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!
