In conversation with Lucas Ihlein for Artlink Magazine
Mon, Sep 5 2016The September issue of Artlink Magazine – a quarterly themed magazine covering contemporary art and ideas from Australia and the Asia-Pacific – includes a conversation we recently made with artist Lucas Ihlein. Ihlein's projects explore subjects as diverse as agriculture, gardening and social ecology, everyday life, avant-garde cinema history, fan culture, urban planning, communication and social relations.
The interview, titled "1:1 scale art and the Yeomans Project in North Queensland", is preceded with an intro contextualising our conversation and how we met:
We first met Lucas Ihlein in May 2014 at the recommendation of artist Nicholas Mangan. We had been invited to Melbourne to participate in Gertrude Contemporary’s Visiting Curator Program in partnership with Monash University of Art Design & Architecture, and had taken a few days out to visit the Biennale of Sydney and meet some Sydney-based artists. Nicholas was already familiar with our curatorial interests, stemming from ecology and site-specific practices; indeed, we’ve recently made an extended interview with him for the catalogue of his exhibition "Limits to Growth", so his matchmaking with Lucas was prescient. We talked for hours and have been corresponding ever since, with a view to collaborating further.
We were struck by the breadth and enthusiasm of Lucas’s practice and his voracious approach to the process of learning from the point of view of a novice. Where other people might pain over the policing of the roles of artist, curator or researcher, Lucas happily didn’t spend much time worrying about it. Accordingly, although it was the engagement with social and environmental ecology that initially piqued our interest, we soon realised that his was a collaborative practice that has embraced, for example, the re-enactment of “expanded cinema” works from the 1960s and 1970s (in the form of Teaching and Learning Cinema, run with Louise Curham) as well as a “blogging as art”, an approach that really chimed with our project for The Last Newspaper for which we had edited a weekly newspaper within an exhibition.
Indeed, a key impulse of our approach to the projects we have undertaken as Latitudes around art and ecology, in the broadest sense, has been to resist the narrow restraints of normative environmental-concern ecology, in part following Felix Guattari’s essay "The Three Ecologies" (2000), to encompass social and political relations, human subjectivity as well as historical research. In other words, thinking about a practice that does not necessarily give primacy to exhibition‑making as well as considering what an ecological art project might mean in terms of process and site, and thinking through what acting ecologically might entail in relation to acting curatorially, acting editorially, or acting historically, and so on.
Looking back on our projects in collaboration with the Royal Society of Arts “Arts & Ecology” programme—a public commission for London with artist Tue Greenfort (2005–8), our publication "Land Art: A Cultural Ecology Handbook" (Royal Society of Arts/Arts Council England, 2006), and the symposium of “Art, Ecology and the Politics of Change”, 8th Sharjah Biennial (2007)—as well as the exhibition "Greenwashing. Environment: Perils, Promises and Perplexities", Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2008), they now seem to belong to a very specific time when green issues gained wider traction. One might crudely say this began with the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change in 2006 and effectively ended, or was overshadowed, by the 2008 financial crisis and its grim legacies.
We begin this interview at a moment when we’re revisiting some of the concerns left in the wake of such projects from the near past while preparing a group exhibition for CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux in 2017 around the carbon cycle and narratives of raw materials. At the time of writing Lucas has just returned from Guangzhou, where he has been exploring the geographical and social dimensions of sea level rise in the Pearl River Delta.
Continue reading...
Lucas Ihlein is an Australia Council for the Arts Fellow in Emerging and Experimental Arts. He is currently showing alongside Trevor Yeung (Hong Kong) in Sea Pearl White Cloud 海珠白雲 at 4a Centre for Contemporary Asian Art until 24 September 2016. Ihlein’s collaborative project Sugar vs the Reef will culminate in an exhibition at Artspace Mackay, Queensland, in mid-2018.
RELATED CONTENT:
2016, Australia, carbon cycle, Ecology, interview, latitudes, Lucas Ihlein, magazine
The interview, titled "1:1 scale art and the Yeomans Project in North Queensland", is preceded with an intro contextualising our conversation and how we met:
 |
| Lucas Ihlein and Ian Milliss, "The Yeomans Project", field trip. Farmer Peter Clinch demonstrates the keyline irrigation channels at The Oaks Organics, Camden, NSW, 2014. Photo by Caren Florance. |
We first met Lucas Ihlein in May 2014 at the recommendation of artist Nicholas Mangan. We had been invited to Melbourne to participate in Gertrude Contemporary’s Visiting Curator Program in partnership with Monash University of Art Design & Architecture, and had taken a few days out to visit the Biennale of Sydney and meet some Sydney-based artists. Nicholas was already familiar with our curatorial interests, stemming from ecology and site-specific practices; indeed, we’ve recently made an extended interview with him for the catalogue of his exhibition "Limits to Growth", so his matchmaking with Lucas was prescient. We talked for hours and have been corresponding ever since, with a view to collaborating further.
