To feed his rock'n'roll addiction he went out into the chill rain to the Gladstone Pub in Chippendale, the
grungiest music pub in all of Sydney, like some worn down Goth-Metal venue,
tatty black interior with vampire crypt chandeliers, only this night they’re
hosting “Country Music”. His good mate, Paul, was playing slide-guitar, so
mellifluous it made Arthur's eyes roll back in his head in bliss, worth the hard
trudge down several city blocks on a wintry Sunday night.
And while he marched he cogitated upon his brilliant non-career as an
“Artist”. What a failure! Such ignominy! It sure didn’t pay to be on the edge
of the herd and act the smart-ass as an outlandish outlaw! Pondering the
injustices long dealt out to him caused tears to spill down his cheeks with the
rain, he was broken, sad and, for the
‘Akashic record’, he sang into the wind the artists’ oft repeated lament, "Woe is me."
He'd just come from the Internet where he'd been informed he was excluded from yet another group show of artists, this time from the gallery where he'd had his one-man show the year before, where he'd begged to be included in anything that was happening in future. No god help him, what the fuck had he done this time around to piss everybody off? Told he'd positioned himself as an outsider, in reality he felt it was ruthless competition that had pushed him out of the way. Oh yeah, and he liked to rock the boat with Cassandra-like political forebodings, very unsettling for the majority who preferred luxury tour cruises through a robopathic status quo.
Bloody hell, was he just being a paranoid loser? Oh what a rat-race the Art World was, with money and fame the cheese in the maze. He might have another heart attack any minute, then all would be lost, he had to tell
his story to someone, even if it was just the empty sky, or the silent expanse of cyber-space.
The support act at the Gladstone Pub was a frumpy blond, about 40, dressed like
an old granny and playing guitar, singing her own sad songs, much like Patsie
Cline, and she was very, very good, country soul, with a wan smile and a look of disappointment
shadowing her eyes. And Arthur surmised she’d once had hopes of being a world
famous artist, she really did have a voice that could’ve conquered all hearts,
but here she was singing to seven lone punters in the ass-hole of the planet.
Millions of artists have gone before her, shouting out into a blind, infinite
universe, “We were here!” Then disappearing into the deep black hole of anonymous,
ordinary life, of scraping together a living and hustling whoever to get a
break; only a very few lucky souls became super-stars.
Reading the credits to video-hits and movies, he had seen the names of countless
hopefuls, “A Film by…”, “Starring…”, “Music by…”, “Art by…” and wondered where
they had all gone as most were never heard from again. From his experience he
knew “the Arts” industry was voracious, venal, mean, conservative, shallow, cruel,
THEY chewed the masses of wannabes into Big Mac hamburger meat and then spat
them out into some back-alley garbage can. It was the Quick or the Dead, smooth
upper-caste businessmen and bureaucats being the Quickest, they laughed in
their mansions while the armies of desperate artists ran restlessly around and around in the
streets, gnawing on their own tails.
Arthur had grown up inspired by the fantasy that one day he would be a
famous artist, in spite of being from the backwoods of working class Victoria
where the Arts were viewed as the peccadilloes of moneyed wastrels. To Arthur,
art as a way of life seemed a ticket to boundless indulgence and artists were
the hippest of dudes, the quintessence of romantic drollery worthy of strenuous
emulation. He had doodled and drawn since the age of four, compulsively,
exuberantly, repetitively, as though it was a secret, magic power with which he
could make his way in the world. He knew nothing of entrepreneurs,
collectors, investors, critics, academics, curators, bureaucats or any of the
other beasties from the vast menagerie of Art parasites sucking the vital
juices from the plethora of toiling artists. He was oblivious to the battle
fought between Low and High Art, between kitsch popular culture and ‘king’s
ransom’ masterpieces, and he didn’t realize the era he labored within, post-post-modernism,
was all about the packaging, conservative values and the hard-sell, not information and spirit.
He adored the romantic ideal of ‘the artist’ as if it were a pagan religion
and naively thought it was open to all comers, to create whatever they felt to
and even make a living from it. He hoped to get colorful notoriety, laughing
in the face of the Beast, throwing a spanner in the works, shocking everybody,
anybody, for he was a wannabe pop-culture iconoclast in his masturbatory pipe-dreams.
What a dill he was! He’d done it the ancient, pagan way and played sorcerer's apprentice, assisting the activities of daily living of his Master, Compassion, instead of going to art school. He should’ve taken more seriously what
his old art and yoga mentor, Swami Compassion, had once said to him, “People
will only like your work if they like you”.
This had infuriated Arthur at the time for he felt that art should be
looked upon objectively, for its own merit, the artist being virtually
invisible. He didn’t realize he’d have to sell himself, to beg at the door of
powerful 'experts' to get his work considered, to be nice to bureacat wankers who
always play it safe. He didn’t know that in the ruling “structuralist”
philosophy of the times, the artist WAS the art; in yuppie eyes he was a bald,
working class fag with a smart mouth who wore non-designer, shabby clothes, and had the effrontery to tread on precious middle-class territory.
