589 PLATEAUS

2007 (Lee Ingleton / Johnny Pavlatos) 

At the heart of ‘589 Plateaus’ was the concept that it is should be coordinated rhizomatically. It can described by quoting Foucault when he said that “acting is an art of living and thinking”. Lee Ingleton and Johnny Pavlatos formulated 589 Plateaus to sustain a real critical practical philosophy that proposed everyday revolutionary practice as an intensifier of thought. A public socially engaged art think tank. That is to say that it functions constantly on a multitude of critical levels. Their effort was in constant development and the plateaus that formed stemmed from hard work and creative practice. They wanted ‘589’ to build on radical concept[s] and that they should germinate to feed the revolutionary creative productive desire ~ which in turn should feed the artists expression in the everyday world as a desire to broaden ones meliue and spread the message further and beyond.

Conceptually 589 Plateaus’ emerged from a strict diet of deterritorialization and deconstruction of the structure of the A.R.I. (an A.R.I is an Artist Run Initiative ). They were aware of the cult like frameworks of this but at the same time were deeply critical of the institution of contemporary art and public art practice and its cult like status and frameworks. If there was an algorythmn that could symbolise this arrangement, it may look something like this;

Publicness + [AO] – PA – CA / A.R.I = 589 Plateaus

The hermeneutics of this equation mean rhizomatic practice opens to multiple possibilties. It means that art making remains open to the reflections and the requirements of the artists and curators themselves to be able to engage and interpret the site through their own needs, gender identities, there own publicness, and to realize a multitude of specificities in their practices. Lee and Johnny discussed many varied possible practical requirements that would aid in realising the concept of ‘ a revolutionary practice’? They took some time and listened to each others ideas about the space. They considered the possibiliities of how to break down the artist audience barrier. For example, one consideration was to give 589 PLATEAUS 24 hour viewing availability as a commercial shop window would. They discussed how would this be any different to lets say the window display’s of other galleries such as The Gertrude Art space or The Dolls House? After many lengthy discussions, alcohol, texts, music, noise, and in consultation with their highly actualized cats, Lilly and Gingy, they accepted that difference was important, so with this in mind ‘589 Plateaus’ should develop rhizomatically with the artists and art works. They agreed upon the 24 hour public presentation window concept and discussed that this capability would allow for the development of the concept of the ongoing ‘everyday’ practice, a relationship forged daily with the passersby, that should, in a marc auge – non place way, begin to call a ‘non audience’. To realize the queer deleuzian non place concept, they searched to rent a commercial space on a major road where the public would pass by on a daily basis. they eventually found one; it was at 589 High st on a dead strip of an area of melbourne that had not yet been gentrified – northcote.  It became Plateau Number 589. They activated the concept of 24 hour access by constructing the performance / creative space at the front of the shop, accessible to the public 24/7 via a large double window facing directly onto High st. The aim was to deliver, develop, administer, curate, and present a 24 hour fully functioning  Public Art Space to the public for at least a year. ‘589’ Plateaus aimed to function on the surface as an A.R.I., but with the explicit difference as to not accept any financial support from private or government agencies. Its self regulating autonomy meant that artists were also not charged fees. To the public there was not any real apparent difference to this ARI space, apart from perhaps that the art works remained on display 24/7. The interest in this specificity was not only to critique the institution of public and private art and its organized capitalist space, but moreover to queer the specificity of everdayness and the signifiers of oppressive white settler capitalist hierarchies. What was also interesting about the rhizomic strategy of 589 Plateaus was that both the site and the work co-determine each other’s significance. The nature of a site specific work in a shop on the High st [for example] takes on a the strange hardwired organizational and institutional habits that passerbys have when focussed upon shopping and gazing into windows. This specific publicness was transformed by 589 Plateaus. Comparatively it can be described as a similar alchemy to when a an amazing book is digested and it’s akin to reading critical theory or philosophy. 

Audience and art positions where flipped and within the exchange of art and audience, the viewer was forced to reconsider the site the space and the situation from a different context, it really was the process of deterritorialization. What happened was a beautiful schizophrenic moment, the audience and art become actualised in the revolutionary moment itself. Sound, Video, Social Sculptures, Painterly works all became immeshed with the everyday reterritorialised world of >> shopping. The public who would perhaps not enter into an ARI space because of the galleries institutional snobbery, watched listened and commented upon the artwork[s] on the windows and in their everyday journeys.

Below are some of the passer-by’s documented comments;

– On the structure – ‘I think its art and the artists live upstairs, ‘they change the artwork every month’, ‘It’s an art space within a shop;

-On the content ‘I think is says a lot about the media’. ‘Its about us!’

– On context ‘ We want what your on!’. ‘Why is there a cat on this”? “ 

While they watched and listened we watched and listened. It was a paradoxical return of the public’s own publicness. The public was particularized as they paused for a moment in time to deconstruct and determine a strange shop window in a reterritorialised shop space.

the public were reterritorialised by the artists and art works. A orchid and wasp story of publicness on the High st.