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This interview was conducted in March 2004.

INTRO

Lucas Ihlein is an artist who's interested in "art projects which draw attention to the elements of exchange and communication between people."

Lucas was a winner of the 2003 Freedman Foundation Travelling Scholarship for Emerging Artists. He presented a "kind of forensic analysis" of his "sabotage-by-bomb of Simon Barney's Briefcase Gallery, which took place a year earlier."

Lucas lived in a gallery for a month in an exhibition titled Bilateral, has been involved in Squatspace, and is currently involved with the development of NUCA, the Network of Uncollectable Artists. He's currently in Montreal researching "Expanded Cinema", Fluxus, social research projects, and more.

CURRENT AND PAST PROJECTS

What are you doing/working on in Montreal?

My girlfriend Jane Simon is doing research here, as part of her Ph.D thesis. She's been looking at the work and the dialogue surrounding the work of Michael Snow (a seminal experimental filmmaker, who lives in Toronto). Montreal is a great city, very bustling and friendly, and there is good access to Snow's films here. Also it's really close to New York and Toronto, and to Windsor/Detroit, where we attended the Media City film festival recently. [see http://www.houseoftoast.ca/mediacity]

What did you get to see or do in London recently?

I'm also very interested in experimental film. In London I was looking through archives at some work from the early 1970s, produced by artists from the London Filmmakers Co-op (LFMC). The Co-Op doesn't exist any more, but the archives are now housed at an organisation called LUX. I was also delving into filing cabinets at the British Artists' Film Study Collection at Central St Martin's College.

What I'm researching is a thing called "Expanded Cinema," a phenomenon in which artists introduced live elements, such as performance, to the projection of a film. They were extending (expanding) experimentation beyond the "film itself" and into the "screening event". It was a key forerunner to what has become "video installation art" and yet it remains a largely unknown history. Unknown for a few reasons - first, because of the trickiness of presenting the work - very specific conditions need to be met (you can't just project the film and be done with it) and second, because the filmmakers themselves were quite resistant to their work being commodified. The artists from the LFMC deliberately opposed both the commercialisation of the film industry, and the "commodification" of the art object. They refused to sell copies of their films, which could only be accessed via a rental system through the Co-Op itself. The Co-Op was in control of the production, archiving, distribution, and exhibition of its members' films. It was a unique and exemplary model for artistic "co-operation". [you can read more about expanded cinema at my blog http://bilateral.blog-city.com/read/424751.htm ]

My research will hopefully culminate in the re-enactment of many of these "expanded cinema" works in Australia. This might happen in late 2004, and, funding permitting, will involve bringing out one or two of the original artists...at this point it looks like it's going to be pushed back into 2005...

In the 'State of the Arts News' at http://www.stateart.com.au/sota/news/default.asp?fid=2148
titled: 'Winners Announced: 2003 Freedman Foundation Travelling Scholarship for Emerging Artists', the blurb says:

"Lucas will travel to London, Berlin and Stuttgart in November 2003 to embark on research into three key areas of his art practice - Fluxus, Expanded Cinema and social research projects. Lucas also plans to meet with key artists Emmett Williams, Malcolm Le Grice and Stephen Willats to further his research into these areas."

Can you elaborate a bit about what Fluxus and what kind of social research projects you're working on?

"Expanded Cinema" fits into a kind of Fluxus way of working… Fluxus was (is) a specific art movement in the USA and Europe in the 1960s and 70s [a pretty simple intro to Fluxus can be found at http://www.sierra-arts.net/FLUXUS.html ] - many of the performance pieces by Fluxus artists (including Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, and Emmett Williams) were produced as "scores" in the same way a piece of music has a score. Thus other artists could carry out the piece simply by following the instructions.

I had intended to make it to Berlin to meet Emmett Williams, but never made it that far. I ran out of money.

However, I did meet Stephen Willats, which proved to be a fascinating encounter.

