So, to begin. Adam Cullen’s art. The thing that always strikes you about the work is that it demands a response. The nature of that response is immediate and subjective. It’s not a passive experience. The imagery, the text, the titles. There is a defining clarity to the work that sets it apart from most other art made in this country. It wouldn’t seem that there is a lot of room for ambiguity since so much of the works subjects deal in the history and vernacular of contemporary Australia. Yet Cullen’s work isn’t about a literal experience. There is room for the artist and the viewer to consider the conceptual space that’s been created in the art work. As Mike Parr noted at the opening of Let’s Get Lost, the mystery and ambiguity of Cullen’s art lies in the gap between the titles and the images we see, a space for humour, self deprecation, a degree of reflexivity, a forest of metaphors and a conflict with the apparent.
I’ve been writing on Cullen’s work since 1997. Every time I’ve attempted to write, it has felt as though I have had to scale the same mountain. How does one respond to this work? How do you account for its intensity? How do you take into account the unaccountable mysteries of someone else’s subjectivity? That’s no easy task. I think of particular experiences I’ve had with Adam and his work and how those experiences have come to define how I understand both.
I’d like to share a few of these experiences with you.
I first encountered Adam at art school in the early 1980s. I was in the library where I had a part time job shelving books. Adam came in. In those days he had hair on his head, and a soft, round face. He looked completely unassuming. Attached to his leg by a chain was a pig’s head wrapped in what appeared to be Glad Wrap. This was a performance artwork that has since become notorious, an oft repeated anecdote used to underscore the outrageousness and uncompromising nature of the artist and his work. I don’t quite see it that way. Let me explain the context of that work.
The early 1980s at art school saw a bizarre mix of student types. There were suburban kids rubbing shoulders with inner city punks and hippies from up north. There was one guy there who was what we’d now call a feral punk. He wore a leather jacket with the pelt of a dead cat stuck to the back with its head mounted on one shoulder, its skull filled with pink fabric and diamantes popping out of the eyes. I thought he was a wanker. So when Adam turned up with the pig’s head chained to his leg I was wondering – yeah, what next? This guy can’t seriously expect me to take this seriously does he?
In retrospect it was an amazing thing to do. The art that was being made at City Art Institute in 1984 was unremarkable. The senior teachers were mostly painters from the ‘60s and early 70s whose careers were on the wane, but also among them were people like Mike Parr and Joan Grounds and Ian Howard teaching performance and conceptual art. The art made by the students didn’t have much texture or bite, or relevance to the real world. There were exceptions, people whose names you’d know now, Hany Armanious for example, but with Adam Cullen walking around campus, it was incredible how a supposedly progressive institution like an art school could be shaken up by a guy with some meat attached to his leg.
The shock value was one thing; actually living with it was another. The pig’s head became so rank Adam wasn’t allowed on public transport. His mum insisted that he slept with his leg sticking out his bedroom window. Eventually his father wouldn’t let him in the family home.
This story is used as shorthand for the outrageousness of the gesture, but I think it illustrates a theme that recurs throughout Cullen’s work – that art is a public experiment in subjectivity that acknowledges the artist understands the limits of the gesture. You can’t be fucking serious can you? Actually yes, because we define the act of making art as a mutual agreement on the validity of the creative process, a compact between artist and audience about what we understand the limits of art to be. Art that questions its own validity as gesture is always in danger of dissolving before our eyes. You might say, well, isn’t all art a public gesture of subjectivity? And yes it is, but whereas an art object seen in the context of an exhibition or in a gallery is the result of a process that includes the subjective responses of the artist, the subject of the work isn’t the subjectivity. Forget the pig’s head. The art work was the relationship between the artist and the audience – in this case, the students of the art school, the good people of the RTA and Adam’s family.
I came to know Adam a little in the mid 1980s through a mutual friend and fellow student at City Art named Paul Terrett. Adam has acknowledged Paul as one of the key early influences on his work. Paul was doing performance art that, like Adam’s pig’s head work, went to the edge of what could considered an actual work of art for audience and performer. One of Paul’s performances might have been in a conventional performance art set up, say in a gallery space or in a theatre, and involve props and a sort of slow motion physical comedy routine – or it might easily have been a conversation in which Paul would include random words, or strange inflections, or misdirections where he’d point out something that was irrelevant but which took on unwarranted significance. I see that same relationship acted out in Adam’s use of text.