Most gronky Art careerists hated Arthur, the freak, on sight and when he
opened his mouth their antipathy quadrupled. He tried to be the nice guy, cool
friend to everyone, mediator of quarrels and savior of the downtrodden, but he
was stridently opinionated, a deluded revolutionary try-hard and, as well as
wild art, he created annoyance in all the pretentious, leftie artist and activist circles he was attracted
to. He had overlooked that he was operating in a competitive, capitalist world
and, in the small, provincial pond of barracudas that was Australia, no mercy
would be shown in the race for the dollars and the immortality acceded to the
“Great Artist”. Some arts-holes would sell their grandmothers to the
glue-factory for such fame, though nice middle class people pretend it isn’t
so. Arthur was ignorant and ingenuous, incorporating both Hansel and Gretel in
his fey soul, wandering in the wilderness, unconscious of the greedy witches
lurking in their candy sheds willing to fry the nuts off of any guy dumb enough
to crash their domain.
In early ‘77 Arthur was still fresh from his rambunctious, mind-bending
experiences of India. He was stranded in Sydney and his phantom soul-mate of the
moment, Zac, held sway over his emotions, his anarcho-Maoist influence getting
Arthur’s righteous indignation boiled up to fever pitch. Thus incited, full of
rainbow verve and revolutionary zeal, he attended an exhibition of political posters at
Fly Swatter’s Gallery in Darlinghurst. It was a show put on by the Lead Sheds
Art Workshop mob whose base was at Sydney University and Arthur was in awe of
their radical, post-modern, social-realist precociousness. He tried to approach
one of their leading lights, a feminist dyke named Bobby Stoner, to tell her
how wonderfully daring he thought the Group’s art was. Clutching her wine-glass
tightly, she grimaced as he moved towards her and hurriedly turned her back to
him, aghast at the balls of a ‘nobody’ street-person importuning someone of her
celestial talent, Arthur’s first taste of the “blow-off” in what would become a
long history of them.
He plodded on regardless and persuaded the Lead Sheds crew to allow him to
silk-screen print his “Blood On The Streets” poster, which advertised the
benefit gig for the White Bay anti-uranium riots and helped pay the fines of
all those arrested. The poster used news-paper photos of cops dragging protesters
along by their hair, with blood dripping, like the title of a horror movie,
announcing “Blood on the Streets”, and it grabbed much attention. The whole
event was a blood-curdling success and mightily impressed his fellow
revolutionary artists at The Lead Sheds, encouraging them to allow him further
access to their precious Art Workshop, a purported public access-space but in
reality a tightly controlled private fiefdom. He was bursting with passion,
color and psychedelic hallucinatory madness from his sojourn in magical India,
clashing art flashed from his third eye and splattered upon an unsuspecting
world; like “Carrie”, he couldn’t help himself.
He noticed some cans of fleuro paint and asked his comrade artists, "Who is
using them?" and they replied, “No one. It’s passe hippie crap.” He recalled a
‘60s psychedelic mural, “Alice in Wonderland”, he’d seen in a hippie café in
the city of Bangalore, India, in 1973, that used bright fluorescent colors against
a dense black background. He looked at the history of posters at the Workshop
and, apart from a mid-seventies monochrome fleuro from a guy called Buzz, the
rainbow of fleuro colors made available by new technologies had been ignored
by the Marxist realists at the Lead Sheds.
Still from "Virgin Beasts"
To Arthur’s psychedelic brain, colour was a drug that got him high, he
designed a shockingly bright, incandescent poster for his bail fund raiser,
“The Anti-Authoritarian Dance”, again holding the gig at Balmain Town Hall, with
the Balmain cops gnashing their teeth in the foyer. (He didn’t learn till many
years later that the Balmain Town Hall had long been the spiritual home of the
Australian Labour Party.) This gig was also a great success, the crowd rioting
with the rock’n’roll fun, dancing wildly with pagan hysterics till the roof
near blew off, and this encouraged Arthur to carry on throwing benefits helter-skelter. He always paid basic expenses to the workers involved then donated
all the profits to the various protests, never keeping anything for himself as
money was not his god, though his cynical detractors possibly mythologized him as
a thieving outlaw, buying a Balmain mansion with the loot he had scammed.
As part of his general mania, Arthur
had always thrown himself, guts and all, into whatever attracted his interest.
When he was a yogi seeking enlightenment he devoted the best years of his youth
to practicing the arcane disciplines, surrendering comfort and career to the
great quest, twisting himself into knots, meditating for hours in the freezing
Ganges River, devouring every yogic tract ever printed. When he came back to
earth in Sydney and his unrequited, mutinous lover had won him over to the
revolution, he agitated so zealously he came across as more radical than Che
Guevera. Any and every issue would get him harping and carping like a
rabble-rousing demagogue, ever willing to storm the Bastille, picket a nuclear
reactor, march on parliament and save the world. While this impressed a few
Maoists, it left all the half-baked, leftie careerists climbing the pyramid of
government bureaucracy unamused. They sneered at his rabid intransigence, his
egomaniac delusions of romantic resistance, his “more radical than thou”
naiveté.
As an assertive, opinionated, anarchist upstart he got on most sane, dull,
people’s nerves. Like Zippie the Pinhead, he thought “land-rights for gay
whales” contained a politically viable philosophy and he truly believed the
Social Construct in which he wallowed was “Topsy-Turvy Land”; much of what the
State/Media/Church pushed upon him as GOOD he saw as BAD. Once, at a benefit
gig he put on at the good old Lead Sheds for “The Prisoner’s Action Group”, he
featured a rock’n’roll band called “Real Fucking Idiots”, and that was a fitting tag for
Arthur himself considering his recalcitrant, bent soul. Rocking the boat, agitating sacred
cows, honing the satire of his art, he relished the infamy of being a cheeky,
nasty boy and was careless of the dampeners it put on his artist’s non-career. At
every snooty cocktail party he was not invited to, he said the wrong thing and
trod on the wrong toes.
