our civilization has delimited an aesthetic field inside wich the most opposite aesthetic works are inscribed.
this aesthetic field prsents itself as nature (thus hiding its arbitrary. artificial. and historic character) out of wich it would seem impossible to imagine the phenomenon of art. of these three elements the aesthetic field comprises author. spectator and work of art. the latter appears as the meeting point of the first two. the materials that compose it (the surface of the page. the graphic sketch. in literature. the canvas. the pigments. the stone. etc. in the plastic arts) are thus converted into the base of something external to the materials themselves. this illusion of transcendence (the so - called artistic expression) emerges through a material but on the condition that the illusion surpass the material. disguising it. the work appears finally as ´´a result a product that forgets the artifice of production´´
the contrary occurs in the case of david lamelas: the work - as effect- product - disappears and what springs up in its place is the activity (the artifice) of its production. thus. this labor becomes unthought of in the ´´aesthetic field´´. as the idea pf the work of art disappears. that of the author and spectator disappears. too both are defined by their relation to the product: the first as ´´creator´´ (producer). the second as ´´contemplator´´ (consumer). one and the other are going to consent to the production of the work of art in the void determined by its absence. becoming producers and product simultaneously.
this labor is not more than a small part. a quotation. of a vaster discourse that of the means of information. taking a specific sector of those means as a basic sequence - the events that occurred in vietnam between june 15 october 15. 1968 - lamelas's labor is going to repeat and transform that discourse.
by its mere location - the venice biennial - this already counted as a ''work of art´´ but. since it is not a work but on the contrary. its production. it carries an unsurpassable contradiction in its very being: the work of art is formed (inasmuch as the notion of art supposes the idea of a result - something completed. fixed. identical. to itself. etc) in the very moment and conditional to its disappearance. in the other words. in the order to have a product(work of art)its process ofproduction must finish. but this process (wich is indistinguishable from the historic process of production) appears as constant means of transformation and. as such. remains foreign to any idea of conclusion. it is in this contradiction. in this radical refutation of the mnotion of a work of art on the one hand. and the notion of the artist conceived as a ´´creator´´ on the other. where his revolutionary character resides. his movement of production is going to mingle with (and not going to express) that of the producing labor since both draw from the same formal material.