I remember Paul telling me about a performance that Adam had done that involved starting a lawn mower on stage in the college’s genteel theatre space. That sounded pretty good to me and Paul vouched for Adam’s bona fides. When I met Adam I was taken aback by the fact that he is very thoughtful and soft spoken. Paul and Adam, in what would later turn out to be the first of many collaborations that Adam would do with artists he admired, did a performance that started at 2am and ended at dawn for five days. I can’t recall exactly what the work involved but I remember Adam and Paul coming around to my house at midnight to invite me to be involved but the idea of doing anything at 2am in Hyde Park South seemed a little scary.
This 1980 phase was a prelude to the next part of the development of Adam’s art that I think is a significant part of the story. But first there is a bit of a jump. The early 1990s were a time of change in the Australian art world. Between the mid 1980s and the early 90s, the effects of post modernism made its way through the contemporary art world. In the 1980s this approach to making art, to writing about it, studying it and exhibiting it were, as the writer and theorist Edward Colless put it, a scenic, mannerist period of hermetic, reflexive and wilful obscuritanism that ended at a point of complete irrelevance, uselessness and utter beauty. Big painting. Big photos. Big hair. Wayfarer sunnies.
There had to be a backlash.
It came in the form of what was dubbed “grunge” – a term that was coined in an art context in Australia by Jeff Gibson in a review of Rad Scunge, a group show of young artists curated by Dale Frank and staged at Karyn Lovegrove Gallery in Melbourne in March 1993. Adam was part of that show along with people such as Hany Armanious, Mikala Dywer and Nike Savaas. Let me just quote you a part of Gibson’s review as it appeared in the May 93 issue of Art & Text to give an idea of the sort of work in the show…
“Stepping through the front door of the gallery, the first object we see is a soap encrusted toilet bowl. This phobic receptacle is part of an expansive installation by Hany Armanious, Abstract Pain Thing, that takes in hair curlers, plastic bags, computer parts and a slab of rough cut carpet.”
Cullen’s work was called Cosmological Satellite, Mother Denied Depressed Speech.
“The work consisted of primarily of a metal beer keg, a rubber plunger and an umbilical cord suspended in formalin. The reference to intoxicating substances speaks much about this work. There is a kind of drunken logic circling across all this detritus that screams Dionysian abandon.”
At first it seemed that Grunge art of the early 1990s was some sort of extreme off-shoot of post modernism, an eruption of an aesthetic of the ugly that could be traced back to inner city cafe expressionism and punk rock. What wasn’t really understood at the time was that Grunge was the beginning of the end of formalist post modernism in contemporary Australian art. The word grunge was lifted from the genre of guitar music that was around during same time. Grunge art had broken out in Los Angeles. It was in the air. The zeitgeist demanded change.
Although most of the artists who were in the Rad Scunge show denied the idea of an “art movement”, the show has become to be seen as a major shift. The sleek look and feel of 80’s post modernist art – all those large canvases with references to Australian colonial history, those massive cibachromes of nude bodies and transgressive dress ups, all that reflexive irony – good bye and good riddance – and welcome the arrival of carbuncular filth. Cullen and his cohorts were engaging with the European tradition of conceptualised expressionism – Marcel Duchamp, Jeff Koons and Martin Kippenberger were evoked as spiritual grunge fathers, along with Arte Povera and Neo Expressionism as comparable aesthetic movements.
So when we ask where Adam’s work fits in the context of Australian art it doesn’t at first seem to make sense. His work appears singular, unapproachable, and incomparable. But it’s with Cullen’s contemporaries that you find the spiritual if not exact physical match to his work and philosophy. I see the same spirit in Armanious’s sculptures that evoke the hallucinatory edges of the neurological surreal; there’s a similar dedication to the theatre of the self, not to mention a comparable sense of humour, in the performances of Tony Schwensen, performances such as The Art of Watching where Schwensen spent 185 hours watching the entire 2006 Commonwealth Games on a TV in a specially fitted out demountable office. Guy Benfield, another artist whose practice ranges through various forms, has an aesthetic closely related to Cullen.
All artists go through a salon period, but they eventually following their own path away from the common ground. Tracing it back gives a clue to where it comes from.
Jeff Gibson declared the Grunge movement over even before it really began, already art historical due to the artists self conscious deployment of historically traceable transgressive aesthetics. Wrote Gibson in 1993: “…just as the museums of Europe are littered with Neo Expressionist monstrosities, so too might there in ten years be a little patch of Grunge fouling up the air in the back lots of public collections across Australia.”
