelas come to mind. The first is his acclaimed film work The Desert People (1974) in which the question of the native American is central. Half road movie, half documentary, it portrays 5 young americans who speak about their experience of living with a tribe, the Papagos. The final monologue is by Manny, a Papago, who speaks in English, then Spanish and finally in Papago. The film culminates in a tragic car crash, as if the co-habitation of native and non-native americans is doomed. The second work is Dos espacios modificados which Lamelas made for the Bienal de Sao Paulo in 1966. In this piece he changed the shape of the cubicle that was given to him to show his work and doubled it by using aluminium beams and sheets, creating a second rectangular space without walls. Just like Quand le ciel bas et lourd, it plays with perspective and the point of view of the beholder as much as it raises the question of our spatial experience and understanding.
 

David Lamelas, Quand le ciel bas et lourd. 
By Benjamin H.D. Buchloh

This text was published in the exhibition catalogue 'America. Bride of the sun. 500 years Latin America and the Low countries', p. 243-244.

In the extreme polarization between the urge to equate aesthetic operations with factual information and the withdrawal into self­reflexive tautological thought that defines conceptual art at the end of the 1960's, David Lamelas chose to occupy a position of de­liberate undecidability, continuously shifting between the linguistic dimensions of struc­ture and reference. Already in his first exhibition in Europe in 1968, when he represented Argentina at the XXXIV Venice Biennale, his installation at the pavilion circumscribed both the lim­itations of the tautological model of mod­ernist self-reflexivity, and the limits of the institutions of art. By introducing the continuous flow of informa­tion on the developments of the Vietnam war supplied by news agencies and a telex machine into the pavilion, he turned the exhibition space literally into a newsroom: a secretary read the incoming news via a microphone to the viewers and recorded them simultaneously on a tape recorder for the entire duration of the exhibition (60 days), thus constructing a sedimentation of factual information and an exact historical record of the time period during which the 'work' and the 'exhibition' occurred and in which they literally coincided.
Entitled Office of Information about the Vietnam War; at three levels: the Visual Image, Text and Audio, both the complexity and the didactic clarity of Lamelas' work frustrated traditional aesthetic expectations and led to a relative failure of signification for the art world audiences of that moment. The installation ruptured first of all the dis­cursive framework of conceptual art by in­troducing a model of language as commun­icative action, rather than a model of language as self-reflexive structure or as one of ir­recuperable difference. [When Hans Haacke shifted at about the same time within his own development towards this radically different language theory, his work was met with equal scepticism: in fact one of his earliest explicitly political works, his contribution to the Pro­spect exhibition at the Kunsthalle Dusseldorf in 1969, constructs an almost identical in­tegration of a seemingly formal procedure with a radically different set of language operations introduced into the institutional framework]. And at the same time the in­stallation criticized the institutional framework of art by challenging the self-declared silence and the neutrality of the exhibition (literally by invoking sound as an aspect of representation, and metaphorically by activating the space as a function of information). In linking the exhibition/institution directly with the functions of public and political information and communication, Lamelas constructed not only a dialectic between the aesthetic and the factual, but he also reconstituted the lost political dimension of artistic institutions, reminding us of their origins in the bourgeois public sphere.
Beyond these obvious challenges the work posed a number of questions (perhaps not only unanswerable, but even inaudible at the time), questions not just concerning the relationship between the 'disinterested' aes­thetic structure and the institutional frame, between linguistic self-referentiality and the instrumentalized languages of ideology and 'information·, but the work confronted its audience with the challenge of a Western hegemonic institution by an artist from the cultural 'margins' of Latin America, which seems to have been another reason why the work was 'overlooked' at the time.
Clearly the work must have provoked the defence mechanism of Western art audiences to protect themselves, first of all, against political questions as a matter of aesthetic principle. If, however, a political critique was articulated by a member of an unknown mar­ginal artistic community, it had to be dis­missed all the more urgently since the legit­imacy of challenging Western hegemony itself had to be refuted. [In the same manner that David Medalla's work at Documenta V in 1972 remained largely 'unseen', since it constituted in a very similar way a contestation of the credibility of Western hegemonic cul­ture by an artist from a 'third world' country.] Looking at Lamelas' work now makes us realize (more then twenty years after its definition) that in the audience's resistance, behind the guise of an aesthetic concern for high cultural purity and disciplinary autonomy, there operated an actual insistence on hege­monic superiority and the legitimation of continued ideological and political domin­ation. 