Willats is a veteran of "social resource projects" especially in London, where he has always lived. These projects involve interacting quite intensely with residents in particular neighbourhoods, usually social housing estates. He goes through a process, with willing participants, of getting them to "model" their own ways of living, utilising prompt questions and images. Generally, the residents produce a body of information about their homes, and their neighborhood, which are displayed on large panels in the estate itself, or within the local public library. To me, Willats is unique in his ability to generate and exhibit projects within a particular community, without the need to parasite that community's values by turning them into "art". There is an account of one of his recent projects at Variant Magazine: http://www.variant.ndtilda.co.uk/4texts/Jane_Kelly.html

I was interested to meet Willats, because I thought I might be able to glean some tips for a "social resource" project I have been wanting to initiate in Sydney - specifically in my home suburb of Beaconsfield, which is a little corner of Alexandria. (Near Green Square train station). Beaconsfield wakes at seven each morning to the dulcet tones of jackhammers and metal saws, as yet another warehouse is torn down and replaced with a dull apartment complex. Sure, it's happening all over Sydney, but Beaconsfield is special, because, unlike many of the rapidly gentrifying suburbs, it is not yet struck by amnesia. By this I mean, there is a large population of long-term residents, who remember what the suburb "used to be like". I suppose a project in Beaconsfield could utilise a methodology similar to that employed by Willats, involving having residents form "images" of how they view their neighborhood now, in the past, in the future.

Of course, I'd like it to be a bit more fun than that, as I am not really instinctually drawn to demographic surveys and door to door questioning. I would like it if the project could rally the neighborhood to take a more active role in what was happening around us (beyond the banality of attending local council planning meetings). An account by Sydney Morning Herald architecture writer Elizabeth Farrelly, of what is happening to the neighborhood can be found at http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/07/21/1058639723616.html

What other projects have you worked on or been involved in and where have they been exhibited or performed? (eg Squatspace)

SquatSpace is an artists group which began as a gallery at the Broadway Squats in late 2000. It was the only space in town where you could do whatever you wanted, physically speaking. One artist removed half the floor, another buried a TV in the earth under the floorboards. In one performance, a resident squatter threw dozens of old stereos and computers off the third story of the building, producing a poignant mangle of obsolete technology in the street that remained there for weeks.

Working with SquatSpace really made sense in a city like Sydney, where the "legitimate" hiring of space is absurdly expensive - I think the model of squatting was pretty inspiring to a lot of people, even if they might never try it themselves. Running that space forged a very strong collaborative relationship between the artists involved, and we've continued to generate occasional projects in various squatted sites ever since - for instance, this year was the 4th annual SquatFest film night, which we present at the same time and date as TropFest, but in a beautiful squatted venue.

At SquatFest, films by artists and activists are shown in a supportive and celebratory atmosphere - it's not hard to see how such an event can operate as a strong critique of the corporate nature of the film industry. As one TropFest punter blogged this year, "I doubt the idea of the original creators had big corporate logos adorning the screen. Sort of like an ad sponsered [sic] by 16 short films. Then again, if you want to put on a festival for 100,000 people, you have to suck it down." [from 23 Feb 2004, http://www.andrewandkathleen.com] [see also http://www.squatspace.com and http://scan.cat.org.au]

Another current project is the development of NUCA, the Network of Uncollectable Artists. I won't talk too much about it here, suffice to say that we are creating a set of bubblegum cards featuring Australia's 50 Most Un-Collectable Artists. Readers of Chaos Generation are most welcome to participate…[More info at http://www.uncollectables.net]

GETTING INTO ART

What kind of art do you create?

Recently I have become more and more interested in art projects which draw attention to the elements of exchange and communication between people. For instance, in late 2002 I did an exhibition at the Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide, called Bilateral, where I lived in the gallery for a whole month.

Naturally, this kind of thing has been done before. American artist Chris Burden slept on a shelf for a few weeks in a gallery in the 1970s. I remember a few years ago some people lived in the windows of a department store in Melbourne. Last year a magician lived in a glass box over the Thames in London for several days. Even if all these projects seem very similar on the surface, they do have significant differences in what they were setting out to achieve. Burden, along with many performance artists of his era, was testing the limits of both himself, and what the gallery system could tolerate as "art". The "living in a box" people, I imagine, are part of the same worldwide "reality tv" phenomenon which we all know about.

