Publications: November 2002

Artists involved in the publication: John Abbate; Damiano Bertoli; Briget Crone and Ruth McLennan; Annette Douglas and Josie Dujmovic; Katherine Huang; Sean Loughrey; Raafat Ishak; Rod McLeish; Vera Muller; Tom Nicholson; No-one Is Illegal / Refugee Action Collective; Ocular Lab (Julie Davies and Alex Rizkalla, Larissa Hjorth, Sally Mannall, Paul Quinn); Bernhard Sachs; Masato Takasaka; Gary Wheeler; Work about Work (Arbeit ueber Arbeit, Berlin)

The project involved the setting up of a studio/workshop/exhibition in West Space for a month in which people worked. This facilitated a discussion and accumulation of material concerning the utopic, ranging from art to politics, economics, architecture, science, etc. This included an extensive national and international dialogue, substantially on the web but it also included material solicited and communicated by post, video, audio tape, fax and so on. The stress was on the presentation of the material and the performative, evidencing the act of engagement.

Sub-projects (by Bernhard Sachs, Tom Nicholson, Vera Möller, Sean Loughrey, Rod McLeish, Alex Rizkalla/Julie Davies) were initiated beforehand and presented at West Space, or generated during the exhibition.

The structure of the Office of Utopic Procedures was consciously open, continuous, antihierarchical and unedited. It contains no obvious resolution, beginning or end – instead being a discussion, a dialogue, a theatre of discourse, a theatre of the act.

Project website work-about-work

Designer: Gary Wheeler

Publication November 2002 saw the release of the West Space Project Publication: Office of Utopic Procedures 2002. Numbering 176 pages, including colour plates, it is West Space’s first hard-case bound book. This text was generated through an Office of Utopic Procedures project supported by the West Space Projects Program through an Australia Council VACB Presentation and Promotion Grant.