Learning from Experience: in League with the City of Melbourne

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The following essay was commissioned in early 2011, by the League of Resonance – a Melbourne artist group comprising Jason Maling, Jess Olivieri and Sarah Rodigari. In this piece, I try to tease out an anatomy of sorts for their particular brand of socially engaged art practice. Much of the underlying information comes from an interview I did with the artists in early 2011 (thanks to Liz Pulie for the transcription yakka)…

[…a diagram to accompany the article. Click on the image to see it larger…]

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Dinner dates with strangers; excursions to inspect chewing gum stuck on waterpipes in back alleys; groups gathered to cross the road together; chance conversations on street corners: these are among the marginal, largely invisible activities which constitute the current project of the League of Resonance. The working methods which underlie a project like this are not widely understood. This is hardly surprising – the artists of the League employ a set of processes which are still relatively novel additions to the toolbox of contemporary art.
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New Project – WHAT LIES BENEATH

Place, blogging, links

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At the Right to the City Symposium yesterday, Jesse Adams Stein organised a panel on “Place Blogging”. I wasn’t able to make it, as SquatSpace were co-ordinating our wiki-workshop at the same time, but it certainly sounded like it could have been interesting. In the publicity material for the panel, my Bilateral Petersham project (carried out this month FIVE years ago!!) was mentioned as an example of place blogging. Strangely enough, this is the first time I’ve heard this term used to describe blogging within, and about, one’s hyper-local area – but now that I have heard it… wow, check this out!

Jesse writes a blog about her local neighbourhood, Ultimo. Also speaking on the panel was Meredith Jones from Marrickville, Matt & Polly Levinson from Darlinghurst, and Linda Carroli from Brisbane.

Here’s Jesse’s spiel about the panel discussion. I’ll be interested to hear how it went.

Also at the symposium was a panel on walking, organised by Performance Space, and expertly chaired by Bec Dean. I spoke, along with Jo Holder and Stacey Miers, about a collaborative project that Big Fag Press has begun called “Green Bans Art Walks”. (I’ll write up a description of that project soon).

Accompanying us on the panel was Karen Therese, whose wonderful project Waterloo Girls premiered this weekend; and Jennifer Hamilton, who is planning a walk in the rain along the Cooks River.

I’ve recently become a big fan of Jennifer’s blog… It seems that – contrary to my assumption that facebook (and whatever other shiny new things) had taken everybody’s minds off good old fashioned blogging – that this humble medium is still going strong, especially amongst those who want to think a bit more deeply about the place they live. Here’s another example.

The Right to the City – Diagram versus Wiki

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SquatSpace are currently involved in an exhibition at the Tin Sheds Gallery called The Right to the City. We decided to start plumbing the depths of our own history, based on the idea that, “after a decade of ratbaggery, if we don’t write our own history, who the hell will?!”

The exhibition has a large blackboard diagram beginning in 2000 (when we began) and continuing into 2012 and beyond. On the chalky diagram, we try to map a bunch of activities by protagonists from SquatSpace, as well as those in our nearby networks. I’ll put a photo up of the diagram soon – it looks a bit like a pebble dropped into a pond, or a weather map, or the circular rings of the cross-section of a tree.

The good thing about these big diagrams is that they give a kind of “world view” – in a glance, you can get the sense that “a shitload of things have gone on” in our world during the last decade. This visualisation of “a lot of things happening” is an end in itself, quite beyond the more detailed understandings about what those things actually were, that can be discovered by zooming your attention into the diagram.

But no matter how detailed, a two-dimensional diagram has limitations. First of all, the problem is that if too many connections are drawn on the diagram, the whole thing becomes a tangled mess, and ends up not communicating much at all (except the rather obvious fact that “there seem to be a lot of connections”). And as I’ve observed when making these sorts of complex diagrams in the last few years, when actually drawing up these diagrams, there’s a clear relationship between the amount of space on the page, and the flow of ideas in the brain. I’ve noticed that at the beginning, content and connections flow fast and thick, while towards the end, when the amount of “page real estate” gets more limited, my ideas start to slow down too. How could we go beyond this spatial limitation?

