Born in Buenos Aires in 1946, Conceptual Art pioneer David Lamelas was already a key figure on the Argentinian scene when he left to study at St Martins College of Art in London in 1968. Working in a wide range of media—photography, installations, performance, cinema—he put together an uvre that challenged contemporary modes of transmission and reception of information, while making space and language central to his visual concerns. Like Guy Debord in Society of the Spectacle (1967) —‘The spectacle is not a collection of images: rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images’—Lamelas dismantles the media system by using photography as a plural language, borrowing the codes of the fashion, celebrity and rock star genres for his series London Friends, Rock Star and Violent Tapes; in London Friends (1973) he actually had a professional fashion photographer photograph his friends as if they were pop stars. He also pioneered the genre that drew its vocabulary from movies and is now a pop culture mode in its own right: this use of photos to generate a fictional narrative is very much present in, for example, Helmut Newton’s fashion work. In Rock Star (Character Appropriation) of 1974, Lamelas personally embodied all the rock star archetypes in their on-stage, hair-blowing-in-the-wind ecstasy, as a way of analysing the process of transformation of a personality and the language of the pop attitude: ‘I was living in London and this was the image of English culture at the time. Everybody wanted to be that. So I decided to take a photo of myself like that, as a rock star. And that’s what I am—in the photo. Because the photo is the truth!’ Which reminds him of another idea of Debord’s: ‘In the really inverted world, the truth is the moment of the false.’ This notion also underpinned his 1976 film about terrorism, The Hand, which came after the story of a rock star’s return to the stage in Los Angeles after ten years out of the business.