In Arthur’s flighty mind each political stunt was a holistic piece of
performance/conceptual art, starting with the act of civil disobedience at
which he’d get arrested, then creating the poster, finally putting together the happening
music gig as support to pay off the police fines. As Art it all went
unrecognized by the ‘Powers That Be’, ‘They’ preferred ballet dancers laying
turds on glass topped tables as cutting edge ART as long as it had an obtuse,
conceptual rave to go with it; oh yeah, and friends on the Grants/Members Committee. He was a crazy freak with more than
a burning chip on his shoulder, it was a raging forest fire, he hated much
about the way the world was organized, and he often depicted it all come tumbling
down in his imagery; possibly all this drama was the
denouement of his violent childhood and oppression as a homosexual. Of course
he was aided and abetted in all his insurgent endeavors by other dysfunctional
rebel-types of which Sydney had a plentiful supply.
Throughout all these avant garde antics, Arthur acted the independent
loner in the Workshop, paying for all the silkscreen materials he used,
personally hand making all the posters and cleaning up religiously after every
artwork. The gang at the Lead Sheds named their Collective “Dirtworks”,
stamping the “Illuminati” design of an ‘eye in a pyramid’ upon their posters
which Arthur thought was clever but not for him. He preferred his own
signature, slashing a big ‘Z’ as did ‘Zorro’ in the 'Fifties TV serial. He was never asked to join the
hallowed in-group of “The Collective”, to concur on decisions, disburse funds,
get paid as a teacher or take on a commercial job, though in Government
National Gallery records THEY would record him as being a member of “The
Collective”. In truth he was excluded, humored, mimicked, slandered as a wanker
and a foolish outlaw who got in trouble with The Law for his art; in reality
it was only playing it safe and pretending radicalism that got one an arts
career in Auz.
The leader of the Lead Sheds Art Workshop was a one-eyed craftsman named
Chips MacSalty; son of the University’s vice-chancellor, he could get away with
post-modern poster murder, and he did, creating brilliant, challenging artworks.
He was the only one whom Arthur considered had any integrity and he liked him a
lot, as did everyone, he had charisma, was sincerely dedicated and very laid
back, open to any hard luck story, such as Arthur’s, and he was very kind to
the little poof. Chips led a coterie of six other artists, all of them ripping
off famous, historical designs and rearranging the images to suit their
iconoclasm. They were all paid by the University to take classes in
silk-screening, they taught Arthur the craft of making perfect posters and for
this he was honestly grateful. But they had little influence on his style, he
preferred to use hand-drawn cartoons of his own making instead of their
photo-realism or rearrangement of famous classics, and the fact that he
remained a fiercely independent artist alienated him from “The Collective”. As
far as the history of Pop Art posters goes, he was more turned on by Toulouse
Lautrec’s perverse nightclub sketches than Andy Warhol’s commercial shock-value Polaroids.
Many poster-jobs from around the city, for advertisements and good causes,
flooded into the Lead Sheds and the Gang of Seven took all the jobs, every last
one of them, never offering Arthur a thing, him surviving by taking the dole.
He dreamed up every one of his disaffected events and did the poster for it, the
demented “performance artist”, thankfully avoiding “The Collective” as if it
was a Stalinist farm, he didn’t want to die nameless in a mass grave. Eventually
the “Dirtworks” gang drifted apart and a second mob took over, “Juicytoil”, but
Arthur got no merciful employment from them either. When a job as silkscreen
lecturer finally came up, after he’d been toiling seven years in the Sheds, he
optimistically applied for it but was knocked back, maybe he was just too mad
even for these anti-establishment house fraus. The job was given to a macho
Greek guy who’d showed up out of nowhere claiming he was an expert carpenter
and could build all their screens and tables for them. He then proceeded to
politically harass and sexually molest the nice feminists for a few months till
they had to sack him, but Arthur had also fucked off by then.
Back in early 1979 Arthur
threw a benefit gig for a little club in Darlinghurst called “Garibaldis”; it
was a favorite haunt of artists and politicos and the old Italian guy who
owned it was going broke and Arthur tried to help him out. The poster for the
gig was a cartoon caricature of the notorious drag queen, Doris Fish, striding
out of Kings Cross with a gang of Punks in her wake, silk-screened in a rainbow
of fleuro colors set against a dense, black field; and on a street corner he
depicted a dog taking a shit, an image much discussed and sniggered over. The design stuck in the minds of people “on
the make”, for down the track Arthur was asked to paint a twenty-foot high
mural, “Enjoy Smack Cold”, on a pylon holding up the railway-lines into Kings
Cross, which miraculously survived twenty-five years of storms, graffiti and
official discomfort. This was in the late Nineteen Seventies, the Punk
sub-cultural style ruled the Underground, and around the world the new
technologies of artificial dyes was being taken note of by all the punked-out
artists. Fluorescent was so in your face Punks just had to take it up.
