Monday, November 17, 2014

David Lamelas at Kunsthalle Basel

David Lamelas at Kunsthalle Basel

An interesting comparison between Bruce Nauman ubiquity and Lamelas left off the grid. Both with early awkward sculptures, a switch to video/film, lines on floors, mediumless. Both were ahead of their time, and yet today there is at any  moment at least one Bruce Nauman video playing somewhere in the world, 24/7, while Lamelas equally deadpan institutionally-reflexive esoterica remains firmly on the fringes. Perhaps that Nuaman’s crystalline crippling of intention and meaning was more immediately reproducible and apparent than the subtlety of Lamelas critical loose threading, creating loose threads. The institutional promotion could be attributed to Nauman’s hegemonic influence, the permeating embedded self-skeptics, an influence so complete as to be invisible, but perhaps Lamelas’s productive outward criticism of media givens would have left us all better off.