Well, in the case of this particular project, we decided to try out a “post-digital” method – to combine the old-skool analogue chalkboard with a new-skool digital tool of pedagogy: the wiki. The good thing about the wiki is that it is infinitely expandable: there is no end to the amount of stories, and versions of histories, that can be added, and the links that can be made between them. The limitation of the wiki is that you only ever see one detail at a time, rather than the whole world view. (And based on our experience so far, although the learning curve is not steep, it takes a surprisingly long time to craft decent wiki pages…) So the chalkboard and the wiki walk hand in hand.

SquatSpace is inviting anyone who was ever involved in our stuff (or we in yours) to contribute – as well as those whose work was influenced by us, which influenced us, or which seemed to coincide with what we were doing in a coincidental zeitgeist kinda way. The wiki is here.

Predator

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[Predator: image lifted from here…]

Every now and then I remember Predator.

Today, I visited Jill.txt, a blog by Jill Walker Rettberg I’ve been following for a few years now, which explores blogging as a form of research and fiction. In this post, Jill discusses disease blogging.

She writes, “blogging about your illness is to take back control over your body and your life by owning it, by expressing it yourself, on your terms”, and she linked to a few key examples of folks blogging about their struggles with cancer.

I felt moved to reply with the following:

One of the most powerful disease blogs I have ever been priveleged to read, is by an old friend known as Predator, who died in late 2003, early 2004, which tracks the progress of his cancer.

He did not believe in fancy mysql platforms underlying blogs – he published .txt files directly via ftp.

Predator did not make it – his last blog entry is particularly poignant.

Sadly, it seems his blog is no longer hosted, but I found a copy on the internet archive, here.

For someone like Predator, who had a fiercely scientific mind, coming to grips with his own impending death was something he needed a regular, public / private forum to think through. It just did not make rational sense to him that his body would soon give up on him, and this is something he grapples with throughout the blog.

Lucas

Some years ago, I was lucky enough to download from somewhere a PDF copy of Predator’s blog, combined with a whole lot of his other writings. It’s called “pred.txt: The selected rants of Michael Carlton”.

It no longer seems to be hosted online anywhere, so I’m going to post it up again here (about 11mb).

Long Live Predator.

For me, you will forever be visiting our squat in Pyrmont late in the night, with an unfeasibly large hot water system strapped to the back of your motorbike. And installing it. And making it function. In a building without (legal) power.
Long live Pred!

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I also found this: Predators manifesto on drain exploration, which is exhaustively detailed and riotously funny. It’s worth scrolling down to the end for the legal disclaimers. What a hoot.

Adelaide Traffic Island Garbage Map, now in a book!

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How exciting! Kris Harzinski, of Philadelphia, has just put together a book called From Here to There: A Curious Collection from the Hand Drawn Map Association, published by Princeton Architectural Press.

It contains my Adelaide Traffic Island Garbage Map, entitled simply MAP, 2007, which was printed on the Big Fag Press.

(The above photo is borrowed from Michael Surtee’s Flickr page, and his blog. I hope he doesn’t mind, as I have yet to receive a copy of the book myself.)

Here’s another blog which mentions the book (and my print!)

Oh, and! There’s an accompanying exhibition too! At Arcadia University, in Philly, from September 23 – November 7, 2010. What fun.

[The cover of the book…]

Two new fun things to do…

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What I’m working on right now:

Environmental Audit
A project as part of the MCA’s exhibition “In the Balance: Art for a Changing World”. In my contribution, I am carrying out an ‘environmental audit’ of this exhibition itself, which has an overt theme around environmentalism and sustainability. My work is an ongoing project running from start of July to end of October 2010. It’s made up of of social interactions with artists and museum workers, a series of blog posts, and a series of prints produced on the Big Fag Press and delivered regularly to the MCA during the course of the exhibition.

Tending
A gardening project at Sydney College of the Arts in Rozelle. Initiated by Ross Gibson, who commissioned me “to make a garden and write a blog about the process”. A dream project for me combining two of the things I love to do. I have coerced Diego Bonetto to work with me on the project, which runs from July to December 2010, just one day per week.

…see you over at those places!

Catfish in the dam

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This week’s Permaculture course theme was Aquaculture. I’m sure, like me, other students were captivated by the possibilities of introducing fishy and watery elements into our design systems, and seeing what you can do with old bathtubs. We were also struck with great fear around the farming methods for Tasmanian salmon.

Often after class I think about how some of the things I’ve learned could be applied to my Dad’s piece of land: a 5 acre block in the Hunter Valley, half “bush” with a small dam, half house site with lawn.