I saw my month at the EAF gallery somewhat differently - more as a way to add "value" to the experience of having a show in a city I am not from. By living in the space, I was able to meet nearly everyone who visited the exhibition, make coffee for them, spend a little time with them.

In Sydney, I work, periodically, at the MCA [http://www.mca.com.au], where I meet a lot of international artists - who, more often than not, fly in for a day or two before the opening, tweak their work a little, drink champagne, then jet off the next day. I ask myself - what kind of a life is this? What does it mean to be an artist? Are these people not interested in the place their work is touring to?

Conversely, a few years ago, I spent a few days in southern China - I met some excellent artists there, artists who really engage with the nitty gritty of what it is to be who they are, where they are. They make great work, which has been acknowledged, and curated into numerous shows around the world. The work travels, but, because of visa restrictions, the artists don't. So the curators are drinking the champagne, and the artists are sitting at home wondering how it all went.

I guess I feel that, if we must continue to utilise the "gallery convention" as a venue for art, then we need to "add value" to it, turn it into a place where discussions occur, food is consumed, films are watched…within the museum context, I've seen artists incredibly frustrated by the fact that they cannot control the display of their own work, as they are restricted by the public liability, or "artwork insurance" policies of the institution.

So I'm really interested in projects which re-discover that basic connection between artist and audience, in ways which aren't compromised by beaurocracy. These artists tend to be more aware of a connection between what they are doing, and the world around them too, as they are not buffered and couched within an artworld of internal references. (Believe it or not, there are still many many artists in Australia who still believe that the debates surrounding "abstract painting" still have mileage in them… stripes -vs- monochromes…. sheesh, gimme a break…)

What were your recent exhibits in Sydney at the Sir Hermann Black Gallery and the Performance Space about?

The show at the Sir Hermann Black Gallery was for winners of the Freedman Foundation Scholarship. It's a $5000 prize for overseas travel and research. The fella who gives the prize, Lawrence Freedman, says that travel really helped to open his mind and give him some of the best experiences of his life. He wanted to give that same opportunity to artists. It's a pretty good prize, because it doesn't come burdened with any obligations like study - it's just for travel.

In the Freedman exhibition, I presented a kind of forensic analysis of my sabotage-by-bomb of Simon Barney's Briefcase Gallery, which took place a year earlier. [see images of this project at [http://www.chaosgeneration.com/gallery/lucas/briefcase.htm ] Briefcase, as its name suggests, is a gallery which exists within the confines of a small box - exhibition openings take place at a pub, the Hollywood Hotel, and Simon carries the case around with him, occasionally squatting museum launch events too. It's one of my favourite artist-run projects in Sydney. Simon had been asking me to do something in the case for a while, but I had always wanted to blow it up rather than exhibit in it. Eventually, with the help of artist Simon Cavanough, I staged the theft and detonation of the Briefcase, complete with anonymous ransom notes and balaclavas. The event generated a lot of material, video, photos, scorched fragments, so these were packaged in a faux-forensic display for the show at Hermann Black. [You can read about Briefcase at http://www.artspective.com/profiles/simonBarney ]

The exhibition at Performance Space was called Video Spell (Actions) and was the first in a series curated by Blair French, concerning the various aspects of video as an art making form. (Actions) included Tom Nicholson, Sanja Pahoki, and myself, and the work was pretty much all based on documentary footage after an action or performance. My piece was a kind of summary of the wealth of photographs and video produced from my ongoing Event for Touristic Sites t-shirt project.
[ you can read about Event for Touristic Sites at http://www.thepaper.org.au/issues/034/034all_australians_are_slobs....html
or http://www.haikureview.net/haiku3/haiku3.htm#lucas ]

How did you first get interested in art and what inspired you to go on to study and then practice art?

Drawing, surprisingly enough. I was always good at drawing, and despite doing quite well at science and maths in high school, I felt that they were just "subjects" whereas art was a kind of "calling" for me. I was really into painting, too, in high school, and I thought that if I went on to study art at university, I'd be able to concentrate on that.

What's your background and training?

