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
Archive for the 'residencies' Category
[nb: the following is the first blog entry for the project Bilateral Petersham. For the rest, head on over to http://thesham.info]
Petersham_04_04_06
The clock ticked round to midnight and I sat in the kitchen watching it. When all the hands pointed to twelve, I took two photos. Without the flash, the clock looked yellow and blurry. Flash-frozen, on the other hand, it looked like it had been caught in the act. Embarrassed at having been sprung doing something vaguely shameful but essentially harmless.
That’s how I brought in the third of April. The beginning of “Bilateral Petersham,” aka “my Petersham project,” aka “The Petersham Lockdown.” There was no tangible difference between one moment, where I was not “on the job,” and the next, when the “project” had officially begun. No fanfare, no ribbon cutting, no glass of champagne. I went to bed and read a bit and then fell asleep.
Continue reading ‘Beginning Bilateral Petersham’
Tuesday, nine am. I’m just about to head back to the air-con-bedroom with a coffee when I bump into a woman in the hostel kitchen. She’s a job search broker from New Zealand. She’s doing her washing up from breakfast. She asks me if I’ve “seen everything there is to see in Darwin”.
No, not really, I say. I think of the crocodile farm, the cyclone simulator at the museum, fishing boats down at the harbour, trips to Litchfield, etc etc. People say you should see them, but we haven’t done these things, and we’re running out of time. Two weeks is not enough for Darwin.
There’s not very much to do here, is there? she says. And the heat. Your hair is constantly dripping: drip drip drip drip drip I can’t stand it. You just never get comfortable.
She is a large woman. She’s probably having a hard time of it. I sympathise with her about the sweat. The air in Darwin is like a gentle sauna. I feel moisture in every crevice. The back of my neck where my collar touches the skin has developed a stinging roughness which I can feel with my fingers, but I can’t see it in the mirror. Is this “heat rash”?
Continue reading ‘the air in darwin’
[The following was first published at the Fusion Strength Blog]
Thursday, nine am.
Each morning I set my alarm for 730 or eight. The idea is that I’ll get up and do some study. I have discovered that the only way I can study here is to sneak out of bed early, before the others wake up, tiptoe to the kitchen, and make myself a pot of black coffee. While the coffee is on the stove, I put on two slices of toast. Just before the it pops up, the coffee boils, and I take it off the element. Then, almost immediately, the toast pops. I butter it with vegemite, pour two cups of black coffee, stir sugar into one of them, balance the whole ensemble on a dinner plate, and go back to the air conditioned bedroom. Jason is still sleeping. My clatter makes him stir, however, and he opens his eyes a crack, laughs quietly in that way that he does and says “I smell coffee!” “Wake up and smell it,” I say. Thankfully, this is probably the lamest joke I’ll tell all day.
Continue reading ‘Coffee Stains in Bed’
the following spiel is lifted from the artists' village website: http://www.tav.org.sg/
Fusion Strength '05 = 24hr Art, Darwin
Fusion Strength is, as the title suggests, a fusion of strengths for the participating artists as well as the audiences. Based on the three notions of collaboration, intervention and performance, FS (Fusion Strength) is a heady mix. Started by Juliana Yasin, its initiator and artist, it has proved remarkably successful in Singapore and Indonesia. FS'05 now hits Darwin, Australia.
Structured around the idea that an art practise is organic and rhizoid, FS is about collaborating through intervention and performance. At the heart of it being the artist’s own interests and practises. Execution of the project begins by a Singaporean artist selecting an Australian counterpart to form a single cell. Each cell will then be given the opportunity to work together but nothing is made nor prepared before arrival at Darwin. It is at 24Hr Art where it really starts. Tapping into the local community there, the first cell will work towards a piece that will take form in any medium the cell decides, which could then be altered in any way by another cell based on a planned schedule. Three cycles of actions then form for FS in Darwin with three outcomes, all potentially beguiling.
What and where else could be more explosive than six artists given the creative freedom, the space and time to collaborate?
FS' 05 = 24hr Art, Darwin will be showing from 16th to 30th September 2005.