A second work, produced a year later for the Camden Arts Centre in London, raises a similar range of questions, and once again its relative obscurity reveals the inability of audiences and critics of the Sixties and Seventies (let alone those of the following generation) to situate Lamelas' work in an interpretative context.
Invited to install an exhibition at this in­stitution, Lamelas suggested instead to use the available resources for the production of a short black and white film, entitled An In­vestigation of the Relations between Inner and Outer Space. The very substitution of a film production (modest as it was in terms of technology and budget) for an exhibition project, appears now as a programmatic decision in favour of a radically different perspective on both the institutional frame­work, the technical means of production and the distribution form of the work. As in his Venice Biennale installation in the preceding year, Lamelas deployed relatively advanced technology (film and sound record­ing) within the space traditionally reserved for static high art objects. However, it was a functional and communicative technology that was deliberately not neutral and value free, but that stood in almost programmatic opposition to the futile emphasis on traditional industrial production in 'minimal' sculpture where the discrepancy between industrial technology and the high art discourse of sculpture had ultimately remained on the level of a design problem. We should remind our­selves that in the mid-Sixties, with the minimalist's widely celebrated 'advanced' methods and materials of industrial fabrica­tion for sculpture, one was in fact confronting a rather naive and romantically limited in­tegration of industrial production within the high art object. By contrast, Lamelas deploys not only film and video technology as the primary media for his exhibition substitute, but he also uncovers within the film itself a catalogue of technologies that determine daily life in a very substantial and possibly complete manner: starting once again from an almost parodic performance of modernist self-referentiality by measuring the entire space of the exhibition and making the camera travel along all of the neutral white architectural surfaces that constitute the exhibition space, the film lists in a lapidary, almost statistical litany, in ever widening circles, the spatial and technological, the social and the institutional spheres that constitute the viewers' social identities - just as much as that of the subjects depicted in a shared continuum of technologies, urban organization, media technologies and trans­port systems. The film concludes in an almost grotesque climax, expanding the oppositional concepts of inner and outer space to a literal pun : a series of casual interviews conducted with anonymous pedestrians - by accident and foresight - on the day of the first manned landing on the moon (which happened to be the day the interviews were filmed). 

