Buenos Aires Time as Activity
Until 11 March
Opening:
Thursday 10 February 19:00 – 21:00hr
Avenida de Mayo 1480
Buenos Aires, CP1106
info@ignacioliprandi.com
Time as Activity is one of the pivotal works in the career of David Lamelas. The first version, Time as Activity (Dusseldorf), was shot in 1969 in the surroundings of the hall where the work would be exhibited, and consisted of the footage of three perspectives of the city. Three photographs of the same places and a brief text-manifesto that explained the parameters of the work accompanied the film.
The peculiarity of the film, both the German version and this one—seventh edition shot in Buenos Aires—is that it presents three views of the city, silent, shot in 16mm with a stationary camera, and separated by intertitles that indicate the elapsed time in each take. In the reductionist plan that concerned Lamelas in the 60′s, he got to the extent he was seeking with this work: three shots without detail, subject or action, which only performed the task of documenting the mechanical temporality of the city with the utmost possible neutrality and naturality. Due to this sustractive quality and the ‘almost nothing’ of the images, Lamelas considers the 1969 Time as Activity his first wholly successful conceptual work. After that first version, the following ones were shot in Berlin, Los Angeles, New York, Saint Gallen, Fribourg and now, Buenos Aires.
If according to his way to document the cities where the nomadic Lamelas has lived, his whole work can be considered some sort of travel journal, the attainment of Time as Activity (Buenos Aires) would be a return to the origin, to the zero point of the journey. But what is peculiar in this case is that Lamelas complies with the dogma of the original version—documenting the surroundings of the exhibition hall with certain parameters—but not in a dull place, like in the rest of the versions, but in an image that is a hallmark of the city, that he decides to shoot as if it were an ordinary location. The work is in that way, a ready-made Time as Activity that takes a paradigmatic image of the city, the Congress Square, and shoots as if it was the first time, from two different angles and then from inside, in the hall of the senate chamber during a session.
As if they were backdrops for a TV presenter, the images insist on a static shot that leads us to a boredom sensation. Lamelas wants an excessively long time to elapse in each take, so that we bury our expectations and then, half resigned half absent, take notice of the waves of the flag, the movement of clouds or the gestures of a politician as if from the mere surface of these details stemed the truth of things. Time as Activity suggests thus a documentalism without disclosure, without opinion or theory: an intransigent and relinquished realism that fulfils the wish of Clement Rosset of “getting the real back to its insignificance” because this eventually implies “getting the real back to itself.”
—Inés Katzenstein
Buenos Aires, January 2011