Arthur was a man of his
times, surfing the wave of the moment, hip to what was hot and cool, a real
punk himself and seven steps ahead of most of the pretty young things trying to
impress champagne Sydney, that plastic city of celebrated hairdressers. In his
recycled clothes he never made the IN-Crowd, at art soires he was a nobody, the
eternal outsider with his crazed history of LSD therapy, acid jaunts on the
international freak circuit and squatting with anarchists down on Pyrmont Point,
a freak’s life compared to most people’s humdrum experiences staying at home in
the suburbs.
It didn’t take long for artists all over town to start making posters with
lots of different fluoro colors and thick, black edging; even similar images
to the nasty dog defecating showed up: when an image is hot, it’s hot . “The
Collective” still snatched up all the commercial jobs at The Sheds, Arthur
eking out a sorry existence of poverty in his ramshackle Pyrmont Squats studio,
carrying on blindly, blissfully ignorant of the careerists maneuvering around
him. He toiled to create his explosive works of fleuro outlined in heavy black
like “Darling it Hurtz” and “No Future”and paid for it all with his dole-money.
As far as he was concerned, the major artistic influence on his style, apart
from everything he’d ever looked upon, was the “Little Black Sambo” books of
his childhood in the Nineteen Fifties, designs in primary colors with heavy
black outlines. This style had a long history with the likes of Van Gogh,
Lautrec and Picasso, influenced by Japanese prints, so he could never claim he
invented it. Yet while it’s true that all the Sydney artists meeting at the
Sheds inspired each other, borrowing, enhancing, evolving, Arthur didn’t like
being left to eat their dust when they got their works recognized later on,
especially as his “Garibaldi’s” poster was the work that resuscitated the fluorescent craze
in Sydney, for all that the art-wanking desperadoes would say otherwise. Being
of the gutter, he was made to stay in the gutter.
In this cruel, commercial world, winning is what counts, and THEY won, the dice were loaded against him. Arthur could only declare, “Fuck ‘em! A boy’s gotta do what a boy’s gotta do, plod on regardless,
surviving, creating and staying cool was a form of winning also.” Arthur had
tried to be an all-round Mr. Nice-guy, ever ready to lend a helping hand or a
sympathetic ear, cleaning up after everyone, lapping like a puppy at all the
great artists’ heels as they toiled away at their masterpieces in the Lead
Sheds. He forgot nice guys got trodden on in the big rush to Nowheresville. He
was a poofter from the wrong side of the tracks, from provincial Melbourne no
less, no private school and no old boys network. He didn’t have a clue about
what was really going on with the ART world; he thought all the posters were
for radical, political causes and every one of them should be put up on the
street walls of Sydney.
He was naïve, idealistic, dumb and delirious, the quintessential soft-touch;
he considered Art and money anathema. He gave his artworks away, did jobs for
free, lavished effort in painting murals on crumbling public walls, printed up a
deluge of cartoons which he handed out on street corners and generally avoided
any connection to capitalist value systems. Most of his work was mass-produced,
copies of copies, thrown to the wind, of the moment, for he felt that all would
turn to dust in the end, nothing was permanent. He was living in ‘Cloud Cuckoo
Land’, hanging his art on sky-hooks.
It was only when the party was over that it gelled on Arthur what up-market
Art Gallery entrepreneurs had in common with revolutionary artists. He didn’t
know all the Lead Shed artists had kept most of their posters in storage, ready for sale
as ‘High Art’ to government funded galleries. When he stated that he wanted to
put all his works up on the city’s walls, “What do you mean, the walls?” piped
up Bobby Stoner, “Our prints are going to the Galleries, hopefully to be sold
to private collectors, that way we only need do a limited run.” “A limited run,
for private collectors?” mused Arthur. “I must be on another planet. I wanted
to paint the whole town punch-drunk fluoro pink. Fuck, what’s going on?”
But these clever careerists indeed did make it to the hallowed walls of the
State with their proclaimed “Street Art” while he trudged the streets, defying
the law, sticking every one of his thousands of posters upon the walls, never
sending them to galleries for private collections, this kind of art business
being out of his ken. And thus he ended up broke and ignominious.
Arthur had been showing politicized films at many of the benefit
functions he helped organize, always pleading with filmmakers to donate their
work so the gigs would be shit-hot multi-media events. There came a day when he
realized he could make the films himself, another secret childhood dream
dredged up; if no one was going to discover him as a movie star, he would
discover himself. He had a good mate in those times, Glen Lewis, who supported
him unconditionally and put a Super 8 camera in his hand and he saw how it easy
it was to make “Punk film” by waving it about like a wand. He filmed the scenes
he moved through, life in the gutters of Sydney, the squats, punk rockers,
potheads, protest marches, strip clubs, and in 1980 he put it together as “My
Survival as a Deviant!?” He showed it at underground clubs, some liked it, some
didn’t, but it was the beginning of his wondrous movie career.
Sydney was a vicious town that chewed up guttersnipes who dreamed of better things, you were either well connected
to money or connected to a ball and chain, there was little in between.
Maniacal in his sincerity, believing in his causes, his bleached white hair
standing on end and dressed like a cyber-punk Zippie the Pinhead, he stood out
from the safe crowd like a freak-show clown. As a nasty, edgy artist, he always
knew the conformist Auz elite would be denied him; a libertarian gutter fag who
undermined consumer capitalism with cutting vitriol, it couldn’t be otherwise.
