Author Archive for Lucas

A Melbourne Engagement

Published
by
Lucas
on May 17, 2010
in uncollectable art and workplace relations
. 4 Comments

This coming weekend I’ll be in Melbourne for Next Wave Festival. I’m speaking in a forum entitled “Taking it to the Streets” (!).

All the Details are here.

Come along to help me celebrate an early Bob Dylan’s Birthday!

2010 Next Wave Festival Club, 1000 £ Bend, 361
Sunday 23 May, 2pm-3:30pm
Little Lonsdale Street, Melbourne

This forum will explore the potential for publically-sited art to meaningfully engage with social issues beyond the art world. If one accepts that art can and should be marshalled towards social justice, then what are the specific artistic competencies that are best deployed towards these ends? What have been some of the successes and failures of socially and politically charged art in the public realm? And can art enact social change and still be good art?

speakers:

Deborah Kelly (Chair)
George Egerton-Warburton
Lucas Ihlein
Iain McIntyre

A Status Update

Published
by
Lucas
on April 12, 2010
in workplace relations
. 7 Comments

Ten days ago I deleted my Facebook account.

A week went by, and it seemed nobody noticed.

So I think I made the right decision.

[a few possibly related posts]

Best Job? Boring Blog?

Published
by
Lucas
on January 4, 2010
in blogging, tourism and workplace relations
. 2 Comments

best job in the world
[...screengrab from Sydney Morning Herald, January 4, 2010...]
- – -
…and so it turns out that Ben Southall, who “won” the “best job in the world” (his assignment – to live in the lap of luxury on the islands of Queensland’s Great Barrier Reef while writing a blog about his daily life) had to work a teensy bit harder than he expected.

In this article from the Sydney Morning Herald (via The Telegraph, London) Ben explains how he had to work 19 hour days, in a “gruelling seven-day-a-week grind of promotional events and official gladhanding”. (I love the term “gladhandling”.)
Continue reading ‘Best Job? Boring Blog?’

Brook’s way with kinds, categories and memes

Published
by
Lucas
on October 19, 2009
in odds and ends and writing by me
. 2 Comments

The following is a book review I wrote for Artlink Magazine, Vol 29, No.1, 2009. It’s about Donald Brook’s new book, “The Awful Truth About What Art Is”.

Artlink has published Brook’s book — it’s a print-on-demand number, you can find out more about it, and order it if you wish, here.

And if you every get the chance to meet Donald, as I did a few months ago, do take the opportunity: he’s a national treasure. He writes regularly here. In one of his blog posts, he tries out some of the ideas in his book, to much discussion, consternation and silliness.

- – - – -
Continue reading ‘Brook’s way with kinds, categories and memes’

Art as public forum: the art of blogging by Laura Hindmarsh

Published
by
Lucas
on August 26, 2009
in blogging and Writing by others
. 2 Comments

Laura Hindmarsh, an artist from Perth, recently wrote an article for UN Magazine entitled Art as public forum: the art of blogging.

Laura and I met just over a year ago when I was visiting Perth and working on the Bon Scott Blog. Together with her colleagues Claire and Anna, she sometimes makes projects under the name Inter Collective. The collective runs a blog parallel to their ephemeral art practices. When we met last year, we shared thoughts about our various motivations for blogging alongside interactions “in real life” (or as Lauren would say, “IRL”).

For one thing, as artists operating within an educational institution (at the time Laura was an honours students at UWA in Perth) blogging gave visibility to her otherwise “blink and you miss it” / “you had to be there” practices – making those practices available for “assessment” by the university system. But of course there’s more to it than that…

You can download Laura’s article in UN Magazine here (but you have to get the whole magazine as a 12MB pdf). For ease of use, I reproduce it below.

Laura also has some interesting ideas about the effects of keeping a blog on the experience of time. In one email she sent me, she used the term “structural intervalling” as a way of thinking about how daily blogging breaks time down into chunks which become manageable… but there wasn’t room for such complexities in this essay. Hopefully we’ll hear more on these ideas from Laura soon…

On with her article–
Continue reading ‘Art as public forum: the art of blogging by Laura Hindmarsh’

Shows, Shows…

Published
by
Lucas
on July 27, 2009
in Uncategorized
. 1 Comment

the sham george paton

Latest stuff…

I’m in Melbourne at the moment, for the launch of The Sham exhibition at George Paton Gallery. It’s to be an adaptation of my Bilateral Petersham project for the gallery, which I first did in 2007 at Artspace in Sydney.

The exhibition will launch on Wed 29 July, 5-7pm. The show runs from Tuesday 28 July 09 – Friday 7 August 09 between the hours of 11:00AM – 5:00PM, and I will be in there most of the time minding the gallery. Which is George Paton Gallery, second floor, Union House, Melbourne University. So pop in and have a cuppa eh.

All the fine details are here. I’ll also be doing a couple of talks while I’m in town.

The first is at Victoria University, at the invitation of Jason Maling. 12-1pm on Thursday the 30th of July. It’s at the Flinders St Campus of Vic Uni, 300 Flinders St, Melbourne, 17th Floor – Art and Design department. It’s be a general artist-talk about my stuff for the lunchtime lecture series at the uni art school.

The second will be at the Centre of PostColonial Studies. It’s specifically focused about the functioning of my blogging as art process. All the details are here.

