For one night only, “Four Films by David Lamelas” will be shown at Light Industry (155 Freeman St.) on Tuesday, September 8 at 7:30 pm. The special screening will be followed by a conversation between Lamelas and Stuart Comer, the Chief Curator of the Department of Media and Performance Art at the Museum of Modern Art.
In the Bloomberg Tate Shots video above, the pioneering conceptual artist David Lamelas exhibits a work called Time. Originally created in 1970, Lamelas reproduces the work at the Tate Modern in London in January 2008. In Time, Lamelas, whose career has been focused on exploring time, space in language, uses time itself as the object.
He creates an “architectural intervention” by taping a line on the ground and invites fifteen to twenty-five people in the room to participate in the work by standing in a line next to him. The piece begins by Lamelas counting to sixty (called “holding time”) then turning to the person next to him to “pass time” on. Each participant holds time before passing it on to the next person. The work ends when Lamelas runs down to the end of the line and the last person passes time back to him.
Lamelas explains, “something very interesting happens, because at that moment is a time that really nothing else happens to you, except the passage of time, so you get into kind of a Zen sort of inner self, to try to find your space within yourself. It is not me who creates the work, I just give the elements to create the work, and then the viewer or the performer of this particular work, he or she makes their own work.
“And I’m very pleased that the Tate actually bought Time in 2005 and I’m very, very happy about it because the Tate didn’t buy an object, didn’t buy sculpture, didn’t buy film, they might have interpreted it by painting or drawing – it means that I achieved what I wanted to do – that is, to be able to produce a work that exists as a concept rather than as an object.
“And one of the great qualities of art, I think, is that it goes through time and is alive in a thousand years from now. And especially this work, because a thousand years from now people from 3010 will be able to perform a piece of today. So it’s about that, you know, in a way it’s about immortality of concepts. The immortality of art, really.”
“Four Films by David Lamelas” include his early work, A Study of Relationships Between Inner and Outer Space (1969, 16mm, 24 mins), Time as Activity (Düsseldorf) (1969, digital projection, 13 mins), To Pour Milk into a Glass (1972, 16mm, 8 mins), and The Desert People (1974, 16mm, 48 mins). Tickets are $8 and available at door. Seating is limited so better to get there early. The Light Industry box office opens at 7:00pm and the event begins at 7:30pm.