Like Tourette’s Syndrome, to give the finger to ‘The System’ was compulsive,
and total fun. In spite of the poverty, oh how he loved being the REBEL. He
went on to make daring animated films, and they won international awards; there
was a Big World out there curious about the state of things inside the magical
Isle of Auz, and his work intimated something of this. Eventually the Internet
was invented and he could really talk to an international audience; laughing
with glee, he jumped over the heads of the local plodders, overcoming the black-balling
and censorship, he spread his wings and was free, the Internet a true democratic
leveler.
In 1984 he was making one of his typical, illuminated designs, a poster for
his short, animated film, “The Thief of Sydney”, when a Japanese guy, Rick
Tanaka, came into the Lead-Sheds Workshop and watched Arthur as he finished up.
He talked about how he was a disc jockey for the radio station atop the
University of Technology’s concrete tower, with a show in which he played
Japanese pop music, and he wanted to make a poster to advertise it. He was
enamored of the style, fluorescent color and motif in Arthur’s “Thief of Sydney”
posters which he’d just put out to dry, a dragon wrapped around the Centrepoint
Tower, and was inspired to do something similar.
But Artie didn’t get the job, months later Rick gave it to one of the
Lead-sheds “Collective”, Mickey C, and together they came up with a poster,
fleuro with heavy black outlines, of the Godzilla movie-monster attacking the
same Centrepoint Tower. The coloring and design of the Jap-pop poster was not
unlike Arthur’s “Thief” and he didn’t mind his hard-won design worked over,
mimicry being the best pretense at respect, so the bullshit truism goes, and he
kind of felt honored he’d made such an impression on the hip foreigner. In the
gladiator’s bull-pit that was the Australian Art scene, he had to be happy with
any commendation he got.
There was even a night when the imperious Bobby Stoner gushed to Arthur
that as he’d had the genius to dream up the name of “Toby Zoates” as moniker for
his work, perhaps he could dream up a new name for “Dirtworks” as they’d grown
tired of its ‘Sixties, Illuminati connotations. Even she had progressed in her
posters to bright colors outlined in heavy black, a look that had become
‘Sydney ubiquitous’ and Arthur was growing heartily sick of it. Arthur smirked
into her smarmy face and suggested, “All Mod Cons, Bad Samples or how about
Soft Edges?” She stared blankly in return, too canny to take the bait,
suspecting he was taking the piss, and gave him her famous no comment, prim
smile.
By 1985 the old Lead Sheds gang had split up and gone their hairy ways, the
smartest of them seeking jobs in the Arts Bureaucracy, the only infallible way
for half-talents to stay on the Australian Arts Gravy Train. Arthur labored on
making batty posters and wallpapering Sydney with them, not a corner in the
entire inner-city missing out.
Over the years he noticed he was excluded from all the group shows of
the Sydney poster makers, usually held at Fly Swatter’s Gallery, and he couldn’t
figure out why, he’d never done anything bad to them, not one thing. And it was total exclusion, as if some other agenda was at play. They knew of his hard
life, yet they seemed to take pleasure in putting the boot in doubly hard, it was
mean of them, these middle class brats were like the overseers in convict times who didn’t mind using the
whip. He could only imagine they were jealous of his achievements, a boy from the slums, too much competition for
their pseudo-radicalism and pedestrian lives, his animated film, "The Thief of Sydney" the clincher, too hot for their cold hearts.
He thought back to that evening, in the late ‘Seventies, when he was invited
to dinner at Fly Swatter’s prestigious gallery
penthouse, along with his straight mate, Karl, who Artie suspected was flirting with poofy old
Fly. In the middle of the meal, Karl proposed the two of them make a daring
risque film, a 'John Reschy' sexual outlaw kind of film, with Artie in some
public toilet pulling his dick, on camera. Old Fly seemed impressed by the idea but Artie refused to do it, he couldn't understand why this was such a hot idea; he accused them
both of being crass voyeurs, they argued on and on, quite heatedly, and old Fly’s
wrinkled face got grumpier and grumpier whenever he cast it upon Arthur, who became quite abusive in his refusal. The
boy was not living up to salacious, arty-farty notoriety, or some such obtuse
nonsense, somehow he just didn’t please the guy. When he showed old Fly his work
and fished for a show at his renowned gallery, the old prick just gave a
cryptic smile and a slight shake of his grizzled head. There was going to be no
easy patronage for Artie, that’s for sure.
Being the generous, naïve fool, he delivered a copy of every wondrous
fleuro poster he printed to the Swatter’s gallery and the old squirrel stashed them
upstairs with his huge collection. Arthur never knew what became of them,
whether they were trashed or sold on. He did discover, much later on, that the
old rogue had long decided to ignore Arthur and back his competition for hip
artistry, an inane Kiwi who had often come to the Lead Sheds to eyeball the
latest posters produced there, a private school boy, safe, heterosexual and
connected, who made crap art depicting Aussie cliches, appealing to gronks. Arthur would've liked to appeal to Fly's sense of "Gay Community, Brotherhood and Solidarity" but it was just toilet graffitti to the old dick, it was what was safe, commercial and dumbed down that had dollar-potential and money has always been the name of the game. Whatever, over the years, though there would be furious denials, Artie often saw certain aspects of his
work in the pop artist's famous shit. Winners are grinners, losers are boozers,
he could only escape into a pot haze and repeat over and over, “Sydney is a small, shallow pond, full of sharks."