Look forward to catching up with Melbourne friends at any of these events!

louise, guy, lucas

If you’re still in Sydney, this week is your last chance to catch Imprint, an exhibition curated by Anneke Jaspers at Artspace. In the show, I’ve collaborated with Louise Curham under the banner of the Teaching and Learning Cinema (TLC) to re-enact Guy Sherwin’s 1976 work Man with Mirror. You can see details of the progress of this work over at the TLC blog. I’ll update it with more notes soon, and a downloadable pdf brochure/poster about our piece too!

(the above photo shows Louise and Lucas with Guy Sherwin in the background at the exhibition launch in Sydney…)

Alphabet Soup!

Published
by
Lucas
on June 10, 2009
in odds and ends and workplace relations
. 1 Comment

This is a little animation I made a few years back for my sister’s self-published children’s literature magazine Alphabet Soup. It’s a great mag, targeting kids between 5 and 12 years old. Alphabet Soup is based on the philosophy that kids will write better by reading more – and the mag has space for children’s own stories, poems, and drawings too – a virtuous feedback loop…

When we were young, we subscribed to Cricket magazine (from USA) and Puffinalia, a local childrens’ creative writing magazine. These no longer exist, and there are are no equivalents available any more, so in true Ihlein tradition, my sis decided to D.I.Y. She has 3 kids of her own now, so I suppose they are her primary audience – but you can subscribe too!

Coming back to the above animation – we’ve never really done anything particular with it except watch it and chuckle. This little bit of moving image experimentation was the basis for my design of the Alphabet Soup logo, which you can see in flattened, coloured form over on the Soup website (I think it was processed after it left my hands, by my cousin Chris).

More kids lit stuff can be found on Soup Blog too…

Push and Pull, Redfern…

Published
by
Lucas
on May 28, 2009
in my projects
. 2 Comments

1963 push and pull
[image from 1963 version of Push and Pull...]

Kaprow’s Push and Pull launches tonight in Sydney, folks.

Some thoughts on our version of the work are here…

The Blogger’s Voice and the Wave of Learning

Published
by
Lucas
on May 8, 2009
in blogging and workplace relations
. 6 Comments

[...to follow on from my post about Two Types of Blogs... here is a post related to some of the processes involved in what I, in that post, called "type 2 blogging"...]

Last November, after I attended a permaculture course run by Kirsten and Nick, Kirsten asked me some questions about the nuts and bolts of blogging.

She asked, “In your blogs, how do you find your voice?”

This is an interesting question. What does it even mean, “voice”?
Continue reading ‘The Blogger’s Voice and the Wave of Learning’

A Homeless Kid?

Published
by
Lucas
on April 26, 2009
in Uncategorized
. 3 Comments

paddy the goat

Following on from all the recent goat-excitement… A few days ago, Steph from Sugargum Farm forwarded me a goaty plea from the suburbs of Melbourne.

Maja, a goat owner in the council area of Kingston, has been hassled by the council to get rid of Paddy (pictured above), a cute little goat she rescued. Her plea has rocketed around the online goat communities, as she asks sympathisers to sign her petition to let Paddy stay.

Here is the spiel from Maja’s petition callout:

We have 2 miniature goats as pets in a residential suburb of Melbourne. We have a permit for one of them, Pedro, who we have had for nearly 2 years. Our other boy, Patrick, was not purchased intentionally. We found him at 2 days old in a paddock near my work and his mother had abandoned him due to his being savagely attacked by a fox. He was distressed and in a lot of pain so we rescued him. 

Our vet had him on antibiotics for 2 weeks as he had pneumonia and nasty wounds from the fox attack. After about 3 months of 6 time a day feeds and many a hot water bottle filled to keep him warm as well as lots of love and care we have hand reared him back to health and he has become part of our family and an important companion for Pedro. 

We did the wrong thing and didn’t notify the council as firstly we didn’t know if he’d make it, and also we didn’t believe the council would understand out position and the seriousness of Patrick’s condition and make us re house him. Someone in the neighborhood has notified the council that we walk 2 goats in our area off a leash and this has prompted our local council to issue us with a notice to comply and remove Patrick within 2 weeks.

So far there are over 50 signatories urging the council to save Paddy!

I emailed Maja to let her know I was interested in anything to do with “goats-in-the-burbs”, and to ask for more details about her battle with the council. She sent me the story below, and a set of great photos of her two goat buddies.

Hi Lucas,

I just had a read through your website!
Love it!

We got goats because my husband has a similar obsession to you. there is just something about them that he loves! Next time you’re in Melbourne we’d love to have you over for a drink!

I have attached some photos of the boys and would love any help if you could offer it.

We are in the process of battling with the council at the moment. Pedro our eldest has a permit which we got by getting our immediate neighbours to sign a petition.

There are members of the council who seem compassionate about our situation but the young man who is dealing with our case directly seems to have it in for us so isn’t helping at all.

There is no law about keeping 2 goats. It just states that no domestic animal is to be kept in a property under an acre without a permit. 

We had some noise complaints when Pedro was younger but he grew out of bleating :) and now I think its because someone said we walk them off a leash, but they are so well behaved they just run after us…

Thanks so much for contacting me, I really appreciate it and I do hope that any exposure about this will help us!

Kindest,
Maja

paddy
Here’s young paddy being led for a walk by his flatmate, Pedro. Aww, cute little fella, how could you turf a kid onto the streets, mean Mr Councilman?