We were struck by the breadth and enthusiasm of Lucas’s practice and his voracious approach to the process of learning from the point of view of a novice. Where other people might pain over the policing of the roles of artist, curator or researcher, Lucas happily didn’t spend much time worrying about it. Accordingly, although it was the engagement with social and environmental ecology that initially piqued our interest, we soon realised that his was a collaborative practice that has embraced, for example, the re-enactment of “expanded cinema” works from the 1960s and 1970s (in the form of Teaching and Learning Cinema, run with Louise Curham) as well as a “blogging as art”, an approach that really chimed with our project for The Last Newspaper for which we had edited a weekly newspaper within an exhibition.
Indeed, a key impulse of our approach to the projects we have undertaken as Latitudes around art and ecology, in the broadest sense, has been to resist the narrow restraints of normative environmental-concern ecology, in part following Felix Guattari’s essay "The Three Ecologies" (2000), to encompass social and political relations, human subjectivity as well as historical research. In other words, thinking about a practice that does not necessarily give primacy to exhibition‑making as well as considering what an ecological art project might mean in terms of process and site, and thinking through what acting ecologically might entail in relation to acting curatorially, acting editorially, or acting historically, and so on.
Looking back on our projects in collaboration with the Royal Society of Arts “Arts & Ecology” programme—a public commission for London with artist Tue Greenfort (2005–8), our publication "Land Art: A Cultural Ecology Handbook" (Royal Society of Arts/Arts Council England, 2006), and the symposium of “Art, Ecology and the Politics of Change”, 8th Sharjah Biennial (2007)—as well as the exhibition "Greenwashing. Environment: Perils, Promises and Perplexities", Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2008), they now seem to belong to a very specific time when green issues gained wider traction. One might crudely say this began with the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change in 2006 and effectively ended, or was overshadowed, by the 2008 financial crisis and its grim legacies.
We begin this interview at a moment when we’re revisiting some of the concerns left in the wake of such projects from the near past while preparing a group exhibition for CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux in 2017 around the carbon cycle and narratives of raw materials. At the time of writing Lucas has just returned from Guangzhou, where he has been exploring the geographical and social dimensions of sea level rise in the Pearl River Delta.
Continue reading...
Lucas Ihlein is an Australia Council for the Arts Fellow in Emerging and Experimental Arts. He is currently showing alongside Trevor Yeung (Hong Kong) in Sea Pearl White Cloud 海珠白雲 at 4a Centre for Contemporary Asian Art until 24 September 2016. Ihlein’s collaborative project Sugar vs the Reef will culminate in an exhibition at Artspace Mackay, Queensland, in mid-2018.
RELATED CONTENT:
- Lucas Ilhein website.
- Archive of texts written by Latitudes.
- Interview with Nicholas Mangan for his forthcoming catalogue ‘Limits to Growth’ 20 April 2016.
Interview with Erick Beltrán & Jorge Satorre published in 'Atlántica' magazine #52
Mon, Feb 13 2012 |
| Installation view of 'Modelling Standard' at Galeria Joan Prats, Barcelona. Jorge Satorre and Erick Beltrán (Illustrations by Jorge Aviña), “Modelling Standard”, 2010. 58 photocopies pasted on the wall. Variable dimensions. Courtesy of the artists. |
In the current issue of the 'Atlántica' magazine #52 (to be launched on 16 February at 4pm, at the Sala de Amigos, Hall 8, ARCOmadrid), there is an interview between Erick Beltrán, Jorge Satorre, and Latitudes conducted in November 2011 during the installation week of the exhibition at Galeria Joan Prats, Barcelona. Below is an abstract of the 4,000 words on phantom limbs, microhistory, devil's drool, apophenia, collaboration, information systems, Sigmund Freud's dog Jo-Fi, collage, döppelgangers, Fantomas, mirror neurons, unorthodox research methods, validation...
– PART
I –
Latitudes
(L): Your exhibition at Galería Joan Prats in Barcelona is the latest installment of your Modelling
Standard
project, as well as being a group show which includes the work of
other artists. [1] Where should we begin the story, where does it start for you?
Jorge Satorre (JS): At the core of Modelling Standard is our interest in the methodology proposed by Italian microhistory during the seventies as well as its precedents. Specifically, the essay of Carlo Ginzburg ‘Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm’, which was published in 1979, functioned as one of the main pillars of our project. In the text, he tried to explain a new way of making history in which there are three basic methods to follow: first, reducing scale; second, in-depth investigations of the few sources at hand; and third, exploitation of hints and traces – working like a detective. [2] Ginzburg supported his theory by alluding to the fathers of this paradigm: Sigmund Freud, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Giovanni Morelli. These three people worked in very different fields, though they shared a medical background and operated in the manner of a detective: deciphering clues through symptoms and finding hidden meaning in details. From this trigger, Erick and I started opening up a web of relations.