All the Leftie types' various artworks trumpeted support of the disaffected, poor, working class, gays, dispossessed, indigenous and homeless, but when someone turned up who encapsulated all these abused entities in one person, such as Arthur, they denied him employment and succor. It reminded him of when he was a child and a big kid from across the road kicked him in the nuts, for no reason at all except for the cruel pleasure, setting a pattern, the beatings never seemed to end, as all these tales on Blogspot attest. Competitive capitalism was only the half of it, apparatchik socialism the sucker punch, for in Auz Govt. bureaucats decided what was art and who could be an artist. And yet Arthur surfed the terror, gave the finger to 'The System' and had a wildly exuberant life.
After old Swatter declined him a showing, he eschewed risk-averse middle-class gallery owners; he was too grungy and notorious; instead he
felt he could use all the walls of the city as his gallery and thus defeat
their elitism and monopoly of art spaces. The cost of silk-screening had become
prohibitive and the Lead-Sheds Gang of Seven continued to hog any available
poster employment, thus he had no money to make hand-printed posters. He evolved
into using the industrial, offset press, printing thousands of cheap black and
white designs, sometimes hand-touching them with fluoro paints. He applied for
an Arts Grant from the Australian Arts Council to have an exhibition of his
latest works but he was knocked back with finality. What else could he expect from the
trustees of an ex-convict colony who cringed at anything which hinted at social
critique and consumer subversion, “subvertizing”, for everything had to be
rubber-stamped “State-sanctioned” to be considered a valuable contribution.
Many years later, in the mid-Nineties, perhaps when they had all imagined
Arthur had been killed off, the old Lead Sheds gang held a reunion to celebrate
twenty-five years of glorious contributions to the Art world. They had as M.C.,
the anarcho-feminist television personality Judy Croissant who blathered on
about how she “found the nerve to go on to conquer showbiz with comedy after
being inspired by the rousing politics of the Dirtworks posters”. One non-star
after another got up and made grandiloquent speeches of self-congratulation
while Arthur sat at the back of the crowd, under his Garibaldi’s print, with a
sneer on his wizened, old Punk’s mug, the bad fairy. He’d gone around and
handed out offset posters for his latest nightclub show, “Deadbeat and Gronky”,
telling them all he’d recently been arrested and framed for an armed robbery by
a corrupt police force, much to their horror and embarrassment. Each of them,
all protest campaign comrades of old, gave him seven seconds and then turned
away, they were over him, he could flounder on his own.
Later in the evening he had to retrieve many of his flyers from the floor,
all scrunched up and abandoned. When he looked in the catalog of works being shown,
he saw everything had been grouped under Collective banners, Arthur’s work now
listed as if it was a “Dirtworks”or a “Juicytoil” Collective production, when
the reality was that Arthur had simply hired the screens and paid for the
paints. Thank no god he’d signed the works individually, otherwise the wankers
would have truly dispossessed him. They were all conscious that he’d been
trampled into a misshapen monster in the ongoing stampede for glory, he could
read it in the wall-eyed looks they gave him, he sensed a guilt-edged
misunderstanding lurking behind their half-smiles.
In the years thereafter
Arthur had terrible nightmares of sneaking around to the abodes of all the
merciless arts-careerists he’d ever met and been used and abused by, and wait
in the dark for them to show up. Like a serial killer whose M.O. was
choosing one kind of person for all his victims, in his case arts-holes, he
dreamed of bumping them all off hideously, maybe sticking paint-brushes up their
fishy arseholes or shoving rubber squeegees into their big, greedy cunts.
Further on in the mid-Nineties, a Poster exhibition was put on by the
National Gallery in Canberra pompously called “The Streets as Art Galleries -
Walls Sometimes Speak” and Arthur was informed that they were including one of
his works in the show, “The Thief of Sydney.” He was extremely thrilled at the
prospect; all his childhood dreams had come true, he had made it into the
hallowed halls of High Art at the heart of his nation. He had been issued an
invitation to the opening but the organizers can thank their evil stars that
his sojourn to the Capital got screwed-up for he would’ve torn the dump apart
over what he would have discovered had he been there, his infamy be damned.
He got his best mate to drive him down to Canberra, only they stupidly took
the coast road instead of the freeway, which added several more hours to their
journey. They trundled up to the National Gallery past eleven o’clock at night,
the party was over, the doors were shut and the cleaners were tidying up the
leftovers. Arthur could only press his nose against the plate-glass doors and
imagine what it must’ve been like to actually be there, in the National
Gallery, with one of his works hanging upon the wall. He had no money, all had
been spent on petrol, and they were left to forlornly wander the cold, white concrete
corridors of Canberra, hungry and disappointed, salivating as they watched the
legion of fat bureaucats gorging themselves in the swank, bourgeois eateries.
When he got back to Sydney he was sent a Catalog of the show,
“The Walls Sometimes Speak”, as if to rub his nose in it. He avidly flipped
through its colorful, glossy pages only to discover he’d been totally expunged
from the book, as if he’d never existed, with not even a tiny pic of ‘The
Thief” nor a slight mention of his name. All those thousands of posters he’d
laboriously marched through the streets and pasted up had been ignored,
crowded out by other precious works he knew very few of which had made it onto
street walls, most going into government offices, galleries and private collections.
