Archive for the 'spatial politics' Category

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’

Participation, Experience, Public Art, Radio

Published
by
Lucas
on October 20, 2006
in interviews by me, public art and spatial politics
. 2 Comments

…what I’ve been up to lately…

- - -

Together with Eve Vincent, presenting at this conference at COFA:

http://www.cofa.unsw.edu.au/newsevents/news/news_0115.html

our abstract:

Participation and Experience: Redfern Waterloo Tour of Beauty

The desire for an active spectator-participant was a key goal of avant-garde art during the twentieth century. Rhetoric surrounding such art practice often connected “aesthetic interactivity” with the ideal of a wider participatory democracy. During the 1960s, in an attempt to overcome the separation between “art and life” which characterised the museum-based practice of much modernist art, artists like Allan Kaprow developed “Happenings” which occurred in the everyday places and rhythms of city life. Utilising the tools bequeathed by Kaprow’s Happenings, artist group SquatSpace now runs the Redfern Waterloo Tour of Beauty — wherein the “work of art” is to facilitate discussion about neighborhood life and community organising in inner-urbanSydney. This paper moves through the perennial question “but is it art?” in order to examine the Tour of Beauty as a case study of “Art as Experience” (John Dewey). This co-presentation engages two perspectives — SquatSpace collective member Lucas Ihlein talks about the making of “the tour as art”, and Eve Vincent speaks from the perspective of a participant-audience member.

- - -
Continue reading ‘Participation, Experience, Public Art, Radio’

Ian Milliss

Published
by
Lucas
on May 14, 2006
in odds and ends and spatial politics
. 0 Comments

Ian Milliss has just uploaded his new website. True to character, it’s information rich, but lacking in images. I like this a lot.

Ian is a legendary Aussie conceptual artist and an inspiring activist, having been involved in the defence of Darlinghurst’s Victoria Street squats in the early 1970s. There are some terrific articles about all his activities at the site.

Here are a few of my faves:

  • New Artist. Around this time, Milliss stopped exhibiting art altogether. This document gives an idea why…(1973)
  • The Barricades. In which he takes an aesthetic approach to describing the construction of barricades at Victoria Street. (1974)
  • Don’t moan, organise! (with apologies to Joe Hill) by Ian Burn and Ian Milliss. In which Burn and Milliss call for the restructuring of the Sydney Biennale along artist-run lines. (1979)

There really is a lot of great stuff on Ian’s site. It will become essential reading for many of us involved in art and activism, and who are interested in finding new ways to be artists (rather than just content providers to an existing system).

Beginning Bilateral Petersham

Published
by
Lucas
on April 4, 2006
in residencies, spatial politics and writing by me
. 2 Comments

[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’

commodification of the artist

Published
by
Lucas
on January 25, 2006
in spatial politics and theory
. 0 Comments

This chunk of text comes from a book called One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity, by Miwon Kwon, 2002, MIT Press, p46-7. It struck a chord with me because it seems to cut through some of the rhetoric I crap on with from time to time. I was thinking about this paragraph in terms of my project Bilateral Kellerberrin, which although not site-specific in a late 1960s sense (ie inextricably anchored to physical location), does grow out of the circumstances of the time and place in which it was planted.

Thus, as Kwon writes, "site" is not only a physical place, but also a set of conditions, social, discursive, temporal, and physical, which situate a project, make it comprehensible to its audience or participants. But the idea of Bilateral Kellerberrin is transferrable (in fact I am looking to transfer the same project to my home suburb of Petersham in Sydney, to see what will happen) - hence the following:

Generally the in situ configuration of a project that emerges out of such a situation is temporary, ostensibly unsuitable for re-presentation anywhere else without altering its meaning, partly because the commission is defined by a unique set of geographical and temporal circumstances and partly because the project is dependent on unpredictable and unprogrammable on-site relations. But such conditions, despite appearances to the contrary, do not circumvent or even complicate the problem of commodification, because there is a strange reversal now by which the artist comes to approximate the “work”, instead of the other way around as is commonly assumed (that is, art work as surrogate to the artist). Perhaps because of the absence of the artist from the physical manifestation of the work, the presence of the artist has become an absolute prerequisite for the execution/presentation of site-oriented projects. It is now the performative aspect of an artist’s characteristic mode of operation (even when working in collaboration) that is repeated and circulated as a new art commodity, with the artist him/herself functioning as the primary vehicle for its verification, repetition, and circulation.

strange strolls in fremantle

Published
by
Lucas
on December 22, 2005
in spatial politics and walking
. 0 Comments

this email came through from Perdy Phillips, in Perth. She recently organised a sound project called "strange strolls":

Hi There

Today [17 Dec 2005] is the last day of the strange strolls sound and walking art
project at the Moores Building Contemporary Art Gallery, Henry Street
Fremantle, Western Australia.