Participating artists
Elka Kerkhofs
Hayley West
Lucas Ihlein
Jason Lim
Juliana Yasin
Lina Adam
more info about the project at juliana's site…http://jy1970.tripod.com/id17.html
- - -
ps: there was a Fusion Strength Blog during the project.
[the following post is part of the Bilateral Kellerberrin project. For more on my Cunderdin workshops, see this link.]
cunderdin is 45 km from kellerberrin. As part of my residency at kellerberrin i am running some school workshops. Since i often do these kind of workshops (as a job) i thought it would be interesting to approach them as an experiment “in themselves” ie – something without a known outcome. That way the workshop process becomes as much a part of my ongoing project as any other aspect of the residency.
Felena found what could be the ideal class for such an experiment – the multimedia and information-communication technology (MM ICT) class at cunderdin high. The students are about 13-14 years old, there are about ten of them. Their teachers, Iain and Trevor, have a focus on film/video and computers, respectively. I think its an interesting class to be working with (as opposed to an “art” class) because there is already, i reckon, an openness to the idea of utilising whatever materials and processes happen to be in front of you, and are appropriate, for a given project.
Of course, the kind of art that i do was kinda unfamiliar to them. I ran them through a very rough powerpoint presentation of some of my projects, trying to draw the focus onto a careful consideration of the banal and everyday as an approach to art making. The “Cornflakes” performance and the orange juice installation were kind of confusing to them, I think. But I pressed on. The lecture theatre piece with cushions may have made an impact, I'm not sure. It's hard to tell when you are not only introducing them to your work, but also the the WHOLE IDEA of this kind of work. One bright spark kept asking “what's the point?” (something that Deakin students also asked a few weeks ago when i talked to them) and indeed that is perhaps the crucial question.
Trevor pointed out afterwards that it was potentially empowering for them to realise that they can make something out of what is in front of them – it is an honouring of the minor things that make up your life. I guess that's some kind of point. But anyway, a lack of point didnt seem to deter them from sitting with me, fairly undistracted, for an hour, which is an achievement with any kids of that age, i reckon, especially when i am not trying to seduce them with razzamatazz.
Before they ran off to little lunch I tried to squeeze out of them some of their interests, with a view to “doing something” together for the 4 weeks when they get back from their fortnight of holidays.
“What would you like to do with that period of time?”
Responses included :
-make something…a car? Drive it off a cliff – a destruction piece. (are there any cliffs around here?)
-make our own drugs (probably a bit out of our league in the time frame)
-create our own music, create our own games.
-design a hockey stick (i was impressed with this one, this project would involve carpentry, graphic design, engineering drawings, testing etc)
-make a cartoon character.
-a car racing or horse racing game
-something involving guitars.
It was good to gauge what they were into, and the idea of games and music popped up a bit, so maybe we can head off in that direction. I am aware that I need to structure, quite cleverly, the “freedom” which i intend to give them. It is probably most unproductive to let them loose and do “whatever they want” because (like improvised performance) they will most likely fall back on that which is familiar, behaviour wise, and i want to do the opposite. Probably I will begin each week with exposure to some particular items of art or media (either by me or by various luminaries i rustle up) and then get them to participate in a collaboration/play activity a la allan kaprow, something self-contained, so there is a “result” within the day. If these are adequately documented, it would be enough of an achievement to present the findings of four activities as a “workshop outcome”.
[the following is part of the Bilateral Kellerberrin project].
folks i have met so far in kellerberrin. a lotta them are men.
tony, a bearded guy on a bike who scared christina when she exited the gallery. he was very friendly, said he works wherever he can find it, at the moment helping a mate of his who is establishing a vineyard west of keller somewhere. said his mate is waiting for a $400 000 loan to set it up. they have been setting up “faggots” - bundles of sticks to hold the grape seedlings in place. tony said there used to be a vineyard in keller at the nunnery…
mick, who is the community development officer at the shire council. actually, i met him when i was here in january, as he featured in some paintings of himself as napoleon (i could be wrong) which were hung in husein’s monumental painting extravaganza. his wife (pat?) is a distribution point for eggs, so i gave him our empty egg cartons. he had popped around to say goodbye to kirsten, but had missed her by about ten minutes.
