Author Archive for Lucas

Beginning the Bon Scott Blog

Published
by
Lucas
on January 21, 2008
in blogging
. 1 Comment

I’m starting a new project. It’s all about Bon Scott, the singer from AC/DC. He died in 1980. During the first half of this year there will be a Bon Scott Festival in Fremantle, Western Australia. That’s where he spent much of his childhood, and that’s where he’s buried. Apparently his is the most visited grave in the Freo cemetary. A bunch of fans have gotten together to raise the money to have a bronze statue of Bon made up. The statue will be unveiled on February 24th at a memorial concert. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, rumour has it that not all his fans think a bronze statue is the best way to memorialise their hero.*)

I have been commissioned by the Fremantle Arts Centre to write a blog about all of this. I’ll be travelling to WA in February for the statue unveiling and concert, and again in April/May when there will be further festivities and an exhibition by visual artists responding to Bon’s life and work. My mission, hazy as it is right now, is to interact with “the fans”, whoever they might be.

I’ve been asked to do this project based on my previous blogging projects, Bilateral Kellerberrin, and The Sham. In those projects, I spent an extended period of time blogging about a small country town in WA, and my own home suburb in Sydney. In this new project, I will need to get my head around a different kind of “site” - no longer geographically specific, but a site which revolves around a community of people who are dispersed throughout the world, and who hold in common their enthusiasm for Bon Scott.

I have to disclose from the beginning: I am not a fan. I certainly don’t dislike the music of AC/DC, but it’s just never crossed my horizon in any significant way, and I’ve never gone out of my way to listen to it. The earlier work of Bon Scott, before he joined AC/DC - well, I know nothing about it at all. So the Bon Scott Blog will certainly be, at least at the beginning, my autobiographical account of “coming to know Bon Scott”. I hope that some of the fans will take me under their wing and show me the “Tao of Bon”.

My first task is to get to Fremantle for the concert and statue unveiling on the 24th of February. I’m looking for an ardent fan as a travelling companion to drive with me across the nullabor from Sydney to Perth. The candidate would need to have a working car with a good stereo, and maybe some camping gear. I will pay for the petrol. Please contact me at shortleftleg[at]yahoo[dot]com to register your interest. (I guess we’d need to leave at least 5 days in advance…)

Coming soon: the new Bon Scott Blog…

–

*but I can’t remember where I heard this rumour. Searching around the net, looking at the enthusiastic sites maintained by fanclubs, I haven’t seen anything critical of the idea yet. Maybe I just dreamed it.

Artists are to Blame?

Published
by
Lucas
on December 28, 2007
in artist run
. 1 Comment

[The following discussion was originally posted on the Artspective website, which, it seems has disappeared from the web. Thanks to the internet archive, I managed to hunt it down again, and I have taken the liberty of republishing it here.]

Artists are to blame: Simon Barney

In early March 2001 an Artist-Run Initiate Forum was held at the Tin Shed Gallery in Sydney. Simon Barney’s article ‘Artists are to blame’ would, perhaps, have artists rethinking the concepts of the artist-run gallery.
Continue reading ‘Artists are to Blame?’

Learning from being there?

Published
by
Lucas
on December 5, 2007
in performance art and re-enactment
. 3 Comments

concordia talk
[natty flyer designed by Abe, who organised the talk].

Last night I gave an informal slideshow talk about re-enactment and performance art at Concordia University in Montreal. Abe de Bruyn, an Aussie performance practitioner who I had met in Melbourne a few years back, is studying here now, and has initiated a series of guest lectures broadly on the topic of video and performance art.

I collected together a bunch of pictures I took on my recent trip to New York, to discuss re-enacting performance art as a strategy which is relevant to art history, archiving and documentation, as well something which is of social and phenomenological interest.
Continue reading ‘Learning from being there?’

Inhabiting Allan Kaprow’s Push and Pull

Published
by
Lucas
on November 23, 2007
in performance art and re-enactment
. 1 Comment

kaprow push pull instructions
[Excerpt from instructions page at Kaprow's Push and Pull. The full text of the instructions is available online here, or for the typewriter/paper feel, read them here.]

Creative Time organised a presentation of Allan Kaprow’s Push and Pull: A Furniture Comedy for Hans Hofmann, during the Performa Festival. It ran for three days at a space called Passerby.