It is against this factographic and political background of Lamelas' early works that one should consider the new sculptural installa­tion at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp so as to resist an all too easy metaphorical reading, a disorientation that the work's conception seems to have conscious­ly laid out for the viewer. The sculpture seems to appear at first like a renewal of late 1960's Arte Povera aesthetics and devices, almost as though aesthetics' structural juxtapositions along the axis of nature/culture opposites had crossed over into outdoor monumentaliza­tion, a tendency - it is crucial to emphasize here - that Arte Povera had been careful to avoid. Yet it soon becomes evident that the readmission of more traditional rhetorical forms (such as metaphorical constructions) in Lamelas' work is not merely the tribute to the newly conventionalized practices of art pro­duction, nor does it seem to be the price paid by an artist (who had turned his back on traditional artistic production procedures and distribution forms from the very beginning, and who has produced mostly film and video work over the last twenty years) to be readmitted into the institution of art and its traditional categories - even though it seems that sometimes no price might be too high to open the doors of the Museum to the present. But just as unconvincing would it be to argue that the enigmatic installation of a field of trees that will grow up under a shield of steel hovering over them like a shadow of extreme protection inevitably thwarting growth, even­tually deforming and crippling them (in the way that traditionally in aristocratic horti­culture fruit trees were grown in decorative formations like the espalier) would inscribe itself within a fairly recent tradition of sculp­tural works that - out of ecological concerns with romantic/remedial intentions - have incorporated trees or micro-ecologies into the conception of sculpture: from Joseph Beuys' 10,000 Oaks at Documenta VI in Kassel in 1978 or Michael Asher's proposal from the same year to plant an alley of trees instead of constructing large outdoor monumental sculptures for the urban sculpture renewal exhibition in Munster, onwards to the more recent works by Katharina Fritsch or Meg Webster. It seems rather that Lamelas' work constructs a particular historicist hybrid of the two sculptural conventions that of a roman­ticization of the simplicity and universal avail­ability of natural means and resources as sculptural raw materials, as for example in the work of Richard Long, and, that of the continuing (and increasingly hollow) rhetoric of large scale sculptural site specific projects produced with tremendous industrial means which lack the simple tools to recognize their inability to situate their claims as public sculpture in the ruinous public sphere. Lamelas' installation entangles these two - mutually exclusive - sculptural conventions, and positions them in an allegorical inter­dependence of failure : neither the heroic rhetoric of the industrial construction (its origins having become finally evident as the origins of ecological devastation), nor the remedial concerns of a romantic commem­oration of nature (and its mere ecological tokenism), could serve any longer as para­digms for contemporary sculptural constructs without acquiring immediately the features of fraudulence. Lamelas' installation seems to accept the necessity of a return to the sculp­tural traditions of the 1960's as a inevitable presupposition for his allegory of these failed heroic paradigms, their abused and obsolete strategies returning into the present as an involuntary and solely credible 'esthetique du mal'. 

David Lamelas: four projects for the public space (1992-2010).
By Pedro de Llano

This text was published in the gallery's Newspaper 117, May 2019.

A CORUNA, MAY 22 - To create a dialogue between the work of David Lamelas and On Kawara is a felicitous idea which pays homage to the artists. Less is more: with only two pieces by each artist, the show at Jan Mot (March-April 2019) triggered a series of connections and links which allowed us to better appreciate their respective projects. The exhibition dealt with time of course – a fundamental subject for both artists, which several writers already addressed in different places – and also showed other interesting issues such as the representation of cities, the relationships that people establish with them, and most significantly, the city as a meeting point and a space for friendship.

The city as an environment to get together is a key subject of one of Lamelas pieces exhibited at the gallery in Brussels: Antwerp-Brussels (People and Time). When he did this work in 1969 – barely a year after his arrival to London thanks to a British Council grant in order to study at Saint Martin's School of Art – Lamelas already had a dense group of friends all over Europe. In this work he portrayed nine of them – artists, dealers, curators and collectors with whom he collaborated on various projects – in a series of black and white images always with the same framing: three women and seven men, mostly walking towards the camera, with determination, in urban contexts in which they appear to be the protagonists. Indeed, they seem to be the sole human presence – except for the photographer himself and traffic. Seven years later, Lamelas did a similar exercise in Los Angeles with his LA Friends. The chosen mediums here were drawing and a slideshow. The city didn´t feature visually on this occasion but in a caption introducing the neighbourhood where each friend lived: John Baldessari, Santa Monica. Allen Ruppersberg, Hollywood. John Knight, Silver Lake, etc…

This leit-motif in the exhibition at Jan Mot with works dating back to the 1960s and 1970s, made me think of the relation of Lamelas with different cities in which he has lived and more particularly, of the projects for public space that he conceived throughout his career. In the 1990s Lamelas created a series of projects for public space which did not always receive the same attention as his “classic” works from the Conceptual years (1968-1975). It is important to recall that these projects don´t appear from scratch, but rather with deep roots in different pieces since the 1960s. For example in the second piece included at Jan Mot – Time as Activity – which began to exist in 1969 in this German city and currently counts up to eleven versions filmed in cities such as Berlin, Los Angeles or Madrid.[1] Or Señalamiento de tres objetos (1966-68), in which the artist intervenes in a public park transforming a tree, a streetlight, and a deck chair in artworks by surrounding them with rectangular metalic sheets laying on the ground that act as “frames”, enhancing them in their environment, creating a visual and spatial relationship among them, and with the passerby as well.

