This is not another version of my faux boo hoo hoo story, it's fact, a hard social realist tale. I have suddenly woken up. After all these years it has hit me like a punch to the heart, the travails of struggling through a class-war planet has driven me into dysfunction. To be a pauper artist, unconnected, rejected from the NAS,a refugee from social housing, and still exhibiting is pissing in the wind.
There have been many surveys which have discovered that the majority of artists who get State/bourgeois recognition and make a good living from their work are from wealthy families. What hope is there for an unconnected working class boy but to make do with communicating from the gutter? Where can I pin the cause of my madness? Is it a delusion, a myth, a romance, a calling? Is my art practice just therapy, a compensatory mechanism for a broken heart?
In 1971 I hit the road at the age of 21 travelling across the world for 7 years. I slept on the streets of Sydney, Mackay, Darwin, Penang, Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta, Istanbul, Athens, Crete and some years later Paris, Spain and Morocco. Often I sat on the street and drew pictures, occassionally selling one. That's as "street" as one can get.
Returning to Australia I lived in Sydney squats for 13 years from 1977 on, one step up from the gutter. I guess I got used to living in a squalid space, the ceiling caving in and rain-water running down the walls. I thought it was fabulous, the dirt and dust most suitable for the "grunge era" of the 1980s, and let's face it, a partial roof definitely beat the streets. In 1990 I got shifted by the Sydney City Council to social housing in Surry Hills, a secure roof over my head at last, but actually it was leaping from the frying pan into the fire, murders, suicides, police busts rained down and I devolved.
I live a lot in my head, studying, researching, reading, looking, watching, discussing, dreaming, wanking, thinking, thinking, thinking... and I don't notice the entropy grunging down my apartment for dust, dirt, mould, hoarded crap piled up. I live on my couch or my bed where I do all my drawing and writing, the dust building up on everything around me till it seeps into my lungs and slowly kills me. The carpet has not been replaced for 34 years! The Housing Dept inspect the place twice a year to make sure I'm not living with anyone or growing pot, they ignore the filth, possibly hoping I'll sink into it and drop dead, then they can sell off the flat.
Whenever I have a big project on the boil I let everything go even more to pot, busy making posters, paintings, online promos, while all art materials, clothes, books get scattered everywhere. I had a show on recently and in my preoccupation with it I ran out the door and left a tap running in a plugged sink. I came home 7 hours later and found my entire apartment flooded with 3 inches of water. Sludge, wet paper, soggy carpet all turned into a swamp that I squelched through to cross the room. Feeling defeated I daily mop, scrub, wash and sweep, throwing heaps of rubbish out: perhaps the ordeal a blessing as at last my apartment is getting a good clean out and all put neatly in order. But as I pushed the detritus around with a mop I flashed that indeed I have been quite mad much of my life, acting out the role of a bohemian with delusions of artistic grandeur.
Let me again go over my life of poverty, intransigence and mistakes. Both my parents came back from the 2nd World War with PTSD, to no counseling, no jobs, no accomodation. We moved 7 times in and out of share-houses with arguments raging between all the detainees. We finally got social housing in 1956 in the Olympic Village after all the athletes split. Domestic violence was rife, my dad beating my mother into the floor and beating me, from infancy on, for crying loudly and squealing like a girl.
As a boy's boy and a sissy boy I got in a lot of fights in childhood, the local kids beating me up, my teachers strapping me on hands and legs for disrupting the class, my brorher often punching me out for acting effeminitely: life was a riot. In my teens I was poofter bashed, raped, unemployed and homeless, my burgeoning queerness alienating me. Then at 19 I was conned into having psylocibin (LSD) therapy by an undercover cult called The Family to convert me to heterosexuality. It didnt work, I was bent further, my conditioning to accept the bullshit of the society I lived in was blown out my arse like so much crap, particularly religion and authoritarianism. I wised up, clearly seeing "the emperor has no clothes." I became cynical, twisted, angry, angst-ridden, the classic outsider. This scrambling of my sense of self was the ultimate shove not just to the edge but over the cliff into vagabondage.
After 7 years on the road, mostly all over India, I washed up in Sydney and unleashed my madness on that much abused, old convict colony. I papered the walls of the entire inner-city. What better gallery could I have? That got me the tag of "street artist" and hopefully "street cred." To communicate directly to the people without the middle-person of gallery entrepreneur or govt bureaucrats is my aim and pleasure. There's no money in it or State sanction, it's raw and uncensored, liberating and outrè, just how I like it. If Arthur Stace can do it with "Eternity" I can do it with "No God No War."