Last night I dreamed I was visiting Dad. He and I were talking about his dam. I was telling him he had to throw a bale of lucerne hay into it as well as some reeds and other pond weed seeds, and put in some yabbies – to try to get it producing some food.

In my waking life, I’m always wary of how much Permaculture propaganda to dump on Dad – I don’t want to overwhelm him with too much “Nick Says This is What You Should Do”; and I’m conscious that Permaculture is still (mis)perceived as quite “herbal” to some old fashioned and highly rational folks.

In my dream, we were walking around his dam, with fishing rods. There were big fish in there, we could see them swimming under the water. We were stunned and delighted. Suddenly we noticed a huge fish embedded in the sand near the dam, slowly breathing, stranded on dry land. We leaned in close to look at it. Dad reached down to pick it up. It made a “meow” sound like a cat. From this we knew it was a catfish, although it looked more like a large barramundi. I warned him to be careful, as catfish have poisonous spines.

Dad laid the catfish on a chopping board and took out a very large sharp knife. He was about to cut into it, but first he decided to feed the catfish some small baitfish that he had there – like whitebait or something. The catfish was still alive and gobbled up the small bait. I felt quite squeamish about this: it felt cruel, like the last meal of a condemned man. I knew that the big fella was soon to be sliced up himself.

And indeed, that’s what Dad did next, sinking the knife into the fat flesh behind the gills. The catfish bled profusely, deep red bloody meat spilling onto the unvarnished wooden porch of his house in the Hunter Valley.

Petersham Tree Audit

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olive and mulberry diagram

It seems redundant to say this, but here goes: trees are important. This week’s permaculture class was all about The Glory Of The Tree.

Speaking for myself, as a budding organic vegie enthusiast, up to now I’ve been a bit blase about our woody friends.

I have a couple of lemon trees in the backyard, but I think they’re “rootstock”: very thorny and no fruit. Someone (maybe my fruity friend Rohan) said they need to be grafted with a fruiting stock before they’ll actually make lemons. I considered pulling them out, because I was always getting poked on the butt by the thorns when I leaned over to collect lettuce leaves. But then my flatmate Louise said that I should just be patient and wait, and maybe some grafting guru would come along one day and we’d be able to fruitify them. I obeyed, and I still await the arrival of our citrus knight.
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Artlink Underground

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[The Underground radish – click to see it bigger…]

I guest-edited an edition of Artlink Magazine. You can read more about it here (including a few of the essays which are available there online.

The issue features great essays and artwork, interviews and comics, by and about Ian Milliss, Chris Fleming, Vanessa Berry, Leigh Rigozzi, Pat Grant, Rick Smith, Alison Bechdel, Margie Borschke, Ianto Ware, Geert Lovinck, Shane McGrath, Breakdown Press + Ian McIntyre, Glenn Barkley, Jessie Lymn, Danni Zuvela, Teri Hoskin, Ali Russell, Tony Birch, Caren Florance, Peter Drew, Melinda Rackham, Kirsten Bradley, Eve Vincent, and Donald Brook.

The issue will have a launch celebration on Sunday 4 July, 2010, at Bill and George in Redfern, Sydney.
Free, all welcome! Magazine available at a discount price!

3pm, Bill and George, 10-16 William St, Redfern, Sydney.

At the same time, Bill and George will also be launching their LIBRARIUM project, “a slow-growth free-range artisan’s library of small press publications etc”.

All the details about the launch are here and here.

PLUS! Hot off the Big Fag Press, I’ll be launching a limited edition print of the above image, which is used as the cover to this edition of Artlink.

Get ’em while they’re hot!

PLUS!! News just in:
This edition of Artlink will be launched by septuagenarian Newtown artist David Urqhuart !

David Urquhart was born in Kings Cross, Sydney, grew up in Homebush with the smells of the cattle yards a daily delight. He went to school, but was not educated, at Catholic schools.

David began his respectable working life in the rag trade, including selling bras and girdles for The Jenyns Patent Corset Company.

As was fashionable in 1968 he turned his back on his wicked capitalist ways and â€˜dropped outâ€™ and joined the marginal people.

As a graduate of Sydney College of the Arts, David imagines himself to be an artist.

David will ruminate briefly about the multiplicity of “undergrounds” he’s experienced over the years, before raising a glass to toast this new edition of Artlink Magazine !

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[Here you can see a photo of David fighting homophobia, with the help of the Roads and Traffic Authority. ]