Projects in the public space became popular in the 1980s and 1990s and were a direct effect of the expansion of the artistic field provoked by Conceptual art in its crucial period between 1968 and 1975. Proof of it is the organization of the first edition of the Skulptur Projekte in Münster in 1977. Or Chambres d’amis, the memorable exhibition curated by Jan Hoet in Ghent in 1986, in which 50 artists conceived works for private homes, blurring the limits between public and intimate space. Both in Europe and the US these initiatives were essential for the understanding of the evolution of a whole group of artists who began doing immaterial and conceptual art in the 1960s (performances, films, language-based works, etc…) and who were marginalized by the market and many institutions in the neo-conservative era of the 1980s with the return of painting and object-based practices. Vito Acconci or Dan Graham are explicit cases, but also others, closer to David Lamelas in Los Angeles such as Allen Ruppersberg, Michael Asher, John Knight, Dorit Cypis or Maria Nordman – most of whom posed for him at the studio on Sunset Boulevard.

The 1980s were a sort of “desert crossing” for many of these artists. Nevertheless during this decade Lamelas did some of his best known videos in Los Angeles. In these works the city has a relevant presence, although not essential. The city plays more as a background than a leading role. However, video did have an incentive which we can also find in his projects for public space: it’s capacity to reach larger audiences.[2] After this period came another – in the second half of the 1980s – in which Lamelas returned to a practice which is central throughout his career but which stayed somehow in the shadow: drawing and painting. From this period are pieces such as Inside-Outside (1984), Entwurf “Reception Center for Solar Energy” (1986) and Los Angeles PM (1987) in which Lamelas experiments with apparently traditional mediums, but with innovative and original intentions. What is especially interesting in some of these works is the idea of a project carried out through drawing and/or painting. We can see this for instance in a work like Entwurf “Reception Center for Solar Energy” (1986) – a sort of sketch for a utopian and deliberately inconcrete ecological initiative which nevertheless turns out to be evocative of the “New Age” trends to which some Southern California artists gravitated in the 1980s. And this brings us straight into the 1990s projects, in which drawing as a conceptual tool appears, together with writing, as a genuine constant in the work of David Lamelas – from the earliest to the very recent.[3]

*  *  *

The first project I’d like to focus on bears the poetic title Quand le ciel est bas et lourd (1987-92).[4] It was produced for the group exhibition America. Bride of the Sun. 500 Years of Latin America and the Low Countries and consists of a hovering steel plate in the form of a trapezoid, suspended by three rows of eight pillars.  Under the plate Lamelas planted three rows of sycamore trees which seem to converge toward an imaginary vanishing point. The piece was installed in 1992 next to the Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp (designed by Jacob Winders and Frans van Dijk and opened in 1890) in a surrounding park and opposite of the former location of Wide White Space, Lamelas’ first Belgian gallery., The structure functions as an asymmetric element – dynamic and relatively unstable that contrasts both with the solemnity of the Neo-classical building of the museum and the rationality of the urban axis of the Flemish city which is known in the Zuid neighbourhood as “The Petit Paris” – a reference to Baron Haussmann.

Benjamin Buchloh points out the monumental and architectonic character of this work, as opposed to the immateriality of his previous projects – especially those related to video and TV.[5] The title is borrowed from the first verse of a poem by Baudelaire and intends to be a commentary about the so-called discovery of America (which had its 500 years celebration in 1992), and the oppression suffered by the American peoples (indigenous, slaves, immigrants…) since colonial times until the imperialist episodes of the Cold War, and through the different processes towards Independence in the 19th century.

