the ’sham

For those of you who have just got your copy of Bilateral Petersham from the exhibition at artspace, perhaps you’re beginning to delve into my adventures of just over a year ago. I’d be curious to know how it reads, what the experience of reading is like for you, where you are when you read…
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Now this is a rather functional entry, simply announcing that the winner of the upcoming north-versus-south bowls comp at the Sham Bowlo would be awarded a beautiful bowling trophy. (In the end, the trophy was withheld due to a lack of rivalry, the two sides were too friendly.)

Less friendly, however, was the comment from the MVC (MarrickVille Crew) who told me I should respect the territory that they control. I’ll reproduce the whole exchange here because it’s pretty interesting.
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A few vignettes. One about seeing a fire-safety demonstration at the railway, “I stand and watch through the cyclone fencing, my fingers clinging onto the wire.” The other from a few folks at the bowlo, a flasher reported in North Petersham, and the proximity of a couple’s house to the club enabling it to operate a bit like an extension of their living room.

Listen to the entry here [4 min, 1mb, mp3].

Read the original posting here.

A post reflecting upon, and comparing, the Petersham and the Kellerberrin projects. The difference between a residency where I was in someone else’s town (which I then had to leave) and a residency where I am already at home - I don’t have to leave. There’s no urgency to “finish”, get everything done, to wrap things up before I go.

Listen in here [2mb, mp3, 6 min].

Read the original posting here.

A small episode which combines sport and theatre. Alex, an extraordinary resident of the ’sham, tells me he’s a rugby journalist and a playwrite. We watch Mundine beating Green (Man beating Machine) on the big screen at the local pub.

Listen in here [1mb, 2 min, mp3].

Read the original posting here.

This is one of those days where I really meander. It’s not that I don’t have an intention to do something specific, it’s just that my lack of forward planning means that it doesn’t work out the way I imagine. Instead, other things happen, the changing of the plan leaves me open to the time being filled with other adventures.

In this case, I wander up to the Metropolitan Community Church, and head off on a digression about the history of the Mastertouch Pianola Roll Factory, which had occupied the site for ages before the MCC took it on.

In this historical vein, Anthony from the Bottlo fills me in on a few snippets of local (New Canterbury Road) history.

Listen in to the podcast here [3mb, 7 min, mp3].

Read the original posting here.

In which I announce my intention to deliberately leave the ’sham, to go and visit uncle Lester, the Aboriginal elder from Marrickville. He’d given me permission to cross the borders which were arbitrary and invented!

Listen to the podcast here.

Read the original posting here

Half an hour before the exhibition at Artspace opened, I managed to sit Reuben, the curator, down on a couch and we recorded Situationist Flan, the blog entry from a year and a few days ago. In this episode, Reuben came out to visit me in the ’sham, and we attempted to make up the recipe for the pudim flans which had been the source of much confusion on the blog. While we were waiting for the flans to set, we went out on our own flan, talking about situationism and the derive as we went.

In this recording, we’re joined by Tracy from Artspace, for some of the comment voices. At the end of the reading, Reuben and I chat about the nature of the project and its transition from the streets of the ’sham to the gallery in Woollomooloo.

Listen in here [10mb, mp3, 23min]
Read the original posting here

It’s Tuesday May 22, 2007. Two days to go to the opening of the exhibition at Artspace in Wooloomooloo. The show’s called Publicity. It’s curated by Reuben Keehan.

Reuben’s idea about the title “publicity” was to take the word back a bit, beyond our current understanding of it as advertising or marketing. He wanted to get to an earlier meaning, from the French (I think) meaning “the act of being in public”. More like “public-ness” I guess. So… doing things in public, being a public figure, the relationship between public space and private space, between public time and private time, or simply being part of the “general public”.

Some of the works in this exhibition have grappled with the concept of “public space” - even though they didn’t really set out that way. It’s just that working outdoors seems increasingly to raise the issue of permission, what you can and can’t do when you are on land which is owned by the government. Unless it’s relaxing with your family in a non-organised way, activities on so-called public lands seem to generate paranoia and the need for assurances that what will happen will not be dangerous, upsetting or disruptive.

It has to be said, most “interventionist” art which happens in public space is not in itself particularly dangerous, upsetting or disruptive. Bridget wanted to have some horses canter through the streets of Sydney, with the riders waving her ambiguous suffragette-slogan flags as they went. Astra has been pulling her mobile perspex booth through the streets, communicating with passers-by by writing on the booth’s transparent surface with marker pens. At worst, these spectacles might cause a slight confusion, since we’ve become used to only seeing events taking place out in public that are either

(a). functional (like driving a car)
(b). spectacular and not directly functional (advertising stunts or a conventional political protests)

If Astra and Bridget are not trying to sell anything, protest anything, or achieve anything practical, then what are they doing, and why?

Art, obviously, is a small sphere of activity where uselessness is tolerated. Declaring that something is “art” might allow you to get away with not explaining why you are doing something, the underlying meanings etc. But the “what” still needs to be vetted and approved (riding a horse through the CBD, setting up a small wheely booth on a footpath). And this is where things get tricky. How to get permission for an activity which will develop in unknown directions, or which needs to be directly responsive to interactions with people and places?

Often, artists will just sidestep the permission process and go ahead regardless, hoping to slip under the radar (although this becomes trickier when you’re being sponsored by a public gallery).

In the case of my Petersham project, I chose to utilise another way of being in public which didn’t require council approval: a blog. During April and May 2006 I stayed within the boundaries of Sydney’s inner-western suburb of Petersham. The suburb was my “site”. Each day, I blogged about what went on: who I met, what we did, things I saw going on. There was no set structure to enable me to “work in public” or “interact with the public”. I was the public!