This project saw 16 Australian and international artists create sound
walking tours of Fremantle.  The viewer/listener hired a standard CD
Walkman from the Gallery and headed out into the streets of the West End. 
Audiences were taken away from the everyday by the sound experience
created.  The 14 different sound walks were extremely varied.  Some
artists lived locally and their works reflected personal connections to
place. Others had never been south of the Equator.  Central to the project
was the differences created between what you hear and what you see:  the
imaginative journeys undertaken extended the experience of the body and
made the streets living, luminous and imbricated.

For more details see http://www.perditaphillips.com/

For those of you who could not make it you can purchase a catalogue at
http://www.lethologicapress.org/

Also, a big thank you to everyone who assisted with the project during
the last three years.

Perdy

strange strolls
Curator: Perdita Phillips. Catalogue writer:  Nyands Smith.
Participating artists: Begum Basdas (Turkey/USA) Viv Corringham (England/USA)
Robert Curgenven (NT) Lawrence English (QLD) Aaron Coates Hull (NSW) Maria
Manuela Lopes and Paulo Bernardino (Portugal) Minaxi May (WA) Roxane
Permar (Shetland) Perdita Phillips (WA) Ric Spencer (WA) Kieran Stewart
(WA) Aili Vahtrapuu and Virve Pulver (Estonia) Walter van Rijn
(England/The Netherlands) Dorothee von Rechenberg (Switzerland).

Parramappa - Photos and Stories about places

Published
by
Lucas
on October 24, 2005
in spatial politics and walking
. 0 Comments

Via Antipopper:

"What makes a place interesting? How do we relate to it, and why — especially if we come from somewhere else? How do they become familiar or strange? These questions are what Parramappa is all about. Young people from refugee and newly arrived migrant backgrounds wandered Parramatta, taking photos and writing stories about different places. Choose a map to zoom into and find out about each neighbourhood."

http://www.ice.org.au/parramappa/index.html

terminus projects

Published
by
Lucas
on October 18, 2005
in odds and ends and spatial politics
. 1 Comment

This caught my attention: terminus projects.

…here are some key statements which interested me, from their "about" page:

-"Terminus Projects is an independent organisation that initiates site-specific projects of artistic and cultural relevance."
-"we commission artworks, performances, seminars, publications and events which reflect on the experiences which transform our perception of time, space and place."
-"Pioneer innovative and alternative sites for presenting contemporary works and ideas."
-"Instigate collaborations and exchange between practitioners, academics, and local communities on a national and international level."

Thus far, terminus projects seems to be presenting artist's video works in the sydney underground train video advertising network - these videos will pop up while commuters are waiting for trains, in between the product ads and the ads masquerading as "news."

It could be that terminus may begin to operate a bit like an Aussie version of Artangel. Which would be great. The organisers seem to be very professional, able to attract funding for ephemeral/site specific projects, and somewhat entrepreneurial, without being just about self-promo. They're young too.

the art of snoopping

Published
by
Lucas
on July 5, 2004
in performance art, public art and spatial politics
. 0 Comments
On Wed 7 July 2004, Jaye Hayes presented an evening of "snoopping" @ West Space. In the invitation to the event, she wrote:
"NUCA has lured me out of the shadows for 1 nite only to share the SNOOPP story for Resistance Through Rituals. there'll be some kind of explanation of my behaviour & various bits of antenna trash, plus a tour of the local gutter network.
so come along for a cup of tea & a chat :)
jaye"
—
NUCA #41 : Jaye Hayes | snoopp
snoopp vs 2.0 (2004)
subliminal non object oriented piezoelectric processor
http://subliminal.va.com.au/snoopp
She crawls into inner-city gutters after dark, a mobile cellular operator, a subliminal insect on an obscure mission. She is submerging, diving into the darkness, a bug in the code of the street, a disturbance in the energy field. The de-visioned dancer becomes a renegade radiobody, picking up signals & generating bodytext transmissions. She operates as an interactive micro-media unit; embodying the meta-physics of micro-radio.
Gutters are a network, she finds a portal & hacks in. As she jams the architecture of the indent, she mobilizes other possibilities. A temporary telemetric system emerges as the radiobody tunes in to the spatial signal & starts generating feedback. Inside the loop, her data-body dislocates across time-space dimensions creating a re-spatializing sequence; an electro-magnetic interference zone. Dissolving into waves of white noise, she becomes a distributed radio-kinetic entity.
Radio text & signal data are redirected via tech-tools while other residues remain at street level. Night after night, lurking in the dark, mapping the nodes of the network, a tiny telemetric insect shedding data, creating links to an elsewhere…