I went to UWA, in Perth, where I soon discovered that what I was really interested in was not drawing and painting per se, but "the event". Drawing was still very important to my practice - at first, I incorporated it into fledgling events - such as a 30 metre long self-portrait drawing hung from the university belltower for one night only, or a huge dinner party in a café surrounded by charcoal drawings of my friends. It was this social aspect of the work, the chance for it to live "beyond its frame" that really interested me, although I didn't fully understand that until later. It was at university that I first became interested in collaborative processes, film making, performance art…I remember also being deeply involved in issues surrounding the display and presentation of art, as a factor at least as important as the art itself. I suppose that's still an element that holds true for me.

ART THEMES / SUBJECTS

How do you come up with ideas for your art projects?

Usually by accident. One example - in 1995 I was invited to participate in an outdoor sculpture show in Perth. Each artist's "site" was designated by a numbered wooden peg hammered into the ground. The idea was, you would find your numbered peg, pull it out, and place your sculpture in that position. I was working together with artist Mick Hender, and we couldn't get past the beauty of the peg itself. It was raw wood, with the top painted turquoise, and each number carefully painted on in red. We had number 24. It was very beautiful, we couldn't throw it away! In a way, our dilemma was: how could we produce a sculpture that would beat that peg? So we built a glass display case and carefully placed it over the peg, out there in the field. [http://www.chaosgeneration.com/gallery/lucas/peg24.htm ] A lot of subsequent work derived from that peg piece - gallery installations, performances, sound recordings. The numbered peg became a kind of touchstone for us - first, it "claimed territory" in a particularly European kind of way, (a system we later came to question through squatting) - and second, it pointed to the possibility of making art from the here and now, from what is available to you in the present. That philosophy has informed many of my projects ever since.

What do you hope people get from your art?

One of the things I look for is the ability of the work to transcend its "art-ness" - in other words, how would a project operate outside the world of art? That was a particular concern for Event for Touristic Sites, which happened in public spaces populated by tourists. It was important for me that those tourists could respond to the project simply as a "strange thing" that happened in the streets, rather than as an artwork with all the attendant criteria of judgement which get in the way. [some grainy pix at http://adelaide.indymedia.org.au/front.php3?article_id=3652&group=webcast ]

On the other hand, I am well aware that the work straddles both worlds, and that it should also operate effectively within an art context - in which case, I am interested to demythologise the process of artmaking, get people involved, have them feel like they, too, could make a contribution - and certainly to move on from the intimidating, sanitising, monologue of museum shows.

Do you work in specific mediums or have you worked across lots of mediums eg film, video, digital, paint, sculpture, installation, photography etc?

Medium always is connected to the particular project. I have worked in all those media that you list. It really depends on what I'm trying to do. Right now, I'm working with writing a lot, on my blog, and with publishing, with the Network of Uncollectable Artists. [http://www.uncollectables.net] I admire artists who are able to sustain a long engagement with one particular medium, when it constantly yields new and interesting work. Equally, I can't stand the fetishisation of particular materials or technologies for their own sake. You see this happening a lot these days.

What are your work tools?

Pen, paper, blog, e-lists, meetings, video camera, drill, saw, text messaging, an old van, countless collaborators.

How long does it take you to create a new project?

Seems to take longer now than it used to. I think I am more patient, and confident that a project will reach fruition when it needs to. In the past I used to stay up all night finishing things which were conceived and produced in just a few days. With projects of a collaborative nature, which involve many people and a lot of communication, (like NUCA) the best part of a year seems to be a good build-up.

Do you mainly work on your own projects or do you collaborate a lot?

A bit of both. Collaborating enables me to achieve way more than I could alone, and is healthy because it involves relinquishing control. But if I only collaborate, I burn out. One must have both.

Where do you want to take your art?

In Montreal, I've begun helping a local school for "kids at risk" to produce a video documentary about their work-placement programmes. Although I really have no experience in the discipline of documentary making, it's an area I'd like to further explore. I think it's a really powerful tool of communication/propaganda, and it's definitely worth learning that language.

Some of your work is exhibited for a week or so at say the Performance Space in Sydney or wherever. Does it matter that it's ephemeral even though you may have spent some time developing the project?

