Conversations: The Television Interview in Jaime Davidovich and David Lamelas

Abstract

This article examines the motif of the television interview in the film, video and television work of two Argentinean artists: David Lamelas and Jaime Davidovich. Like many of their generation, Lamelas and Davidovich migrated to the Global North amidst the political instability of the 1960s. Television and the mass media remained central themes of Lamelas's work, from his conceptual art in the late 1960s through his experimental films of the early 1970s to his embrace of video from the mid-1970s onward. In an early series of videos made in Los Angeles, Lamelas staged parodic news interviews as if the viewer were actually watching a television program, making ambiguous reference to ongoing political situations. Davidovich moved to New York in 1963 and remained there until his passing in 2016. He pioneered public-access cable production in the mid-1970s, co-founding the Artists Television Network in 1978 and producing his own show, The Live! Show, in 1979. Interviews with artists, critics and curators—some serious and journalistic, some playful or even farcical—were a fundamental component of both projects. While political hardship and migration were indisputably part of their biographies, both artists used the television interview precisely to undermine geographic or political authenticity as markers of identity. Their television works repeatedly stage encounters in which quasi-journalists engage with outsiders, as if perpetually restaging their own incomplete yet insightful integration into their new contexts of production.