The group wanted me to talk a bit about Relational Aesthetics. This is a subject I’ve been invited to discuss regularly in the last few years, most recently at a guest lecture at COFA.

The Erskineville group had been to see the Craigie Horsfield show at the MCA, and, rightly, wanted to unpick some of the rhetoric surrounding this (too often over-marketed) term.

I really enjoyed speaking with them. The event itself - small discussion in a loungeroom over wine and hommous - was not dissimilar to a paradigmatic Relational Aesthetics piece - one of Tiravanija’s food servings, for instance. Certainly it was interesting to observe the differences between the lecture format at COFA (one speaker with a microphone monologuing to a lecture hall of patient docile listeners, and only enough time for 2-3 questions afterwards) and the livingroom format (ten feisty “teacher-students” constantly interjecting, demanding clarification, pointing out inconsistencies…in short, directing the “learning” towards where it will have most meaning in their own lives.)

I spoke about my Petersham project (of course, they wanted to know what my “relational” projects were like). There was much discussion about the nature of the work - the way that writing about events changes the way you live those events, possibly even changes the kinds of things you do… My favourite comment was that Bilateral Petersham sounded a bit like an “intellectual version of big brother”.

I’ve been reading a book by Proust, called On Reading, lent to me by Lisa K. (I referred to it previously in this post.) I wonder if the following quote means anything to you?

In reading, friendship is suddenly returned to in its original purity. With books, there is no false amiability. If we spend the evening with these friends, it is because we truly want to. In their case at least, we often only leave them with regret. And once we have left them, none of those thoughts that mar friendship - ‘What did they think of us?’, ‘Were we not tactless?’, ‘Did they like us?’ - or the fear of being forgotten in favour of someone else. All these anxieties of friendship expire on the threshold of the pure and tranquil form of it that is reading. No deference either; we laugh at what Moliere says to the exact degree that we find him funny; when he bores us we are not afraid of looking bored, and once we have definitely had enough of being with him, we put him back in his place as abruptly as if he had neither genius nor celebrity. (pp. 45-6)

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.

1. MVC Says:
May 23rd, 2006 at 12:01 pm

Yo
I dunno what all this is about cause you say your an artiste but your not doin no painting and from the looks of it all you do is do bowling but you gots a site claiming to represent petersham (or the ’sham’ as you elloquwently putting it). Unfortunatelley for you the ’sham’ is within MVC’s territory and none of us remember getting a requestt from you requestting permission to use the ’sham’ as you’re playground. The crew is quite unhappie with all of this.

When duz your fiascoe end? It best be soon cause our patients are running high. This is MVC’s territory and you are attempting to be artistic without permission. If your trying to represent, do it properly.

2204 Represent & Acnowlege

From: MVC

P.S. Art is gay and for hippies

2. shortleftleg Says:
May 23rd, 2006 at 12:39 pm

Hey there MVC
Sorry if I’ve stepped on toes. Unintentional.

Just nosing around the suburb I live in, I don’t claim to represent it any more than from my own experiences. You’re right, I don’t paint. The “art” is in the stories, I guess. The project finishes at the end of the month.

Tell me more about MVC. I couldn’t work it out from your website. You want me to put a link over from my blog? Any other ways I can represent and acknowledge?

3. MVC Says:
May 23rd, 2006 at 4:50 pm

MVC (Marrick-Ville-Crew) are a small yet powrfull congglomerat of individules who live inside the boundries of MarrickVille municipal councils. Tjhis includes your ’sham’ the other ’sham’ lewisham stanmore and offcourse MarrickVille itself (2204) amongst the other subrubs. We formed around for years ago when me n some of the fellaz decided to make a crew (not gang).

We pride ourselfs in being the no# 1 crew in the district and we have delt with many atempts to take our no#1 spot. We dont do nothing necessarilly bad and we respect our fello mv countrimen. Lets just say we run this place.

Thank you for acnowlegeing cuz thats all we ask and we’’ll let you carry on your experiments now.

Peace

I found this exchange to be fascinating. So many interesting issues arise. Their demands for respect sounded to me a bit like the desire for “acknowledgement of country”. That’s the sort of thing I asked uncle Lester about, the announcement that MCs of official events are supposed to do, to remind us of the fact that we’re all on stolen Aboriginal Land. In the case of the MVC, however, it was a more contemporary “territory” that they claimed to be in charge of.

I was interested in the fact that, like me, the MVC uses an arbitrarily defined area (”inside the boundries of MarrickVille municipal councils”).

For the MVC, I imagine, an alternative “map” is laid over this council-zone, a map of contestation between themselves and their rival crews, where territory is respected, or trespassed. It’s an alternative system of authority which for ordinary people (who don’t even know of the existence of the underground MVC crew) is invisible.

I was curious about their attitude to art. Although the activities of the MVC crew were left unclear in this exchange, it’s possible that they are involved in some forms of artmaking themselves, maybe graffiti (a common way of representing territorial claims). But for the MVC, the work I’d been doing here was clearly not art: “you say your an artiste but your not doin no painting and from the looks of it all you do is do bowling”. However, painting or not, for the MVC, art (at least the definition of it they think I’m working with) is not a respectable activity: “P.S. Art is gay and for hippies”.

Representation and art, of course, have pretty much always gone hand in hand. In this exchange, I become aware of two kinds of representation: the representation of Petersham (as a concept) to the outside world, and the representation that goes on within the artwork (particular episodes and experiences represented through my writing).

The first kind of representation is a bit like that performed by polititians (eg the “House of Representatives) where an individual or group will take responsibility for speaking on behalf of a group or a territory. For the MVC, I was overstepping the line when I (in their eyes) claimed to speak on behalf of the sham without first acknowledging their prior claim on it. As soon as I complied, they were satisfied, and I was allowed to continue with my experiment, since it had been made clear that I had no ambition to usurp the zone they claim to control.

I hope it’s pretty obvious to anyone reading the blog, that these issues of control, and the desire to speak on behalf of others (”represent” them) are things which are questioned within Bilateral Petersham. However, it’s also interesting to notice that when you devote an abundance of time and attention to a particular topic, you become a defacto “expert” on it, and the way people treat you shows that they believe you have a kind of “ownership” over that topic. Then people start to come to you for advice and contacts and to speak about (on behalf of) your topic area. This drifts pretty close to the kind of representing I had wanted to question. What to make of all this?

Listen in to the podcast here [3 min, mp3, 1mb].
Read the original entry here.

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

Read the original posting here.

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

Read the original posting here.

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

Read the original posting here.

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.

Listen to the podcast here.

Read the original posting here

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

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!