Greg Lucas, Walls Have Ears and Other Failed Ideas
22 October, 6pm
A 75 MINUTE GALLERY SLIDE-SHOW PERFORMANCE, FOLLOWED BY Q&A.
GREG LUCAS, PHOTO-ARTIST AND PATAPHYSICIAN, IS ONCE AGIN RELUCTANTLY FORCED TO PERFORM HIS PHOTOGRAPHS THAT ‘FAIL TO STAND UP FOR THEMSELVES’
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OUTPOST event proudly presents Greg Lucas's new performance Walls Have Ears And Other Failed Ideas.
Walls Have Ears And Other Failed Ideas is a live gallery slide-show performance ‘from the other side’. In 75 minutes, Lucas seamlessly connects a series of retinally unsuccessful photographs - that would usually be unsuitable for a gallery wall - towards a strange and bitter success. As the accidental usurps intended meaning, expectations are hilariously unmet.
It is precisely the failure of conceptual intention that is the success of Lucas's practice. The chance-encounter, the accidental, and the science of pataphysics (that is, the science of the particular, the science of ‘laws governing exceptions’) are, among other things, key to his investigations: where impedance is impetus.
Lucas's practice is best described as a form of speculative journalism. The photo-realist writings of Raymond Roussel and the neo-logic evident in the work of Alfred Jarry have been a strong influence, at one time or another.
In Walls Have Ears And Other Failed Ideas, Lucas’s frenetic monologue explores and exploits how everyday events (past and present) can be connected by photographic facts (not painstaking fictions). His innate personal skill as a raconteur, alongside his unique understanding of how images communicate meaning, allows him to exploit the complications of reading photographs in a comic way. Yet embedded within what is ‘surreal’, ‘comic’, and ‘entertaining’ in his performances is a disquieting undercurrent that resists laughter - concurrent with the nature of the photograph itself. Photographs are inherently ambiguous – slippery – unreliable messengers. And it is this 'slippery' point of departure that liberates an honest pursuit of meaning.
“... As observers we are challenged by Lucas’s work, challenged to dismiss our experience of it as purely entertaining or surreal, challenged, in the end, to ask if we, in our own lives, follow our thoughts and desires with sufficient honesty. We are challenged to take a risk at life... If we can accept the challenge and laugh long and hard at ourselves whilst taking it, then so much the better”. (Oliver Thomas, Comic Clash – The Bisociative Shock In The Art of Greg Lucas)
A Q&A with Lucas will follow his performance.
Greg Lucas lives and works in London. He teaches on the MA Photography course at De Montfort University, Leicester. Recent exhibitions include Surreal House, Barbican, London, (2010); Intertextual Tourist Archive, Luzern, Switzerland (2010); Drowned Fireman, Bern, Basel, (2010) and Cube 3, Plymouth (2011). Since 1987 he has performed his photographs in universities, theatres, art galleries and comedy clubs including the Edinburgh Festival; ICA, London; The Photographer's Gallery, London; and as part of John Peel's Meltdown Festival he collaborated with Ruth Blue for the Slide-Show On The Radio, broadcast on Resonance FM High- lights, Kaleidoscope, BBC R4.
Visit Lucas's ‘cult’ blog spot: http://greg-lucas.blogspot.com/