The ephemeral thing doesn't really worry me. All the work can be re-staged in some form or another, if needed (although it rarely is)…The projects live on as documents, images, video footage, written stories. In the end, many more folks gain access to my work through these documents, than from the original "show". That's part of the aims of the Network of Uncollectable Artists - to make historical records of all this amazing activity - those historical records inspire others, and affect what goes on in the future. [http://www.uncollectables.net]

LUCAS AND ART

Do you see or call yourself an artist? And what does that mean to you? (or do you see yourself as a communicator, philosopher, thinker, commentator, strategist, creator, producer and lots of other things?)

In my ideal world, the word "artist" encompasses all those terms already. So sure, I think those terms apply. But still, when I tell people I am an artist, they always ask "So, what do you do, paint?"

Why do you do what you do?

It seems to fit for me. I don't much like full-time employment, and, although I was a good student, I'm not sure if I could go back to that discipline again. I like having the freedom of time to pursue the things that I'm interested in, even if that means I pay an "income-penalty". It's a lifestyle choice!

SURVIVAL AND ART AND VALUE

How do you or artists generally survive/make a living? (especially if they're not producing 'commercial' art)?

We generally work in shit jobs which at least allow us to have the mental energy to put into our own work. Many many of us are on the dole, and we work job-to-job in a freelance capacity. Usually we have some skill which can be used in an industry - for example, I work in museums setting up shows, or taking students on tours of exhibitions, or running art making workshops. Friends of mine make props for the film industry, or the opera house, or whatever. Others get work editing TV shows or doing graphic design, but you have to be careful, because some jobs like that can turn into "real" jobs and demand a lot from you.

Is art meant to be 'valued'?

Hmm… recently I've been reading a book called We Want Some Too by Toronto writer Hal Niedzviecki. His basic premise is that people produce art (or zines or music or pranks or activism or blogs or…) because of a kind of inherent egotism. He argues that we are swamped by the cultural productions of "mass culture" (ie pop culture, mass media), many of which exhort us to be creative, individualistic, and to "break out of the mold". And yet, what chance is there for us to re-play our creativity, when the cultural industries are sewn up by media corporations, and, furthermore, when our common culture and our collective stories all derive from that mass culture itself?

So, for Niedzviecki, the cottage-industry productions of the thousands upon thousands of us who produce these kinds of art (mostly people using their spare time after employment) are a method for giving some sort of meaning to their lives, a feeling of being "in control" of something, even with the knowledge that this activity is not going to change the world. I think it's a very persuasive theory, although it presents a strong challenge to the notion that our self-styled rebellious practices are revolutionary in some way. [you can read an interview with Hal Niedzviecki at http://www.bookmouth.com/Niedzviecki.html]

OTHER ARTISTS' WORK

Who are some other artists or specific works that you like?

I was really inspired by David Medalla and his London Biennale project when I was in London in 2000. It's a free-for all festival, which, in a way, makes fun of the self-important Biennale circuit currently dominating the international art system. At the same time, the London Biennale was a wonderful, friendly, collaborative environment for presenting work - the opposite of what I had expected to find in London's hyped-up art scene. [http://www.londonbiennale.org]

In addition, some friends of mine, Rohan Stanley and Bec Neill, ran a gallery in London called Stuff, where they would serve these outrageously good cocktails and delicious coffee - I think its from them that I really learned the art of hospitality, which is important to my own work.

I've also, in the last couple of years, really grown to love the work of Gordon Matta-Clark, the New Yorker most famous for cutting a house in two. His art involved the politics of space and property ownership in a really interesting way, a way that avoided becoming preachy or dull.

FUTURE...

Are there any type of projects you'd like to work on one day or places you'd like to show/perform your work etc?

I really can't predict where things will head from here. Often some kind of partly accidental opportunity sends me off on a new direction, like in 1998/9, when I got to travel to Singapore, Perth, and Hong Kong, for the Artists' Regional Exchange. That experience was really important, it opened me up to the potential of international artists' networks. Probably I'm going to work deeper into this whole art/communication thing and see where it goes, and whether that means video documentaries, or more and more writing, it's too soon to say…

View Lucas Ihlein's online gallery: http://www.chaosgeneration.com/gallery/lucas
Read Lucas Ihlein's blog at: http://bilateral.blog-city.com
Contact Lucas: bilateral@bigfoot.com