Having attended Milkwood’s intro to permaculture course, I raved to anyone who would listen, about the idea of recycling the energy which constitutes our own shit, to use it again and again – rather than flushing it away to a non-usable state out in the ocean somewhere.
However – besides an ongoing fascination with my compost heap (a way of recycling the energy in scrap foods and plant residues, but not shit) – my “human shit ambition” has been just sitting there, waiting for something to happen. I haven’t managed to crack how to use it within an urban context (not within the constraints of my rental tenancy situation anyway). Continue reading ‘Trading Intangible Commodities’
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
[...screengrab from Sydney Morning Herald, January 4, 2010...]
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…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.
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.
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…
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!
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…)
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…
[...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"...]
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