This particular work has a changing life: in the earlier pictures it’s possible to see the growing young trees sheltered under the metal plate at the same time that limited and perhaps impeded by the lack of light. In other, more recent images, the work seems to “disappear” or hide out: trees – at least those in the lateral rows – have overtaken the structure and grown all over and above. This process reproduces, in an abstract, organic and visual way, the struggle for liberation and emancipation of the American peoples after 1492 – a dialectic in which some win and overflow the imposed limits, conquering freedom, while others loose and stay subjugated and underdeveloped (that´s to say: there were Americas which were more “brides of the sun” than others). Finally, Quand le ciel est bas et lourd reminds us as well of an unrealized project by Bruce Nauman from the late 1960s in which he also intended to put a plaque on top of a single growing tree: “After a few years, the tree would grow over it”, Nauman declared in an interview, “and finally cover it up, and it would be gone”.[6] Despite the formal similitude, the intentions and content of both artists are very different. In the context of the current general rehabilitation of the premises of the Museum of Fine Arts, Lamelas’ work will soon be dismantled and reconstructed in the same park close to the original location.

In 1996, four years after the Antwerp piece and amidst of the rise of public sculpture, Lamelas built Vivienda (Structure) in the city of Santo Tirso, north of Oporto in Portugal. This work was commissioned by the Museo Internacional de Escultura Contemporânea de Santo Tirso; a project dedicated to public sculpture, propelled in its origins by the Portuguese artist Alberto Carneiro – whom Lamelas met at Saint Martin´s at the end of the 1960s. The work was first conceived as a model titled Vivienda (Living Space) and it consisted of a structure which makes us think of the archetype of the house; that is, reduced to its minimal elements – four walls that don’t touch each other, a door, and a roof. There are differences, however, between the project and the finished work. In the first, we see a living place with leaning walls. They need wooden beams to shore the walls up and to prevent from collapsing. It’s indeed a house on the verge of falling apart which brings two references to mind. One by Lamelas himself: his work Untitled (Falling Wall), which he first presented at the Galeria Fac-Simile in Milan, 1993, and a second one of different kind; the infamous scene in a 1920s Buster Keaton film in which the façade of a house falls over the actor – miraculously escaping injury.

In the final version of the work the walls have disappeared and are replaced by a diaphanous metal structure and again surrounded by trees as in Antwerp. The piece is located in the Jardim dos Carvalhais next to a panoramic lookout to the landscape. In the realised version, the house maintains the original scale and volume, as well as the comic detail of a useless door, but it´s been reduced to a sort of sketch or drawing in the air which reflects the dynamism of the first idea, in a different way, together with a certain will to deconstruct the notion of “home” which was also present in the beginning. Is this perhaps the home of a nomad like David Lamelas? Or a gathering point to celebrate a picnic with friends?

While Lamelas was installing the work, he noticed its potential to become a rendez vous for locals and visitors. That’s why in some of the earliest images a pink marble stone bench is missing – which was later added to the work in order to foster its “use”. The idea worked and shortly after people appropriated the sculpture,  especially retired men who would meet there to chat and play domino. This characteristic of Lamelas’ work for the public space –its “use value” – wasn´t that common in the mid-1990s. It was probably the Skulptur Projekte in Münster a year later, in 1997, which made widely known and accepted this kind of projects in between sculpture and design, even if some artists like Dan Graham and Maria Nordman were experimenting with these ideas already in the 1980s. Lamelas points out that his work in Antwerp also has this feature. As neighbours got used to it they started to give it different functions: as a protection from the rain, a shelter for people walking their dogs, a hide-out for couples making out…

Nevertheless, the functional or interactive character of Lamelas’ public works is never literal but rather at some point between its practical use and the symbolic meaning. A good example is an unrealized project with a critical content which seems even more poignant today. It was one of the proposals he sent to the curators of the Biennal In Site, in Tijuana in 1997 and was discarded. The idea would be to build a temporary structure which would act as a stairway and lookout at the same time. From the top of the structure it would be possible to see the US from the Mexican side – the “promised land” for migrants. This proposal involved some degree of irony: paradise can be seen but not touched, shown but not shared. As the son of Spanish immigrants himself, Lamelas tried to evidence, through humour, the injustice which walls and all sort of obstacles represent and impose for those seeking to reach their wishes and access a better life.

