Making Public Alex Lukas by Allison Schifani
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n 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.” 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, datamined 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
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