the ’sham

The following is a new introduction I wrote for the blog-as-book which is featured in the exhibition at Artspace during May-June 2007. You can see pictures of the installation, and people taking away their own copies over here.

If you’ve just stepped through the doors of Artspace in Wooloomooloo, you might have encountered a long wooden bench, snaking throughout the gallery over to yonder windows. On the bench are stacked piles of A5 paper. These are the pages of a book called Bilateral Petersham, by Lucas Ihlein. You can assemble one yourself to take away. Start here, by popping a “thimblette” on the finger of your choice and taking a page at a time as you work your way along the bench. There is a bowl of Minties for you to chew on while you work. If the bowl is empty, ask Tracy behind the desk to top it up for you. When you get to the end, you’ll find further instructions for stapling it all together. Oh, and it costs five bucks (or $4.50 for Artspace members). Just pop your cash in the biscuit jar next to the stapler.

If the above paragraph means nothing to you, chances are you’re somewhere other than Wooloomooloo, and your copy of the book came to you pre-stapled. To bring you up to speed, I’ll say the following: Bilateral Petersham was featured in an exhibition at Artspace, in Sydney, during May and June 2007. The show was called Publicity, and was curated by Reuben Keehan. If you want to have a look at pictures of the assembly-line bench described above, visit the Bilateral Petersham website: www.thesham.info/artspace

Reuben’s idea for the exhibition was to take the word “publicity” 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”.

In the case of my Petersham project, I chose a 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 whole suburb was my “site”. Each day, I blogged about what went on: who I met, what we did, the things I saw. 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, was important to me for another reason. Blogging allows – nay, encourages! – thoughts in process, unstructured ruminations, fragmentary reports. There is no need to burrow away in private, preparing a perfect finished product to be later unveiled, when it’s “ready”. Each day is an unveiling, and perfection impossible. Anyhow, the blog’s dynamic nature means mistakes can be corrected by readers, observations refined and updated tomorrow. There is no deadline, no moment of completion, no end. One moment – even NOW – is as important as any other. The resulting artwork you hold in your hands is simply an accumulation of these moments.

But the “artwork” is not just the Bilateral Petersham website, or the printed text in book form. It was, more importantly, 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-appointed 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 could 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 one of those neglected sites, 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 could always dig through and read the whole thing online. It’s 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 particularly intense fellow I met last year declared his intention to log on and ration himself to one entry per day, thus re-enacting the project from the other end, but I’ve not since heard from him).

Instead, I present this more palatable printed version, which might offer a reading experience akin to The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole. And, like that paragon of teenage literature, Bilateral Petersham contains liberal doses of unconsummated sex (see pages 77, 108, and 175), copious lines devoted to worrying about whether I’m doing the right thing (pages 22, 86) and great paragraphs ‘fessing up to broken promises and bent rules (pages 34, 42, 155). I hope, dear reader, you too find voyeuristic pleasure in sifting through somebody else’s very personal (but published) writing.

Of course some things are lost in the translation from computer-screen to photocopy-page. 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 jump on the 428 bus 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 reading than the book. Bon Chance!

-Lucas Ihlein, May 24th, 2007.

[You can read the new epilogue which accompanies the blog-book over here.]