Push and Pull is a dynamic installation in which anyone can come and rearrange furniture which is spread around in a room. Well, we might call it an installation now, but in Kaprow’s day (the piece was first presented in 1963) it was a “Happening” (or an “Environment”). It’s clear that Kaprow, in the four years since 18 Happenings in 6 Parts was presented, had substantially reworked his idea of what a Happening should be. If 18 Happenings in 6 Parts was a sort of experimental theatre involving specially prepared “actors”, then by the time he devised Push and Pull, Kaprow had moved on to creating situations where the “audience” was now the primary activator of the work.
Continue reading ‘Inhabiting Allan Kaprow’s Push and Pull’

Artivistic Fragments

Published
by
Lucas
on October 26, 2007
in mapping, spatial politics and tourism
. 4 Comments

keg and luca at artivistic
[keg and I present at the final round-table discussion]

Keg and have been attending Artivistic here in Montreal. It’s a DIY kinda conference about the junctions between art and activism, and this particular edition seems to be about occupation and space and nature. Big topics and sometimes the delegates struggle with large theoretical issues - the best sessions are grounded and case-study based. See a few pictures from the conference here.

Some of my favourites from the conference:
Continue reading ‘Artivistic Fragments’

Giving Up

Published
by
Lucas
on October 16, 2007
in odds and ends
. 4 Comments

peanuts never give up
(thanks to Charles Schultz for this drawing, and to this page for some motivational thoughts: “What separates the losers in life from the winners is that the winners press on.” Yikes. )

Liz Pulie, erstwhile publisher of Lives of the Artists Magazine mentioned to me recently that she was interested in giving up.

How can I explain? It’s been a while since she put out an edition of her mag. Has she given up production? Not really…it’s just that…like my Bilateral Blog, enthusiasm and energy to write comes in irregular bursts, and it can seem like things are getting stagnant, or that the whole project is set to collapse during the quiet times.
Continue reading ‘Giving Up’

SHELVE - notes from the archive

Published
by
Lucas
on August 3, 2007
in interviews with me and writing by me
. 2 Comments

shelve at cross arts

In April 2006, SHELVE (a sculpture I made back in 1997) was included in an exhibition at the Cross Art Projects called “Art Language - Every Publishable Place”. The page about that show is here: http://www.crossart.com.au/art_lang.html.

A few more pictures of the work are here. Ruark Lewis who curated the 2006 show at Cross Art, asked me to answer some questions about the work.

So here are my thoughts. Rough and unedited for the sake of the archive- Continue reading ‘SHELVE - notes from the archive’

Bilateral Blogging - Essay about Bilateral Kellerberrin now available

Published
by
Lucas
on June 21, 2007
in writing by me
. 3 Comments

Bilateral Kellerberrin Screenshot

An essay I wrote about my blog-as-art project Bilateral Kellerberrin has been published in The International Journal of the Arts in Society. You can check it out over here. Unfortunately, you have to buy the article (!) and I don’t know how easy that process is, although it’s only five bucks.

(But if you can’t be bothered paying, just email me or leave a comment, and I’ll send you a copy.)

To give you a broad idea, the essay is about blogging as a new(ish) form of artmaking, requiring us to think in new(ish) ways about its ethics and aesthetics. It also involves a bit of thinking about some of the ideas in Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics, particularly the idea of micro-utopias and the difference between art that occurs in -vs- out of an art gallery context. I’m following John Dewey’s concerns (from Art as Experience) that art should not compartmentalise itself into special architectural spaces, but try to find ways to co-exist with every day life on its own terms. I claim that blogging (as I used it in Bilateral Kellerberrin) has the capacity to do this.
Continue reading ‘Bilateral Blogging - Essay about Bilateral Kellerberrin now available’

Sustaining Practices in Melbourne

Published
by
Lucas
on May 29, 2007
in collaboration and sustainability
. 1 Comment

speed dating at the sustaining practices workshop

On Saturday I went to Melbourne to facilitate the running of a participatory workshop organised by Clubs Project Space , called Sustaining Practices.

The first activity was a speed dating session, in which 2 minutes was allowed for blah-blah-ing about what your particular concerns were. I used a dinger to shift them along to the next date. I made a 9 minute mp3 recording of the dating. It’s loud and fun! You can listen to it here [9 min, 4mb, mp3].

The Clubs crew sent out the following info before the event, to encourage participants to bring along ideas which would shape the course of the day: Continue reading ‘Sustaining Practices in Melbourne’

expanded cinema residency at performance space

Published
by
Lucas
on March 20, 2007
in expanded cinema, re-enactment and residencies
. 0 Comments

Louise Curham and I have been doing a residency at the Performance Space in Sydney, (March 5-25, 2007) to work on trying out some re-enactments of Expanded Cinema events from the early 1970s. We’ve been posting up our reports over here: http://teachingandlearningcinema.org