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 an important role in this process. The exhibitions shone a light on these exchanges, in which overviews of trends or individual artists provided an introduction to the innovations of international contemporary art and made Argentine and Latin American artists better known on the global scene.
David Lamelas (b. 1946) began his art career in the early 1960s, doing most of his avant-garde work at the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires. Exploring connections among sculpture, architecture, and conceptual ideas that impact art production, Lamelas created site-specific works that heralded the beginning of a form of experimentation that would lead to a progressive dematerialization of the work. He appropriated tools used by the mass media to reflect on time, space, and process in the transmission, circulation, and reception of information. In the 1970s he started working with photography, film, and installation, and gradually established himself as an internationally known figure in the field of Conceptual art.
In 1971, while Lamelas was living in Europe, he worked with the CAYC to produce the film Lectura (based on the book Knots, by J. B. Laing), which was supposed to have been presented at the Art Systems exhibition during the XI São Paulo Biennial, but ultimately was not (GT-34; doc. no. 1476284). The film was shown at the center in Buenos Aires in July 1971, in advance of the exhibition Arte de sistemas (1971) at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Buenos Aires (GT-52; doc. no. 1476291).
This newsletter announces a showing of the fictional documentary Gente del desierto (The Desert People) (1974), screened by its director at the CAYC in December 1977. The film was shot in southeastern Arizona and featured the Papago, an Indigenous people on the brink of cultural extinction. It combines a documentary record and the syntax used in Hollywood commercial movies, imitating the “road movies” genre. That ambiguity allowed Lamelas to take a critical look at the distinction between reality and fiction in the media.
