the ’sham

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

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!

There was a reason this post was originally “annotated” - it’s not easy to conjure in words alone, the things that happened along this walk. So there was a map which it might help to peruse while listening to the podcast: the map is here.

These boundary walks (of which there were 4, each corresponding to a point of the compass) which I completed with various friends and accomplices during the project, were an attempt to define the limits of my territory, by surfing right along the edges. To a certain extent, it was a wilfull exercise in pointlessness: the border between Petersham and Stanmore is hardly charged and political the way the Israel-Palestine borders are. I can’t think of a reason why living on one side or the other might change your life in any great way, the way it would depending whether you live in Tijuana or San Diego. Instead, these are the (largely) invisible borders of banal suburban beaurocracy, designed to make life simpler: to divide a large slab of land into smaller chunks, I suppose making them easier to “administer”. So it’s somewhat wilfull and cheeky to take these maps and see if we can find where the boundary lies.

By “following a rule” — eg to try and walk the border, no matter how tricky and silly the route might be — we shift the bounds of our normal activity, where we’d normally go, and the way we’d normally travel. We begin to use walking for something else, something non-useful, in the classic sense of “use”. Of course, there’s a big tradition of non-useful walking, particularly de Certeau’s famous “walking in the city” essay. I like what he says about how the city, when walked, is not something pre-existing, but comes into being in response to our pedestrian bodies.

To the flâneur urban surroundings suddenly become both familiar and alien, inscribed with a subjective resonance, strange associations and the depth of myth. By making themselves travellers in their own city, these writers believe that they are capable of subverting the dominant image of Paris as grid, plan or spectacle. The walker is held to invite an alternative city to express itself, one that cannot be separated from the pedestrian body.

Chatting with Tully, while making this recording, I realised that this walk, in particular (with me, Tully, Polly, Bec, and Sunny) has become a kind of myth, at least amongst ourselves. Something that bound us pedestrians together. This would not have been possible by simply sitting around drinking tea and perusing the map. We had to walk it.

Listen in here [mp3, 7mb, 17min]
Read the original posting here.

This post records an embodied interaction between me and Sam, the (then) mayor of Marrickville Council.

The Greenie mayor and I go for a bike ride around 3 of the sham’s borders (south, west, and north), stopping along the way to check out apartment complexes with locked doors, children pissing on trees, and parks where the kids smoke dope. And having a nice cup of tea.

I enjoyed the pace of this story: the dialogue follows the action, as we cycle from place to place, each location shaping the conversations we have about the workings of council and issues of environmental concern. The movement of our bodies through the suburb is woven with the movement of our ideas as we chat and ride.

Sam was ousted from his position as mayor last September, as a result of dodgy deals being done. To tell the truth, I don’t really understand the inner workings of these deals, and I’m especially bewildered by this report which contains details about a particularly tricky democratic process, in which the new mayor, Morris Hanna, was installed after having “his name drawn from a hat” (!). Huh?

Still, Sam should hang in there, cos those green issues are getting bigger and bigger. One recent public stoush he’s had with Hanna is over the use of electric dryers in apartment buildings. Byrne says new apartment buildings should be designed so that washing can dry in the sun on balconies, reducing the need for coal-powered clothes dryers. Often, the body-corporate of a building does not allow such activities, from what I can gather, on aesthetic grounds. Hanna follows this aesthetic line, interestingly linking the “look” of clothes punctuating the modernist grid of apartment buildings with the idea of “slums”:

Mr Hanna said he also did not want his local government area to be turned into a slum, with people hanging their laundry over their balconies. “I travel overseas and I see them doing that here and it’s quite shocking. I don’t want to bring that to Marrickville,” he said.

There truly is no accounting for taste. On my travels to southern China, Barcelona, Naples, one of my FAVOURITE things was the washing hanging from balconies, personalising what might otherwise be grossly alienating architecture.

A pretty good coverage of this issue is over here. Typically, opposition to Byrne’s idea has focussed on abhorrence for the the idea of “banning” something (undemocratic!) rather than the broader issue of “saving the planet” (which while a good idea, should not involve any inconvenience or loss of our rights, right?).