It took a little longer, but here we are.
Throughout the Grunge years Adam had been exhibiting extensively in artist run spaces and public galleries. One show at Artspace in 1997 was a piece that used two brand new cars – a couple of shiny, two-door blue Daihatsu Centros – filled with to capacity with empty Toohey’s Dry beer bottles. The work was called LIFE FITNESS SOPHISTICATED NAGGING. The cars, under the lights of the gallery, shiny and new, looked like a car showroom. It was a very attractive and visually arresting piece. But the title threw the whole thing into a different and uncertain realm. The SOPHISTICATED NAGGING of the title is a joke about how feminism amounts to nothing more than that – sophisticated nagging. I have always read the car as a metaphor in for the male body: a vehicle that can’t really go anywhere since it’s full of rubbish. Life and fitness – always compromised and corrupted, treating the body as a bin. And baby please, enough with the nagging… I think this a key work because it engaged with the metaphorical in a sublimely subtle manner.
That period – from ’97 onwards was an incredibly prolific period of art making for Adam, producing paintings and drawings and video works. But it was the text paintings – the spray can pieces and the works that used more intricate layering of lines and words – that really started to attract attention. The problem with using an aesthetic that seems to many people to be deliberately ugly is that it’s a challenge to the natural tendency to treat material literally. Mud is mud, dirt is dirt, my parent’s telephone number is… The car sculpture was a rich metaphor, while the text paintings seem anti-metaphorical. When I interviewed Adam in 1997 I asked him about his use of text, and whether he saw his work as metaphor, and he said this:
“It’s not what is actually said or how you read it. It’s more that the text is there and you must look at it. It’s a retinal thing. Seeing. I think the problem that a lot of people have with the work is that they read it like a newspaper. People read my work so incredibly literally that they miss the whole experience of actually seeing the text. If you read it, it reads as absolute rubbish. But if you see it, it’s a different experience.”
I remember that interview in Adam’s garage at his place in Lilyfield, surrounded by art making detritus, and a white wooden lattice stuck on the wall with the words SATAN LIVES IN A GARAGE spayed on it. If you see the work and forget the literal, the experience is much larger than simply reading. And then Adam added:
“It’s important not to read [my work] on a literal level, but it’s not a metaphorical one either. I think it’s poetic. It stops you and sends you into a bit of a seizure.”
I have been trying to come to terms with that concept. Neither literal, nor metaphorical. Adam work is a sensory experience that steps away from dualistic relationships into a space of phenomenological contemplation where the work can be studied only subjectively, not objectively, and where the reference points float, transcendent objects, as they are, not as they seem. A car full of beer bottles is simply that. Paint on canvas is simply that. Subjective for both artist and audience but free from definitive meaning.
From 1997 Adam continued with this productive period, all the while refining his practice. Text started to disappear from the work, and after the Blind Side show in Adelaide, the sudden and unexpected arrival of colour and texture. The end of that period is marked by the Archibald win. That picture of David Wenham is an impressive work. Personally I think the better picture was his portrait of Max Cullen from a couple of years before. It was painted on multiple pieces of cardboard, blue slashes of paint. It had the same precise gesture and minimalist aesthetic as the text works and to me seemed like a logical progression from his practice. The Wenham picture was a foretaste of the work he would go on to produce after the Archibald, and significant for that reason.
One of the problems of looking at Adam’s work literally is that you become blind to the skill and precision of his painting. It was interesting to walk around the gallery on opening night and listen to Wayne Tunnicliffe give an explanation of where some of the imagery in Adam’s work comes from, and the back stories to the figures in the work. I have to confess that after looking at his painting for so long I have become blind to the imagery. What I see in the works, and the roots of this are found in the Wenham portrait, is the artful and beautiful way Adam puts paint on canvas – the solid colours overlaid with mid ground shapes and masses outlined in calligraphic gestures. When you look at the paintings you see that few of those mid ground splatters and chunky blocks of colour go beyond the black outline, which means the formulation of the figure that binds it all together is a very considered process. It’s all suggested in the Wenham painting.