For those two months, I ranged around the neighbourhood, drifting anywhere invitations, attractions or curiosity pulled me. Like any artist, I sought out the limitations of my own rules, trying to locate the exact location of the borders, the invisible walls of my cell. Paradoxically, the restriction I placed on myself - not to leave Petersham - did not reduce my freedom. It actually resulted in an explosion of possibilties within an area I might previously have thought to be indistinguishable from others, and thus unremarkable. As you can see from the thousands of words which make up the resulting blog, Petersham is far from unremarkable.

Working with blogging in this way, writing publically each day, is important to me for another reason. As someone who responds well to - but gets stressed out by - deadlines, I wanted to develop a method of artmaking that placed emphasis on working a little each and every day. I figured, if I can post a blog entry each morning, about the events of the previous day, then the last few days of the project will be no more stressful than the first. I can continue to “be in the moment”, and the resulting artwork will simply be an accumulation of all these moments.

But the “artwork” is not just this resulting blog, or the the printed out text in book form. It was also a charged period of public time, during which the project was living and breathing. Each day, dozens of readers would log on, wondering “what Lucas was up to today”. The daily life of Lucas Ihlein, self-imposed prisoner of the ’sham, became a soap opera, an online serial-novel, his own high-rating TV channel, a voyeuristic wormhole into this most ordinary of suburbs. What would happen next? You’d have to wait and see! And a stray comment you left in response to the blog might send Lucas off on a new and unexpected adventure, which would turn up as tomorrow’s story. The show was alive.

On May 31st, 2006, the project finished, I stopped updating the blog each day, and one by one my readers shuffled off to find something else to occupy their time. I, too, became absorbed in other activities, travelling and working in different places and on other projects. Bilateral Petersham became a neglected website, gathering dust and comment-spam. Metaphors abound: a garden overrun with weeds, an abandoned house, an amusement park in the off season, the leftovers of a dinner party. It was a little sad.

Of course, you can always dig through and read the whole thing online. It was (and is) all still there. But to start from scratch and churn your way through the blog after its “public moment” has passed - all ninety thousand words on a flickering screen - is more than anyone I know has been able to bear. (One kind fellow claimed he would log on and ration himself to one entry per day, pretending that the project was still alive, but I have no indication that he actually did it).

Instead, I offer this printed version, which I hope will read something like The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole - a literary formula which is compelling precisely because of the narrator’s ignorance. There is a voyeuristic pleasure in sifting through somebody else’s unformed thoughts.

The transition from computer-screen to photocopy-page was not always smooth. Hyperlinks peppered throughout the text hover frustratingly before your eyes, unclickable on the ink-and-pulp version of Bilateral Petersham. I could only include a fraction of the images which grace the blog. And, of course, if you want to leave a comment, you’ll just have to jot something in the margin with your biro, or use a post-it note, or send me a postcard.

On the other hand, the bookish version you hold in your hands means you can settle in for a good old read without bombarding your eyes with electrons. You can take me with you on the train, into the garden (or, as Calvino once suggested, you could even try reading mounted on a horse, feet comfortably wedged in the stirrups, book nestled in the mane, on the gentle incline of the patient beast’s neck). In short, you can take Bilateral Petersham out in public (rather than burrowing away in the flickering glow of the screen in your living room, or sneaking time between work emails). Heck, you can even get on the 428 and come out to Petersham and read it here (I recommend the park at the corner of James and Albert). Despite my love of blogs, I believe we still haven’t got a better interface for embodied reading than the book. Bon Chance!

On Saturday, Sue came around to record the northern border walk episode with me.

We sat in the kitchen and talked about walking. She’s starting a project interviewing Vietnamese folks in Sydney about their long walking expeditions as they fled dangerous situations in their homelands. Walks on a much grander scale than our little saunters along the local suburb boundaries.

This visit from Sue was something like a re-enactment of last year’s event. We sat and talked, we drank tea, we read last year’s blog entry aloud, and then we walked. This time, instead of doing the northern border again, we just walked “around the block”. But slowly. I told Sue about how in mindfulness class we do these walking meditations, where you pay attention to the breath, and the sensations in the feet and body as you walk. You can’t help but start to slow down as you appreciate all the small movements that go into walking. Walking becomes a thing in itself, rather than a means to an end. She said, “lets do one now!” so we did.

We exited my gate, and slowly worked our way up Chester to the corner of Audley. There we took a turn and headed down the hill, with the sun on our backs. I focused my eyes on the shadow of my head, which was always a few metres in front of my feet. We both felt anxious about “what would the neighbours think”, and whether we’d get honked at by passing cars, two slow-walking weirdos. But that never came to pass. A lady pushing a pram skirted around us, apologising. We stopped and took a breather at the corner of Oxford, each secretly hoping that the other would want to quit and call it a day. But we launched back into it, heading down towards Livingstone, where we took off our shoes to feel the concrete better. Then back around to Chester. The slight upwards incline on Chester was a surprise and a pleasure on the backs of my calves. It occurred to me that if I did this every day, I would become “just that guy who does that strange walking, we don’t know why, but he goes around each day”, a mildly tolerated and slightly amusing local event. This helped relieve the anxiety.

Sue took a cutting of sage and we said goodbye.

The podcast has plenty of thoughtful discussion following the reading of the episode.
Listen in here [12mb, mp3, 30min].

Read the original entry here.