Oh, listen to this story here.
And read the original tale in textual form here.

All this worrying about where the edge of my world sits!

In this little episode, I triumphantly declare that the video store I had previously thought was in Stanmore, is actually in the ’sham. Thank goodness for that, eh! If you click on the link below to the original entry there’s a map you can refer to which will help this all make sense!

Listen in The Choice is Ezy. [mp3, 1.2mb, 2.5min]

Read the original entry here

This is a “key episode” in the sham: in which I depart the neighbourhood for the day. Plenty of ruminations here about the nature of my experience due to having to be blindfolded the entire time.

Listen in here [26 min, 13mb mp3].

Read the original episode here.

This is the entry (posted one day before Easter 2006) in which I announce to the readership of the ’sham that I am considering breaking my self-imposed Petersham lockdown to visit my uncle Michael’s Darling Point house for Easter lunch. (The reason being that my dad was in town, and not in too great shape emotionally, and he’d especially asked me to come.)

Thus ensued, in the comments section, a debate on “fam versus sham” or “life versus art”, including comparisons with Joseph Beuys’ work “I love america and america loves me” (where, so the legend goes, he was blindfolded and refused to touch American soil).

Listen in here. [16min, 6mb, mp3]
…or you can hear the reading of this same episode as broadcast from Mystery Bay, down the NSW coast, where I have just travelled in a campervan. TRUE! Listen here. [8mb]

Original post is here.

In this episode, I liase with my neighbour Luciana about our real estate agents, sit on the front porch like a vechietto (that’s Italian for (”little old man”), and go for a walk along the Petersham/Lewisham border with Lisa Kelly. You can download it here. [7mb, 7 min, mp3]

In a serendipitous turn of events, Lisa Kelly got in touch recently, wanting to hang out over the Easter weekend. We met up on Sunday (April 8th 2007). She said she wanted to “go for a walk”. Neither of us mentioned our border walk of one year ago. She said she wanted to go to Lewisham, she’d never been there before. So we headed in that direction.

There was no anxiety about leaving the ’sham this time, instead we hooked around the back of Petersham primary school and plunged down into Lewisham. It was quieter than Petersham. Certainly, there are fewer planes going overhead. We stopped and spoke to a gorgeous old Portuguese woman after spying her excellent pumpkin patch. Her husband, she told us, is the farmer. He had trained his pumpkins to climb up old floorboard planks onto the roof of his garage, after which they trailed along this overhead trellis thing and drooped their orange-fleshy fruits below. One was so huge it had to be held up with a kind of sling made from an old hessian bag. It’s shape was like a teardrop, and I wondered whether the gravity had done that.

On the far side of Lewisham, we encountered the silo apartments, which are a re-development not dissimilar to the Newtown ones, hollowed out old wheat silos with flats inside. There seemed to be a sort of common room thing provided for the flats which was cool, we thought, although it looked empty and unused. We tut-tutted about the big expanse of land alongside the silos which was not being used to grow vegies. Just some decorative expensive looking plants.

On the way home we stopped to check out the secret future site of our Petersham community gardens. Oh yes, it’s gonna be fun.

The original blog entry upon which this podcast is based is located here.

Well this is it folks. Only an hour and a half to go.

The last few days I’ve been traipsing back and forth from the gallery to Petersham, using Parramatta Road as if it were the corridor of my house.
(more…)

Wednesday:

I meet the Aquilizans for the first time. Anna and I walk up to the Petersham Town Hall to see how they’re getting along. The power keeps shorting out in their flat, something about too many heaters on the same circuit. They must be cold, coming all the way from the Philippines.

Noon: I decide enough is enough. It’s time to punch through the border of the ’sham and inspect the gallery in Camperdown.

Up til now, I have been flirting with a few other ideas: leaving it until the opening, and grandly entering a completely empty gallery; sending someone else as my proxy to measure and photograph the space so I would know what to plan for, and so on. In the end, I figure all these stratagems are unnecessary. Mere stylistic gimmicks. Since my visit to Uncle Lester, the ’sham’s been bleeding air from its south side for nearly a fortnight. It’s pointless to pretend that the border rule is as important as it once was. Anyway, my point has been made. My integrity is intact. Isn’t it?