Continue reading ‘kellerberrin folks’
Arrived in Kellerberrin late last week to begin a 2 month (April/May) residency with IASKA (International Art Space Kellerberrin Australia)… luckily I caught the launch of Kirsten Bradley (of Cicada)'s wonderful Saltmilk environment. Not sure what will pan out for me here in Keller, but a few things are shaping up in my mind:
-working with the quirky local newsletter "The Pipeline" (a photocopied A4 "zine" in which the contributors do their own design, it makes for a fabulous fluxus-like publication)…
-workshops with media students (13-14 year olds) in neighboring town Cunderdin to make some sort of collaborative project over the next month and a bit…
-new local blogging action including making my own rather than relying on blog-city…
-learning how to play chess (perhaps i will advertise in "The Pipeline" for a chess pardner…
-a big Expanded Cinema show at the end of the residency, including a mini-Aussie tour for the stunning Line Describing a Cone by Anthony McCall - (pictures here) - Perth Sydney and possibly Brisbane and Canberra…
-visits from all my wonderful Perth friends and family
-anything else you might care to suggest…
[The following review of my show BILATERAL, by Ken Bolton, is from PLANET_EAF, http://www.eaf.asn.au/nlet/nlet111202.pdf, the Experimental Art Foundation's online version of its newsletter, Oct-Dec 2002]
SEEING (KEN BOLTON)
25 October to 16 November : LUCAS IHLEIN Bilateral
Sydney-based artist Lucas Ihlein’s stay at the Experimental art Foundation took the forms of an exhibition, a residency (effectively a ‘live-in’ exhibition), numerous outreach extensions of the show-and-project, and special events that took place simultaneously in different registers: the purely social, the social conceived and judged as exchange and reciprocity, and as a system viewed as or by ‘Art’.
As an exhibition Bilateral took the form of installation: much of the installation was made up of works produced (as installation in some cases) for previous incarnations of the project: installations in Singapore, Hong Kong and Perth. Many of the works recorded the experience of those places - the learning processes involved in adapting to them, the frameworks of thought they gave rise to - from preconception, prejudice, cliché, through to a measure of understanding.
An effect of Bilateral, then, was to foreground these things in general terms as well as specific - and to promote a degree of selfconsciousness about one’s own behaviour or about one’s city’s attitudes and the degree of sophistication, tolerance, complacency or ignorance this might evince. The viewing of (the) art was also cast as an experience much less neutral than the gallery cube normally implies. That is, the viewer’s presence relevantly carried signifiers of social class and caste (as it always does, but not usually to the art’s point); the art itself (inviting viewer participation, with the artist present, mediating the experience to a degree) was very much a social situation, with unstated social obligations and codes in place.
Ihlein produced a 3 colour silkscreened poster catalogue/invitation for the exhibition and produced new work in response to the live-in experience at the EAF and in response to Adelaide. Associated events included a film night (‘Film’ Films? Fine!) that, as well as the films, involved the staging of a Fluxus performance event, Albert M Fine’s Piece for Fluxorchestra and Ihlein’s Event For Touristic Sites - a kind of ‘action’. At this last volunteers (and people who joined in on the spot) wore T-shirts at a public tourist site (and on the occasion of the annual Adelaide Xmas Pageant) baldly proclaiming the truth of national stereotypes (All Australians are arse-lickers, All Germans are efficient, All Mexicans are loco, All Taiwanese are shifty sort of thing). Naturally, collected like this, they rendered the very formula ridiculous.
(see http://www.pica.org.au/art03/Residencies03.html for Sussi’s clog residency project at perth institute of contemporary arts)
the following is a chunk from an email i sent to Sussi Porsborg:
…regarding praxis and alienation, its certainly easy to feel alienated when at (the wrong) uni…while i did have a good experience at uwa, and remain friends with many of the lecturers there, it wasnt until some time after leaving that i found my real reference points and artistic predecessors…seems like the folks at uwa either didnt think to mention fluxus to me, or they just plain didnt know of it. there are some pieces i did while at uwa which, unknowingly, almost entirely replicate performances i since discovered were carried out in 1965…and so on…
Continue reading ‘first thoughts to Sussi re residency’
Recent Comments