Merge caught up with the man behind the whole shebang, Luke, and asked him a few sticky questions. (If you like the sounds of it, check out our YOU review!)

 
Why YOU? What made you write that first letter?

A combination of several things. Firstly in November 2001 it was just two months after September 11th and there were mysterious packages containing anthrax appearing all over the place. These mysterious packages got my mind thinking and I liked the idea of a strange, anonymous package. I was worried that I might end up on the news after I made the first issues and that they would cause some kind of terrorism alert. It was a threatening time when I think back.

 

 

 Also I wanted to make something that would be completely internet free. I felt a sense at the time of people thinking that the internet was some kind of great saviour. I was totally sucked in back in 1998 by people saying that by 2001 all of humanity would be shopping, making zines and having sex exclusively on line. Once I realised that this was totally untrue I was inspired to make a work that would not be internet friendly. I wanted to reward the people who frequented the kind of places that I thought were making an awesome difference in the work, places like Sticky. I thought that if you wanted to pick up a YOU you would have to support these places by going to them and supporting them. I didn't like the ease of being able to type in www.you.com and find the whole body of work.

Also I wanted to make something that would be very regular. My zines before YOU just came out whenever they were finished. I was inspired by newspapers. My ideal was to be able to write, photocopy, design the bag and distribute the zine on the same day, a feat I only ever achieved once - the zine was still hot from the photocopier when the first copies were picked up by readers at Polyester Records in Fitzroy.

 

 Who gets to contribute? 

The project grew quite organically. After I had made a few issues I started to think about other shapes YOU could take. i came up with the idea of getting a French friend of mine to translate a letter I had written. Before I could ask him to do this I felt that it seemed like a lot of work and it would just be easier to get him to write a letter himself in French. This excited me and worked. After that I started asking people I knew about once a month if they would write for the project.

People who get to write for YOU are just people I meet. Sometimes I know those people well, like family members; sometimes it will be someone I have just met. I think the people who write the best letters are the closest people to me, kind of like the whole YOU project is just one big self portrait and those people are part of what makes me me. Sometimes complete strangers will find out who I am and will write me letters, leave them where they pick up the zine or get in touch with me by whatever means. Sometimes they hit the mark and sometimes they have wild and crazy ideas about my project, which is fine because I choose to leave it all so open ended. It is all just accidents really, one after another which takes the project to somewhere new.

 

 

Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, Bendigo, Wagga Wagga, Castlemaine, Wollongong, Perth, Glasgow (Scotland), Chicago (USA), San Francisco (USA), Portland Oregon (USA), Kansas City (USA).

 

I think its different for different people. Some people are really interested in the writing and some people are more interested in the bags. I'm more of a bag man and I have seen people pick up a copy of the zine and throw the bag in the bin and then read the letter.

I guess i try to be honest and I'm not trying to sell anyone some piece of crap, people seem so used to being sold to through everything these days... aww, I sound like an old man.

Not everyone likes it too it is worth pointing out. Those people who are not familiar with zines can sometimes criticise the project as being "self indulgent wank". I tell those people to go screw themselves.

 What's the charm of producing YOU as a physical object, when you could do the whole thing on the internet for presumably a lot less time and effort?

For me the internet is just so cheap, as in it lessens the value of almost everything and makes most things soul-less. As you can tell, I am not a huge fan of the web.  I think it is good for communication but promotes speed and a shallow experience of the world. As an artist I think you have to respect the medium in which you are working. So many people just seem to dump their work from other formats onto the internet and turn their work into disposable rubbish. The worst zines I have ever encountered are just peoples blogs printed out onto paper - this disrespects the medium of the zine as much as dumping your zine on the net disrespects the medium of the net. If to express yourself you need sound and moving images and interactive on line discussions then maybe your project should be internet based, but if you don’t embrace that medium then you should embrace the medium in which you are truly working.

 

 

I love making my zines every week even though it is so much labour. My partner and my friends cannot understand how come I like this mindless labour so much but I really really like doing it. The creative time of the project can sometimes be a smaller part of the project than the mindless labour.

Creating something that the audience can hold in their hands is quite personal for me and something that can be no way achieved on the internet.

Clearly the internet is for losers. 

The project is not anonymous enough for the anonymity to be as cathartic as it once was. Because I have made the zine every week for over six years and am just writing about my life people figure out who I am. To be honest it is quite a disappointment usually for people when they figure out who makes YOU as there is real power in being anonymous.

 

Because I just write about whatever is happening in my life there is lots of material. I don't feel like the project is close to an end yet. Each issue I try really hard to make different from all the others, both in terms of the writing and the visuals, try and better the last issue and the one before that.  

Yes. The letter was written live over two days as my daughter Ella was being born. I copped a bit of flack for it as the letter kind of suggests that I was just kicking back writing my zine while Anya was doing the work. The truth is that there is quite a lot of down time for the man during labour. Anya didn't want me squeezing her hand as hard as I could for 24 hours. And it was such an awesome thing to write about. i really like the letters which I've written live. I've done a few at shows while bands are playing and the energy is just so exciting and captured somehow honestly in the letter format, with messy thoughts just coming from everywhere.

Anya is very supportive of my zine making, we have made many zines together over the years and have worked on many art projects in collaboration, so we were on the same page when it came to the birth and me writing about it. We didn't have a video camera or anything for the birth so the letter stands as the only documentation of those two days.