L: It is now a fascinatingly complex project which involves a whole host of characters and has evolved through an exhibition at FormContent in London in 2010 and a comic book that you produced for Casa Vecina in Mexico City earlier this year. Integral to the project are the amazing drawings of Jorge Aviña, who we’ll come onto specifically in a moment, which you commissioned as illustrations of certain concepts. But as Charles Fort said, ‘one measures a circle, beginning anywhere’... so, let’s pick one drawing and one character – Vilayanur Ramachandran?
 |
| Erick Beltrán and Dr. Vilayanur Ramachandran. Courtesy the artist. |
Erick
Beltrán (EB):
Ramachandran represents a really curious phenomenon that gets further
explored in the comic – the analyses of the phantom limb and mirror
neurons. He found out that there are cells in the brain that possess
a representative image of our body. If those cells are electrically
stimulated, one starts to feel different parts of the body. Via
Wilder Penfield’s understanding of the part of the brain called the
cortical homunculus, neuroscientists concluded that this
representation is distorted, it’s not to scale with how the body
really is. Some parts have more sensory neurons than others, hence
they appear bigger in the brain’s body image: for instance, the
hands of ‘Penfield’s homunculus’ are too big and the torso is
way too small.
L:
What is the relation between the individual line drawings and the
comic?
JS:
For instance, the misperception Erick mentioned really became the
centre of the comic, which is titled El
Hallazgo del Miembro Fantasma (The
Discovery of the Phantom Limb). The 58
individual drawings were the first part of the project and are pasted
on the wall like posters here in Barcelona as they were similarly in
London. Their structure and relations are set out more like a draft.
The comic is basically a story talking about the power of the images
in which we incorporated some of the characters from the first part
of the project.
L:
The comic format must have posed a different challenge; rather than
jumping from drawing to drawing as with the talk-performances you
have done during the openings of the projects, a narrative has to be
set out and digested linearly?
EB:
We made a sort of ‘game of shadows’ with the comic by
encompassing the narrative and the visual part. A novel however is
something we are going to do at some point.
JS:
The whole project has also set out a new problem for us: we began
with the analysis of microhistory,
yet as we mentioned before, now we realise this has evolved into
considering the power of images. All the characters somehow tackle
this problem in one way or another, and with the comic, we created a
detective story where the characters are victims and perpetrators
of a crime related to images.
It
has been a ping-pong of ideas between us, but we have also let chance
be a part of the process. We have had to confront our decisions and
integrate characters. Jorge Aviña is the illustrator who, as you
said, has produced all the drawings for the project, and we realised
that he had a lot to do with Fantomas, a fictional character in a
Mexican comic series of the 1960s, based on the French character
Fantômas. One of the writers of Fantomas,
Gonzalo Martré, who is now 84, becomes the criminal in our comic and
also is the co-writer of El
Hallazgo del Miembro Fantasma.
EB:
By
then we had realised we had gathered a sort of ‘dream team’ of
what Fantomas could represent today.
 |
| Jorge
Satorre and Erick Beltrán (Illustrations
by Jorge Aviña), “Modelling
Standard”, 2010. 58 photocopies pasted on the wall. Variable dimensions. Courtesy of the artists. |
–
[1] Modelling
Standard,
an exhibition organized by Jorge Satorre and Erick Beltrán. With the participation of Christoph Keller, Raphaël Zarka, Paloma Polo,
Bernardo Ortiz, Efrén Álvarez, Meris Angioletti, Jose Antonio Vega
Macotela, Vilayanur Ramachandran, Jorge Aviña and Florian Göttke.
Galería Joan Prats, Barcelona, November–December 2011.
[2] Carlo
Ginzburg, ‘Clues:
Roots of an Evidential Paradigm’, in Clues,
Myths, and the Historical Method, translated by John Tedeschi and Anne C. Tedeschi (Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1989), p. 102. The Italian edition is ‘Spie:
Radici di un paradigma indizario’, in Aldo Gargani and Carlo
Ginzburg, Crisi
della ragione.
(Einaudi, 1979).
Erick Beltrán and Jorge Satorre's 'Modelling Standard' evolving project and forthcoming interview with the artists for 'Atlántica' magazine
Tue, Nov 15 2011
Invitation card to the exhibition at Galeria Joan Prats.