………….

after the event, Jaye wrote the following:

an experiment in SNOOPP sharing >>>
 
a back room, a faraday cage, a radio bunker, a listening library, a snoopp cell, a receiving dock.
i opened a gateway to my subliminal world & invited low-level listening & personal space-sharing.
the cosy room filled with warm bodies. 'it felt like being in your bedroom.'
but the critical mass solidified an expectation of 1-to-many broadcasting….
 
she attempted to reboot.
she deployed tactical failure.
she let them feel their way in.
she followed the flow.
she was speechless.
she hung out in the library.
she was dull & happy.
she scanned their bodies for signals.
she made personal connections.
she made lists.
she drank tea.
she became buffologous.
she started invoking willow.
she let andrew set the tone.
they waited for something to happen.
it didn't.
she let it go on that way for a while.
some people got immersed.
some people got impatient.
she was too subtle for some.
she surrendered to talkback.
she was curious.
she was conversational.
she was unprofessional.
she was a duckling (ugly).
she showed them her antenna trash.
she made a circuit of radiobodies.
she channel surfed.
she consulted the books.
she held onto the rock.
she played the inbetweens.
she led them out into the rain…

Teddy Cruz at the CCA

Published
by
Lucas
on March 6, 2004
in spatial politics
. 1 Comment

Down at the Canadian Centre for Architecture last night, I  attended a lecture by Architect Teddy Cruz, who works between San Diego (USA) and Tijuana (Mexico). He showed these powerful slides of the long long fence that runs between California and Mexico, "holding back the tide" of human movement to the richer northern state. The fence, constructed from the recycled steel landing mats that were used in the first "Gulf War" a decade ago, stretches right into the ocean. I find these images, fencing off the beach itself, to be quite violent, and certainly the graphic nature of the fence itself has been an inspiration and focus for many of the art projects initiated by the Border Art Workshop and others.

Cruz made some fascinating observations about the economies of exchange going on between the two border cities. For instance, humans are "traded" north, whereas discarded construction materials (like old tyres, wooden shipping pallets, and even entire demountable houses, are "traded" south). You can see quite clearly from aerial photos of the border territory, that the settlement of Tijuana is crowding to the border, pushing right up against the limit of the wall…whereas the settlements of San Diego seem to be retreating from the wall. One of the things Cruz seems to be constantly tackling is the issue of zoning. In an interview, he says:

"So many metaphors about this wall.  This city [Tijuana] crashes against this wall.  Its almost like the wall becomes a dam that keeps the intensity of this chaos, supposedly, this density from contaminating the picturesque suburban order of San Diego.  I call it a zero-setback at the border, because it’s a whole country leaning against the other in a zero-setback condition, again speaking of urbanism.  A zero-setback condition that is very much out of the idea of space in the United States."

[I understand the term "setback" to refer to the minimum legal distance between a property's boundary and the building on it. Setback is obviously something of more concern in the "sterile" suburbs of San Diego than in the more ad-hoc construction of Tijuana.]

When working in the United States, often with non-profit housing organisations to provide shelter for immigrants, Cruz often seeks to incorporate the seemingly chaotic land-use patterns from south of the border. For instance, recognising that small "unofficial" economies (like micro veggie markets) are a part of the lifestyle of the residents, he finds ways to make the housing spaces adapt to "mixed use" - such as having fences between properties fold down horizontally to become ad-hoc market-stall benches, or going beyond the density laws by building illegal small apartments which share kitchen and bathrooms (and hence doubling the population density). All these things are an attempt to adapt the land to the way of life of the residents, instead of the other way around.

Surprisingly, Cruz has found that the local councils are responding positively to his agitation - apparently they get hardly any input from architects about the need to change zoning regulations. And this is one of the most sobering points of his lecture - that architects need to push to be able to design not only the boxes that fit into the existing "invisible borders" within a city itself (property boundaries, zoning restrictions) but to also shape and move the borders themselves.

[postscript August 2006: more on teddy cruz here (thanks to Ian Milliss for the link) :

http://resilience.geog.mcgill.ca/blog/index.php/2006/03/15/teddy-cruz-what-adaptive-architecture-can-learn-from-shantytowns/  ]