Making Public: Alex Lukas
By Allison Schifani
In an essay entitled “What is the Social in Social Media?” theorist Geert Lovink writes about the contemporary difficulty of locating the social – or more specifically, the political opportunities and radical possibilities once afforded to the social – in the age of networked social media. Twitter, Instagram, Facebook; these platforms and others, in his reading, pose difficult questions about the power of public utterance, once considered essential to political action.
To speak, to allow to speak, to silence – these, in many intellectual traditions both modern and ancient, have been exercises of power. But of course, these days, so many seem able to speak, whenever they want, about whatever they want, on all kinds of platforms that might loosely be described as public, and promote themselves as social. Or, in Lovink’s words “the silence of the masses that Baudrillard spoke about has been broken. Social media has been a clever trick to get them talking.”[1]
The work of Santa Barbara-based artist Alex Lukas is similarly concerned with the social, as well as the persistent question of what it means to make public. However, his chosen venues and forms are typically not found within the bot-driven, data-mined din of social media. Instead, he’s spent his career thus far working across media: print, audio, and sculpture, in addition to combinations and reworkings of multiple forms.
In one piece displayed at STNDRD, in Granite City, Illinois, his media consisted of a large blue tarp and the cellular telephone network. Lukas perforated the tarp with holes that enumerated his actual phone number – the public could call if they wished.
Lukas traces the roots of many of his creative concerns to growing up in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the ‘90s. That period was a strange interregnum in which the lasting impact of deindustrialization could still be felt in parts of the city that were soon to become fodder for gentrification. This tension manifests itself in Lukas’s art through his investment in spaces that remain less ordered, less visible, and thus ripe for intervention, illicit and otherwise: ripe for becoming public but not yet obviously so.
Tied to the punk, do-it-yourself ethos of this period is his ongoing zine project. Written Names Fanzine is a print publication “dedicated to occurrences of localized, unsanctioned public name writing.”[2] Its issues explore the surfaces and spaces employed for the inscription of individual names. Issue 5 is titled Petroglyphs and Names Written in Stone. Issue 3: Names and Dates Carved into Bamboo. Issue 6: Names Written in Nails Embedded in Railroad Ties.
Alex Lukas, Written Names
The zine, in a persistent form beloved by ‘90s counterculture, is deeply entwined with what sometimes feels forgotten when we seem perpetually called to post, tweet, like and comment: the intoxicating pleasure of making and changing our worlds when no one is watching. As a print collection, the issues double the publication of these names, lifting them from their sites of original writing and offering them anew in paper.
Across his work is an urgent interrogation of where publics and their discontents form, how we are called into being as a member of a public or excluded from such membership, and how one makes-public, the intimate and the internal. You could call it a sociality subtly removed from what might be traditionally considered the public sphere.
These questions push him to both enter into and investigate often neglected, but nonetheless shared spaces, from the graveyard to the highway. In one of his more recent collections, Town Website, Lukas presented twelve small paintings started in the spring of 2020 in his parents’ Massachusetts basement and continued in 2021 on his kitchen table in Santa Barbara.
The series pulls from pandemic-related text in the public sphere: public health warnings, headlines, roadside message boards. Lukas isolates sections of those texts and then transposes them onto slabs of granite and marble, thus taking the temporary and emergent nature of pandemic communication and securing that lexicon in a monumental gesture.
These paintings were displayed by reservation only. Between each 30-minute appointment, the works were rotated so that each visitor experienced a different show, “mirroring the flashing display of a Variable Message Sign.” These paintings thus slow the rapid cycling of pandemic messaging and instead emphasize the pandemic’s lasting impacts, working on one hand as memorial and historical archive, and as a slowed performance of perpetual messaging on the other.
Town Website, which treats the competing temporalities of the ongoing pandemic and wonders about the more permanent traces it is carving into the world, is also part of Lukas’s ongoing imagining of possible futures and possible future spaces far beyond the present. Taking inspiration from N.K. Jemison’s series of sci-fi novels, The Broken Earth Trilogy, Lukas’s Stone Proposal 7 offers a collection of small drawings that envision “large blocks of stone in a yet-to-be-known museum, sculpture park or future archive.”
Alex Lukas, Written Names Fanzine, Issue #1: Names Written in Nails Embedded in Railroad Ties, Cambridge, Massachusetts, three-color risograph with photocopy, 20 pages, 9.5 x 6.5 in, edition of 100 or so, 2016
As with Written Names, here too Lukas points us toward future publics and future public places that remain unknown to a present producer – to Lucas himself and to his contemporary audience. And as with the names that appear in the zine, or the texts of pandemic messaging in Town Website, Stone Proposal 7 is rooted, ultimately, in text; this one being literary rather than personal or municipal. The legacies of text across genre are, in his work, a way of thinking about the changing nature of social forms and public engagement.
Though his art revels in such speculative glimpses into the far future, Lukas is by no means uninterested in shaping shared public space in the present. In this effort, find his CA53776v2.gallery: a rotating exhibition he curates on the dashboard of his 2007 Ford Ranger, parked in the 300 block of W. Anapamu Street. This gallery, which also employs public text in the form of its title, his license plate number, launched in the spring of 2021.
The project questions where, exactly, the space of art is now, where it could be, and where it might have always been – and in doing so, also questioning the location of the public to whom art aims its speech. Like much of his work, it probes the way art might push into public spaces beyond the museum or gallery, and how that which is public might cross into intimate, domestic, and quotidian spheres.
If we are increasingly consumed in the deluge of public speech in virtual space, Lukas pushes his own publics to seek out, explore and engage in what the cyberpunks would have called ‘meatspace.’ Where some among them used the term derogatorily, Lukas seems to delight in the remaining – if quickly disappearing – possibilities afforded by even the most mundane parts of our very real, material environments; roadsides, dashboards, parking lots, kitchen tables, tree trunks, railroad tracks. His work suggests that there are still ways to make and take these spaces, to write them, and in so doing, rewrite and refigure ways of being in, shaping and forming part of the public.
In seeking the social in social media, Lovink writes that the platforms on which the public now publishes are, ultimately, “devices of capture,” “totally indifferent to the content of what people say.” He goes on: “This is not about participation, remembrance and forgetting. What we transmit are the bare signals indicating that we are still alive.” Perhaps Lukas would agree. But the transmissions with which his work plays are less about indicating the fact of life or capturing its data body, than living it, and living through it, together.
In the heady, heart-breaking noise of the moment, this quiet commitment to publication as an essential act of living with, rather than tweeting at, the social world feels vital: an invitation to make novel, caring, and joyful publics whose lasting traces might yet surprise us.