Chips MacSalty, Bobby Stoner, Mickey C, all getting lionised with repetitive
entries, like they had some insider, golden hook into the Prints and Posters
Curator of the National Gallery, a guy called Dodgy Butthole. Staid house fraus,
T-shirt salesmen and social-security publicists got themselves patronized in
the Catalog, but actual street walls as galleries were far too gauche for the
majority of the works, for Arthur had lived through the times and he didn’t
remember seeing much of their crap up around the city.
What shitted Arthur off the most was the Japanese DJ got a full page
reproduction in the Catalog of his poster depicting Godzilla attacking
Centrepoint Tower, produced by Micky C, and Arthur knew damned well his “Thief
of Sydney” poster had inspired that one. Sure they had all inspired and
borrowed from each other, that re-configuring was the name of the
post-modernist game, all works had their individual touch and it was those
first across the line who won. Still, it pissed Arthur off no end to be wiped
from the slate so deviously for he was confident that his own art was as brilliant
as the next fuckwit’s, dam the experts’ opinion. What a bunch of dickhead
bastards they were, and on questioning Prim Devonham, one of the glorified
artists, he was told it was Dodgy Butthole who had made all the decisions and
he had particularly singled out Arthur for exclusion. Like, how would that
pen-pushing prick know what went up on the walls of Sydney when he spent most
of his slothful life wallowing in Canberra’s robopathic corridors of power?
Arthur’s paranoid, perceptive view of the workings of the Australian scene
suggested that there must’ve been someone giving him inexpert advice, like
Bobby Stoner, who’d long held a pathological hatred of this working class boy
with balls. He howled with pain at their cruelty, was it that they were
jealous, afraid he’d show them up, for his art was hot, and his animated films
were showing all the the world, while they were eternally relegated to backwater
regional Aussie galleries at best. He thanked no god for the Internet. If one Googled his
tag, TZ, his ART popped up from a multitude of sources, the “Collective”
blackballing just not able to keep him down.
If Arthur had made it to the opening at the National Gallery, seen his
“Thief” poster up on the wall, nicely presented behind glass, then noticed he’d
been excluded from the Catalog, in a blood-curdling temper tantrum he would
have ripped his beautifully framed work down and smashed it to pieces in the
faces of the wine-swilling flock of culture-vultures. He would’ve screamed the
truth about the all-suffering “Streets”, called them all money-grubbing creeps
and let them ring for the fucking cops. For the poster was his to do with as he
willed, no one had paid him for it and if it wasn’t good enough for the
Catalog then it wasn’t good enough for their bloody walls.
Such an act would’ve made him infamous! At last he would’ve received
recognition as the perpetrator of an alarming piece of performance art, maybe
the only artist ever to have torn his work down from the Grand Temple of Artifice
in Canberra where “The walls also shriek!” In the doing he might have done the
only honest act ever performed in such a citadel of crapulous chicanery, for in
Arthur’s jaundiced view of the history of Art in Australia, the Great Southern
Land was a bandit-infested desert, rife with exclusion, plagiarism and
nepotism. After all, he was spewing on a cringe-worthy country that had refused
a Van Gogh painting, offered for free in the late Nineteenth century, knocked
back because the curators didn’t think it had any merit.
They could all suck shit and rot in the posterior of their posterity: who
are they anyway? Shit-bags who'll die like everybody else! So what if their tatty posters also hang in the Museum
of Contemporary Art, nobody reads the tiny little names on the wall, their 15
nanoseconds of infamy isn’t worth the degradation of their souls. The lure of
fame and money was irresistible to the crabby cunts, like the ultimate drug,
nobody could resist it, but sadly they've ended up with fish-faces, like most junkies. In this cut-throat commercial world, Art was the least
of it, Art in fact was a tired old whore fucked to death, it was all about the
survival of the quickest and the slickest, the connected and the affected, and MONEY.
The careers of stuffed-shirt Govt. Arts Curators depends on pinpointing and promoting the next, new
avant-garde and, being sophisticated dead-heads, they inevitably, blindly
trawl ‘the Underground’ to find unusual, outrageous, sometimes subversive works
to turn into ‘High Art’ and make MONEY, (Basquiat and Banksy's work for instance.) Arthur obsessed that ‘art’ shouldn’t
be separated from daily life and so he slavishly brought his art to the street,
like “the Lettrists” and anarcho-surrealists of post-World War 2 Europe, to
bring vibrancy to the dreariness of urban streets, the scruffy posters
defying the status quo of obedient consumerism, work, Religion and the family, then blowing away in the wind. Arthur
knew it in his guts: the State would never give lifetime support to anything
that critiqued its machinations; State supported Art was for oxymorons.
Of all the artists he worked with at the Lead Sheds, Arthur thought Chips
MacMalty was the coolest dude, for he had actually put his soul where his mouth
was, got arrested over the issues he’d made inflammatory posters for and dedicated his entire working life in support of those issue. And he
had his own style, didn’t need to plagiarize and wasn’t interested in the
fleuro rage. He was everybody’s hero and as such managed to keep the workshop
productive for many years and was always ready to provide Arthur a space. Like
a naïve, incensed lunatic, Arthur had also got himself arrested over those
burning political issues, many times, and his thousands of wall posters were
simply the aftermath of his warped, heartfelt convictions. None of the other
so-called radical artists from the hot Lead Sheds ever got arrested in support
of the content of their art, they just pushed and cheered from the sidelines,
and pretended to be radical artists. But he did admit it was with the Gang of
Seven that he went on the first Gay Rights march up Oxford Street,
Darlinghurst, in 1978 and he really appreciated their solidarity, the one thing
they did to bolster his ongoing existence.