I walk along Parramatta Road towards Stanmore. Crossing the lights at Phillip Street, I feel the same little frisson as the other two times I’ve transgressed. But the feeling is fainter now, the power of the boundaries is beginning to fade. I keep expecting someone to lean out of a bus and exclaim “Hey Lucas! What are YOU doing here?” People love catching you in the act. But it doesn’t happen.

I pass the Stanmore McDonalds, and there it is: the former border of Petersham. I’ve only ever seen it in the photo Lisa took for me (which graces the banner of this blog) and for some reason I’d assumed the pavement signage would be much larger. And there’s the creek. Poor old Johnston’s Creek, reduced to a concrete-clad semi-circular drain running between a global take away franchise and an industrial building. There’s a plaque, embedded into the cement in front of a rusty fence overlooking the creek. The plaque needs a rub with a bit of Brasso.

At the gallery, I measure up the walls. There’s enough space for all the blog entries to be blu-tacked up, one day at a time. They’ll fill the room. If nothing else, it’ll be an impressive, and graphic, display of labour. I drag some furniture into the room, couches and a table for the computer. It’s going to be a simple show.

On the way home, I stop in at the Olympia Milk Bar. I figure, if I’m outside the border anyway, I may as well have the best and cheapest milkshake in the inner-west. The lights are out, there’s a softness to this old and very weird place. I’ve given up trying to start conversations with the owner. I figure, if he doesn’t want to talk, why force it?

Thursday:

Nicole from eleven magazine emails me. We’d made a tentative arrangement to do an interview today, but I feel too stressed to be able to sit still and talk about the project. Cheekily, I ask if she can come over anyway and do me a favour. I need folders from Officeworks - cardboard envelope folders for my blog printouts. And I need someone to get them for me while I stand on the border and wait. Nicole agrees to help me out.

It feels a bit odd to be doing this. I mean, yesterday I left for Camperdown. So why can’t I just pop over to Officeworks in Lewisham. What difference does it make?

I can’t explain. But that’s what happens.

On her way back from Officeworks, Nicole picks me up outside the shut-down fruit store. There’s good news and bad news. The folders look great, and they’re cheaper than expected. But my credit card has fallen down into a crevice between the plastic compartments under her car stereo. Nicole rummages around. I fetch a screwdriver, tongs, a coathanger. Eventually, the card emerges. Nicole races off, and I promise her an interview, sometime soon…

At one pm, I have an appointment with someone. But for the life of me, I can’t remember who, nor anything about it…

At eight, Bec and I get Indian take away. I ask the nice fellow behind the counter for some plastic containers, the kind they put the mint sauce into. I want to use them for making small flans for the exhibition on Saturday. He gives me about thirty. I ask how much I owe him. After a moment to reflect, he replies, “Just keep coming back!”

In the evening, I phone up Louise, who coaches me through the production of a large scale word document, using the “master document” function. This is so boring it’s almost putting me to sleep thinking about it now. At three am, a “book” emerges, weighing in at 141 pages and 85,000 words… [You can download it here, PDF 1.9MB]

Bec sits on the couch sifting through hundreds of Petersham photographs to make a powerpoint presentation. She chooses a handy 200. It should be noted, Bec is a photography curator. I trust her choices implicitly.

Friday:

I set up a style-sheet so that each blog entry can be neatly printed out without any fuss. These printouts will go up on the walls of the gallery.

Vanessa comes around and sets to work making mini flans. Lisa offers to help, and I send her shopping for tea, sugar, coffee, milk. We all sit in the kitchen together, gluing labels onto my folders for the exhibition. You cannot set a value on moral support of this kind.

At sunset, we sit down to watch 1001 nights on the internet. Vanessa has written today’s story. It’s about the perils of trying to cross Parramatta Road, and the nation of Malta seems to figure pretty importantly too. Barbara’s mouth rolls up and spits out the words, especially when she reaches this sentence:

grubby sticky tape wrapped around telegraph poles and bus tickets in the gutter and flattened cigarette butts.

We all hurry along. We’re due at the bowlo by six, and I’ve still got to find my Filipino guest artists…