After 2000 Lamelas became less involved with projects for public space, at a time the genre itself got into a crisis and the artist entered a new phase in his career. Still he didn’t abandon this kind of practice completely and in February 2010 he accomplished a new piece – very different to the ones before – in Los Angeles. The work was entitled Think of Good and was developed for the group project How Many Billboards, a MAK Center and Schindler House initiative. In this case, his proposal was to revisit one of his most emblematic works: Rock Star (Character Appropiation) from 1974. He re-enacted the photo shoot with a professional photographer, himself posing as an “aging rock star”. On this occasion he edited only one image – worth of Mick Jagger at his best – full of attitude, grabbing a mic, hair slicked back and defiant look. This image was enlarged and printed on the monumental size of a typical Los Angeles billboard, together with the text “Think of Good” – which could well have been taken from one of those self-help, “New-agish”, positive thinking advertising assumed to be characteristic of Southern California culture.

The piece was installed at Pico and Fairfax, two main Los Angeles thoroughfares, halfway from the studio he rented in Sunset Boulevard when he arrived to LA in the 1970s, and Venice where he lived in the 1980s. In fact, both places are symbolically linked to the content of the image: Sunset because it was not far from the Strip, the rogue neighbourhood where all the rock stars performed back in the day at clubs such as the Starwood or English Disco, and Venice, where Gold´s Gym – the iconic fitness center funded by Arnold Schwarzenegger – used to be, becoming an inescapable meeting point for the still bohemian community to which Lamelas belonged, striving to retain youthfulness and fitness with the weight and running machines.

Think of Good is certainly a singular piece because it emphasizes image and representation more than the architectural and participative pieces from the 1990s. Still, all these works share a common approach in which humour and bits of absurdity are fundamental to create a precise and critical relation with urban space. This set of realized and unrealized projects constitute an important contribution to the genre of public art and they let us see David Lamelas work from a different perspective.

Pedro de Llano is a curator and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Santiago de Compostela (ES).

[1] One of the most recent iterations of Time as Activity was shot in Athens and Berlin for the documenta 13, 2017. In Kassel was installed at the ICE station Kassel-Wilhelmshöhe, just in the platform through which the passengers left the train and went into the city.

[2] Lynda Morris, “David Lamelas’ Experience”, exh. cat., David Lamelas, Secession, Vienna, 2006, p. 19.

[3] It’s possible to note these relations between idea, drawing, project and materialization in many of his drawings from 1965 to 1967 – but even earlier than that in certain unpublished works.

[4] The works in public space by David Lamelas that I have been able to retrace are:
- Señalamiento de tres objetos (Signaling of Three Objects), Buenos Aires-London, 1966-68
- Screen, New York City, 1988
- Quand le ciel est bas et lourd, Antwerp, 1987-92
- Vivienda (Structure), Santo Tirso, Portugal, 1996
- A Bridge Between Two Trees , Zoersel, Belgium, 1996
- Unrealized project for in Site 97, San Diego and Tijuana, 1997
- Al otro lado (The Other Side), inSite 97, San Diego and Tijuana, 1997
- Think of Good, in the project How Many Billboards, Los Ángeles, 2010
- Time as Activity: Live Athens-Berlin, documenta 13, 2017

In 1996 David Lamelas created a second work in public space in Belgium, for a temporary exhibition in Zoersel, entitled A Bridge Between Two Trees. 

[5] Benjamin Buchloh, “Structure, Sign and Reference in the Work of David Lamelas”, exh. cat., David Lamelas. A New Refutation of Time, München and Rotterdam, München Kunstverein and Witte de With, 1997, p. 144.

[6] Joe Raffaele and Elizabeth Baker, excerpt from “The Way-Out West: Interviews with 4 San Francisco Artists” (1967), published online by Artnews on March 16, 2018, in honor of Bruce Nauman´s retrospective at Schaulager Basel [http://www.artnews.com/2018/03/16/archives-bruce-nauman-fishing-surrealism-filmmaking-1967/  [Last accessed: May 14, 2019]