In spite of the elitist vitriol spat into his face, Arthur didn’t regret
giving his life over to “subvertizing”, the exhilarating adventure of the
iconoclastic artist running amok in a cold, complacent, bourgeois world. He
didn’t need State sanction, he declared himself to be an artist by his very
deeds. For what makes an artist? A critic’s newspaper write-up? A curator’s
endorsement? A collector’s sale? A bureaucrat’s grant? To Arthur it was the
doing, the slapping up of a mountain of work, the living and breathing of sheer
creativity, as if he were a mad sorcerer, a lead pencil his magic wand. All
else could blow it out their collective arse, his art was from his heart.
EAT THE KIDS!
The Lead Sheds was a muddled attempt at a Utopian free-space, where
sheer creativity was welcomed, the oppressed were uplifted and the heinous
political crooks were vilified. Much fun was had with the rock’n’roll parties
and politicized shows, and freaks could feel somewhat at home there. The top
dogs probably thought they’d been selflessly kind to Arthur, encouraging him
and lending him access to their sanctified precincts and, like Cinderella, he
was always polite, worked hard, never complained or tried to take over.
Secretly he thought they treated him as if he was some poor, club-footed
cousin, to be patronized but never brought into the fold or treated as an
equal. His male gay working class punk character kept him on the edge, an
outsider. In future he didn’t want to hear any shit about how he was a member
of any grand “Collective” or how art was “for the people”. Capitalist human
nature and altruistic collectives are anathema.
While this whole bitch-rave sounds like the typical loser-artist’s bowl of
sour cherries, it makes for one of the juiciest of Arthur’s “how I got beat-up”
stories and, whatever other arts-holes might squawk in reply, he swears by his
version. He hardly ever met an artist who didn’t have a harrowing tale to tell,
of being ripped off, plagiarized, hard done by, blackballed, dispirited and
annihilated, like an army of raving, paranoid misfits with delusions of grandeur
blaming an unjust “Them”. Arthur didn’t have what it takes to succeed, genius,
upbringing and ruthlessness, he was just another failed artist bemoaning his
fate, more talented than Hitler, not as good as Van Gogh.
Regardless, he carried on with his multi-colored hallucinations upon the human condition, on paper, canvas and film, surprised when people made a fuss of
them and enjoyed their verve and satire, shocked if they bought one when he was
particularly hard up for cash. Given the terrible history of the world, the
many wars, rip-offs and tyrannies, the fact it was on the brink of nuclear
devastation, environmental collapse and disease pandemics, he believed it was
the artists responsibility to discuss, protest, obstruct the devolution,
directly, in clear language and imagery. Pretty wallpaper, art as furniture,
conceptual masturbating, clever installations, all a waste of time and space.
The forces of destruction, war machines, police states, environmental
exploitation, are all backed by high capitalism to make profits for wealthy elites who
have no interest in supporting “protest art”, for them Art is to be what Robert
Hughs, the High Art critic, called “bullion art”, objects to invest money in.
Robert Hughs also said Piccasso’s “Guernica” was the last great 'protest'
work of art. Artie firmly believed there were many more to come, using any and
all mediums, particularly the new medium of digital communication, like the
Internet. Deluded, he dreamed of participating in the vanguard of the latest
happening Arts movement, Post Pop Art, Post-Post-Modern Art, Post Apocalyptic
Art, imagining it to be representational, abstract, narrative, meta-textual,
surreal, anarcho-mystic, expressionist, futuristic and realistic all at the
same time. Considering all this, in Arthur’s heart, the Artist had to be an
Outlaw, it was the only way his art would have any viability, it had to have
punch.
For much of his long life he would have to toil through chill winds and
hard rains, howling at the injustices of small souls sticking in the knives while his back was turned, without his right of reply. They were like the spoiled kids from
his school-days, excluding him from their precious in-group; the
goodie-two-shoes who were given access to the art materials because they were
well behaved. And Arthur could only look on from the outside, denied the crayons, the paints, the pencils and
paper because he was constantly rebelling, giving lip. As if art was not only a
reward for conforming, but as a dangerous propaganda tool, it had to be closely monitored.
Yet his childhood dreams had come true, all those years of travail, study
and euphoric abandonment lending solid sub-text to his imagery, he was
satisfied with the art he’d left behind, and what was yet to come, fantastical
vision-quests into the body-politic. He’d gotten on top of his troubles and
created ART, and, what the hell, at the end of the day he could possibly make a
claim to that coolest of titles, “The Artist.” Or was he kidding himself, with
delusions of grandeur, a wanker, a madman, a shaman, an outsider, an outlaw; if
that’s what it takes to make BAD art, so
be it. This is his story and he's sticking to it.
If you enjoyed this story please go to the WEB
address above and consider buying my book of tales about growing up
anarcho-queer, rock and roll punter and mystic adventurer in Australia and India
of the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s.