The Archibald win was a moment, not just for Adam, but as a marker in the long history of that accursed prize. Since 2000, the Cullen win has encouraged more young contemporary artists into the competition. That seems like a good thing. I remember putting on my best suit and going along to the opening feeling as though a new generation were being allowed into the academy, a pleasurable if fleeting moment where you feel incredibly happy for your friends and everyone else who has travelled the path of righteousness. I had my photo taken with Adam on the steps of the galley. I was standing with my friend Mike Boswell to Adam’s right as we smiled cheesily into the camera. A little while later Adam sent me a card. On one side was a note from Adam saying thanks for the support and on the other was the photo. I hadn’t seen it on the night but Adam was standing behind me giving me the finger.
With the $30,000 he’d won from the Archibald and the money he’d made from painting Adam bought a house in Wentworth Falls. He moved out of the city. The Adam that has become known in the media, post-Archibald and post-city, was born in the early part of this decade. The Archibald win was a big boost to his career but it also seemed a benchmark of media visibility that was hard to maintain. The media isn’t particularly interested in artists unless they’re winning prizes or being controversial. Some of Adam’s projects, like the collaboration with Mark Reid, or his collection of dead animals destined for stuffing and mounting, or his big beard and quotable aphorisms, are tailor made for media coverage. I like to think of these media appearances like the pig’s head – an experiment in pushing the subjective into a public realm, albeit mediated by journalists with usually very little clue as to what the work is about.
There are only so many roles to play in the media. You slot into a part that’s already written. When we try to understand where Adam’s work fits into the Australian and International context, where it comes from, what influenced it, artists such as Kippenburger and Mike Kelly make a certain kind of sense, as do artist like Raymond Pettibon. But I think these artists make work with passing similarities. A few years ago I saw the early work of Mike Brown. He was one of the Annandale Imitation Realists who went on to make colourful pattern paintings. His early work, however, was a revelation – rude collages, humorous aphorisms, loose, gestural paintwork all worked together like pages ripped from a kid’s exercise book. Perhaps there’s a connection there to Cullen in the Irish Australian psyche, the need to make the rude noise, the rebel and the outlaw.
But the artist that Adam seems to resemble most, if you believe what you see in the media, is another Irish Australian. He too was a self-styled outlaw, an artist whose work was collected by all the major institutions but maintained the image of the uncollectable iconoclast. They even have similar political views, at least when this bloke was alive. I am of course talking about Pro Hart, one of the original brush men of the bush. Adam’s public image as the outsider who got inside, the mountain man with his dirt bikes, hunting and fishing trips, the animals nailed to the walls – that’s the part the media want and tip him into. I often wonder if it has gone too far. I remember the guy from the late 90s. I knew that bloke well, I thought, and then he went and got his body covered in tattoos. I had a drink with Adam recently and I asked him about a spate of recent profiles that had been published in the run up to the opening of this show. They’re all the same. “Yeah”, he replied, “and they keep on asking the same fucking questions. So I just decided to change the answers.”
I don’t think any artist should be held to account for how they appear in the media. There are too many layers between the subject and the audience for the artist to be in control. Adam’s genius for aphorisms and one-liners – “I’m tired of bashing my head against the wall of reality” is a recent favourite – cut through the noise but it’s too easy to forget one of the most essential elements of the man and his work. He’s a passionate believer. His world, his art, is a moral universe of right and wrong, of angels and daemons, of cruelties and liberating humour. At heart, Adam is a romantic.
The title of this show is a perfect distillation of Adam’s life and work. It’s taken from a song most famously covered by Chet Baker, the jazz trumpeter, and I assume that’s why it was chosen. Baker was the epitome of West Coast cool jazz in the 1950s, a good looking man whose body was ravaged by years of drug addiction. Despite comebacks his latter life was on the skids. In 1988 the fashion photographer Bruce Webber made a documentary about Baker. When you remember the film you recall its glacially cool black and white photography, the beautiful models running on beaches and through palm tree lined parks somewhere in LA, the silky melancholy of Baker’s cracked voice on the soundtrack. Webber wanted to get close to Baker but the subject kept the director at bay, a lifetime of junky suspicion playing across Baker’s spectral features.
Let’s get lost, lost in each other’s arms
Let’s get lost, let them send out alarms
And though they’ll think us rather rude
Let’s tell the world we’re in that crazy mood
Let’s defrost, in a romantic mist
Let’s get crossed, off everybody’s list
To celebrate this night we found each other
Darling, let’s get lost
This talk was given at the Art Gallery of NSW’s as part of Let’s Get Lost a survey of Adam Cullen’s work , June 11, 2008.
andrew frost 