Opening: 17 November 2011, 19.30h (the artist will do a talk at 20h)
Exhibition organised by: Jorge Satorre and Erick Beltrán
With works by: Christoph Keller, Raphaël Zarka, Paloma Polo, Bernardo Ortiz,
Efrén Álvarez, Meris Angioletti, Jose Antonio Vega Macotela, Vilayanur Ramachandran,
Jorge Aviña and Florian Göttke.
The presentation at Galeria Joan Prats is the third iteration of the project which began in September 2010 at FormContent, London and continued in March 2011 at Casa Vecina, México DF.
"Modelling Standard takes as a point of departure the radical historiographic turn introduced by Carlo Ginzburg in the 1970s who focused on localised, popular and disregarded micro-histories rather than universal, over-arching versions. The title Modelling Standard references the scientific concept of the Standard Model used in physics to explain the almost invisible interactions occurring between subatomic particles.
Erick Beltrán and Jorge Satorre use both micro-historical methods and
the metaphor borrowed from physics to create connections between small,
insignificant hints and traces. These are taken from their
heterogeneous references to build seemingly unlikely connections between
literary references, personal experiences, historical data, trivia and
scientific facts through the construction of a diagram. The result is a
series of caricatures and texts through which the artists will construct
a detective plot where Sigmund Freud, Carlo Ginzburg, Giovanni Morelli,
Aby Warburg, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Joe Orton are the protagonists." (taken from FormContent's press release)
In Casa Vecina, Modelling Standard expanded with the inclusion of a comic also with drawings by illustrator and project collaborator Jorge Aviña, which will also be presented in Galeria Joan Prats alongside, as the artists have stated, the "input from a number of artists, illustrators and guest researchers, whose personal research work adds new links to the chain that stretches and lengthens ... like the devil's drool".
Installation process of the exhibition. Photo taken the day we began the interview for 'Atlántica' magazine.
In relation to 'Modelling Standard' Latitudes is currently working on an interview with Satorre and Beltrán for the Spanish magazine 'Atlántica' (to be published in February 2012), where there will be an opportunity to read more about their thread of ideas for this project as well as the process of their collaborative work – the latter being one of the focus of Latitudes' interests developed in exhibition projects such as 'Amikejo' (four exhibitions at MUSAC, León, 2011) or 'The Garden of Forking Paths' (Maisterravalbuena, Madrid, 2009). More news to follow...
–
Related posts:
Portscapes
news: Jorge Satorre's billboard on the A15 and Paulien Oltheten small
exhibition at the visitor centre Futureland and surroundings (18 October 2009)
Portscapes: Jorge Satorre returns an ice-age boulder back to Sweden (18 January 2010)
'Banquete sinestésico' de Erick Beltrán en Halfhouse (30 octubre 2011)
Galeria Joan Prats
Rambla de Catalunya, 54
08007 Barcelona, Spain
Latitudes' 'The Last Newspaper' exhibition featured in the May issue of Shanghai-based magazine 'Art World Magazine'
Wed, Jun 29 2011
In their May issue, Shanghai-based Art World Magazine featured 'The Last Newspaper' (New Museum, 6 October 2010–9 January 2011) exhibition focusing on Latitudes' 10-week-long editorial project and re-publishing and translating four articles originally published in issues: #2 The Last Gazette (focus article on Hans Haacke's "News" by Julienne Lorz), #5 The Last Monitor (an essay on paperweights and newsstands by Harley Spiller), #6 The Last Observer (interview with Wolfgang Tillmans by Lorena Muñoz-Alonso), #7 The Last Evening Sun (focus article on Luciano Fabro's 'Pavimento-Tautologia' by Simone Menegoi) and #8 The Last Journal (an interview with Rirkrit Tiravanija by Desiree B. Ramos).
Thank you to Michelle Ding from Art World Magazine and to all the writers for giving permission to reprint in Chinese.Photos: Latitudes | www.lttds.org
DADDY No.3 Fleur du Mal: Kirstine Roepstorff
Mon, Oct 15 2007
Daddy #3 coverMax Andrews contributes with an essay called "Hold the front page gizmo: Kirstine Roepstorff’s Where the world wander – the Road to Excelsior" to the inaugural issue of Fleur du Mal, produced under the auspices of DADDY magazine.
Kirstine Roepstorff's work integrates a variety of content ranging from daily newspapers, scientific journals, political weeklys and other found imagery. Fleur du Mal is a reference book for her source material co-opting the specific experience of reading a luxury women's magazine.
DADDY is available at Printed Matter, Inc. (New York), Art Metropole (Toronto), ICA Bookshop (London), Artwords Bookshop (London), a+m bookstore (Milan), The MOCA Store (Los Angeles), PRO QM (Berlin), and at Peres Projects, Los Angeles Berlin.
more...
9 June Update: Here is an-Issuu hosted version of the article
