first thoughts to Sussi re residency

(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…

…not that i think replication is a problem at all…in fact, one of my interests right now is in “recreating” or “restaging” some hilarious flux pieces…many of which are rare to hear about, simply because they’re so difficult to document…and what i like about them is that, unlike big names in conceptual art of the same period, whose work is all owned and bought up by private and museum collectors, flux-stuff is still very much in the hands of artists – we can re-create work (much like a musician playing a rendition of a composer’s written music) and the “art” is right there in the “re-creation”…in fact, the “re” of “re-creation” is un-necessary…

…which i guess is one of the things i love about residency stuff…the “audience” has a strong sense of participating, of their participation having the potential to change things…or at least be significant…i suppose its not for everyone, there must be painters (and others…) who need heaps of private time to “do the work” prior to the moment of exhibition…

i am curious what you mean by “cartesian dualism” in relation to praxis and alienation… and how you think about your own work now…i liked the strong connection between what you and your fellow clog-makers were doing, and the idea of the “eight hour day”…art labour and other kinds of labour brought close somehow…and the way this was supported by the use of ex-public service rags…something very nice there…and yet art labour ( i imagine the clog workers and yourself) would have been paid (if at all) very little. like public (community?) service…

another thing i’m curious about is, doing a residency in your home town. what is that like? i have never done that. always somewhere else. when i was in birmingham in 2000 i visited an artist run space called B16 (the postcode of edgebaston, the suburb where the space was located)…there was a fellow there who lived in that suburb, and he did a residency for 3 months. got some kind of grant, gave up his job, gave up his flat, and really moved in to the gallery. set himself a rule that he would not leave the B16 postcode area for the whole time. (nuts!) by the end of the period he had got a local tailor to make him a B16 suit, he had made his own maps of the area, and he was running guided tours of the suburb on a regular basis…

anyhow i’ll shoot this off to you now so as not to overload the first missive. hear from you soon eh?
x lucas

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