David Lamelas

An article in this newsletter invites readers to a screening of Reading Film from “Knots” by R. D. Laing, directed by David Lamelas, at the CAYC. The film was made with help from the CAYC to exhibit Art Systems during the Bienal de São Paulo, a show that never occurred. It was screened together with some of the artist’s other films that had already been shown in Europe (London, Antwerp, and Paris). The article also announces the presentation of the work Publication, an artist book published in London in 1970 and included key figures in the Conceptual art movement discussing the question of whether language can be considered an art form.

Ever since it was founded, the CAYC (Centro de Arte y Comunicación), helmed by the cultural promoter, artist, and businessman Jorge Glusberg, was intended as an interdisciplinary space where an experimental art movement could flourish. The establishment of collaborative networks connecting local and international artists and critics played a key role in this process. The exhibitions shone a light on these exchanges, in which overviews of trends or individual artists introduced the innovations of international contemporary art and made Argentine and Latin American artists better known on the global scene.

When he was getting ready to launch his project, Glusberg took a pretty broad and flexible approach to his use of the category of “arte de sistemas” which had originally referred to the Conceptual art practices that were being developed in international art circles at that time. It was, in fact, at the exhibition De la Figuración al Arte de Sistemas (1970) (doc. no. 761141) that he introduced the term to describe a kind of art that, in its initial radical form, “refers to processes rather than to the finished products of good art.”

Glusberg invited a cross section of local and international artists and critics to Arte de Sistemas, the exhibition that opened in 1971 at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires. Exhibitions and various activities involving some of the invited artists were organized at the CAYC premises during the same period to introduce the latest trends.

The CAYC showed works that David Lamelas (b. 1946) created especially for Art Systems: Reading Film from “Knots” by R. D. Laing and other examples of his work, including Time as Activity (1969), his submission to Information (1970), the great exhibition that MoMA devoted to the experimental avant-garde a year earlier, which was surely the inspiration for Arte de Sistemas. The center also presented Publication (1970), a work of Conceptual art, which represented the debate about “art as language” in terms of the visual arts. It is an “artist book,” the genre of Conceptualism in its reflection on the break with traditional formats. 

This publication, edited by Nigel Greenwood Inc., includes answers from Conceptual artists to a question from Lamelas: Can language be an art form? Since then and after residing for only two years in Europe, the Argentinean artist was acknowledged as a member of the international avant-garde in London.