There are those smart arses who realise they dont need any great talent to succeed, as long as they are proficient con artists. All they have to do is get on a committee and influence it, and/or appeal to govt bureaucrats with a PC proposal, always putting on a smiling, polite middle-class face to hide the venal, ambitious, lying desperadoe. They will get the money/space to do with what they desire and also present themselves as great artists, and many polite suckers will fall for it. And if you don't have the class background of good manners and designer dress you dont make the grade. Anything for the money, the kudos, the power to say who gets in the door. As if such access to fat pickings wouldn't attract the most clever/banal villains.
I was recently informed of the perturbations going on behind the "Sydney Gay Mardi Gras" scene. I've always wondered why I and my art got cold-shouldered by the Gay Mardi Gras organisation, never invited to show my art: after all, I am queer, a long time working queer artist and a '78er. I always knew the SGMG was conservative but I hoped not mind-fucked also, I have since learned a long time CEO is a coke head, that type of hedonist gay is anathema to me, snippy, elitist, vapid.
Worse is a dude who has comandeered the art side of the "gay movement" in Sydney, a queer South African come to touch up the soft Aussies. Previously he floated a project to raise funds for the gay media and gay nursing homes. Many queer businesses and empaths invested around ten million dollars in the caring idea. He embezzled it all, sending much gay media broke with all concerned losing their jobs. He went to gaol for it. Since graduating from prison he has "turned over a new leaf" and taken over the "queer arts scene", namely Fuqtopia, the supposed queer history/art museum.
And what do you know, the artefacts chosen to exhibit are, in the main, banal, depoliticised, safe, unchallenging. A female assistant, when asked if she'd hang my painting of the '78 Sydney queer riots in the musem, used the censorious excuse Ive often been given in my artists' non-career, "there's not enough room on the walls." These are the right wing creeps that have agreed to take a million dollars from the Murdoch's for their vacuous queer mauseleum, a pink-wash for an entity thatvhas trashed queers, and all else progressive and humane, forcthe last 70 years.
Lying Nasty Parasite voters seem to make up the bulk of the Fuqtopians. When a friend of mine told them at their committee meeting that such a donation was anathema to queer history she was "screamed down" for her temerity. They must all be siphoning off some of that million dollars into their own pockets, only that could explain their over-reaction to the thought it shouldn't be accepted. Nothing riles up RWNJs more than a threat to their pockets.
The Murdoch "bribe" is a fait accompli, presented to the community without any consultatiins. Money talks, zombies walk. I'm persona non grata to the right wing queers who have infiltrated the movement and taken over much of the organisations, for therein lies much moolah, kudos and power.
Of course it had to happen, many of us queers are good guys, soft-hearted, ripe for take-over by ruthless fascists. They purport to support all gay art but when I advertised my latest show, "Dancing in the Garden of Pan", via posters, flyers, online posts and video grabs, not one supposed queer art fan came. Only my '78ers compayriots, my best "straight" friends and the Pasd-Port Gallery crew of young skaters and hip fans supporting me. Their antipathy didn't stop one of the Fuqtpians from coming to the gallery the day after my show closed to try and get them to have drinks at the Stoneall pub with their committee to celebrate their vacuous museum, all the while sniffing around at the prospect of also grabbing the Pass-Port Gallery space as it's garnering a lot of "hip" cachet for them to exploit.
So, the arts, among many fields have always been a site of elitism, exploitation and propaganda. Only the ruling class and the ruthless class succeed with notoriety and bullion, the rest of us live in poverty, ignominy and desperation. The real kicker is those money-grubbers ruling this class war have the nerve to present themselves as "caring, humane, progressive, uplifters of the downtrodden and marginalised" but in reality they're the opposite, they are terrifying social oppressors and capitalist money grubbers.
My life's hard journey, working class, impoverished, queer, brutalised, dysfunctional due to a cult's queer conversion attempt, activist arrested 7 times on intersectional concerns, suggests these supposed social uplifters should support me, but instead they kick me in the arse and starve me. It's always been this way, the class war, yet it doesn't stop or defeat me. I roam free and exhilarated, creating art, painting the walls of "the Temple", the world at large my sanctuary.
