Cancel Culture is Killing Me!

 

PC NEUROTICS AND THEIR CANCEL CULTURE ARE KILLING THIS INDEPENDENT ARTIST.

Look out. The trouble-maker par excellence is back in town with another story that will ruffle your feathers and get your hackles up. 

Part and parcel for the artist out on the edge is censure, exclusion, slander, jealousy, fear and cancellation. It's a tiresome story that keeps repeating in my working life because I refuse to compromise my principles, suck up to power, hold back my punches, play nice, be a wimp. Thus Im broke, ignominious, a loner who doesn't give a shit for money, fame or competition.

Recently a young punk/grunge rocker approached me to do a poster for his band's upcoming tour of regional and rural Australia. He'd seen my work on Instagram and wanted something similar, busy street life, anti-authoritarian, cop baiting, with bikers and tattoos, all entwined with Australiana. I agreed and from that brief I had a vision, almost the finished work flashing in my mind's eye.

I suggested a lurid B movie poster design and he enthusiastically agreed, old Bollywood cinema art appealed to him. I researched and did the first rudimentary sketch on Vagatore Beach in Goa. I completed the pencil sketch in a seedy room in Mumbai, a place I'd often fantasised killing myself due to despair, angst and betrayal, so romantic, a B movie plot itself. I never did it as life on the road always enthused me, gave me the spirit to keep going.

 my room in mumbai

I showed my punk client the sketch and he said it was "fantastic" so I continued. I could only find the shoddiest of materials to work with: fragile paper, cheap water colours, a jerry-rigged light table with a sheet of perspex I bought in Colaba, Mumbai. I made it to the Himalayan foothills with the project prepared and set to it with gusto in a freezing hotel room, my hand shaking from the cold so that I could hardly hold a paint brush.

I created, in my opinion, one of my best works. Sixty years of study, practice and exhibiting came to the fore till my brilliant vision was materialised. I was influenced by the art of my youth in the 1950s and '60s. Childrens' book illustrations, ('Little Black Sambo' and 'Noddy and Big Ears'); comic book art/covers (Super Heros and Underground comix such as ZAP); holiday beach town postcard art; girlie calendar art that magazines like 'MAN' luridly depicted; the cover of Pulp Crime Novels; B movie posters; '60s psychedelia; all mulched down into one explosive graphic in my own inimitable cartoon style. It took a hundred hours all together and two recoveries from disastrous accidents with wet paint and me standing on the poster with wet feet.

Given that it was supposed to be Australiana to depict and please the rural towns the band would tour, I included the obligatory koala, kangaroos, cockatoo and gum tree. But what would an outback image of Australia be without Kooris making their presence known? Im very much a proponent of Koori rights and am militant in my opposition to their over-representation in our gaols so I had a Koori boy placed in a pig van as a symbol of our First Nations people's oppression. 

 To balance that out I put a jolly Koori sitting happily by a billabong barbequeing a baby croc for his bush tucker. In front of him, as an opposing satire, I've got the band's singer feeding a cop to a giant, open-jawed crocodile. The entire narrative is a satire on Aussie movies, particularly 'Crocodile Dundee', 'Stone', 'They're a Weird Mob' and David Gulpilal characters. All good, I thought.

 Finally I showed it to the rebel punk band via an email. They loved it, except could I please get rid of the Koori characters as they felt mention of blacks might hurt some people's sensitivities. They would photoshop some nicer images into their place. I refused. I hate woke millenials, or any old dicks, telling me their politics are more viable than mine who has been an activist for 45 years and very much a proponent of Koori rights. They refused to relent, my depiction of Kooris was negative and made them feel uncomfortable. Middle-class whities and PC neurotics hate being uncomfortable. Comfort rules!

As an artist, out on the edge, Im not in the business of making my audience feel comfortable. The opposite, I want to rock their boat, shake them up, question their dearly held notions of propiety. And for me its infuriating that us white gubbas are not allowed to talk of the egregious treatment of our First Nations people. Somehow it's all got to be "happy happy joy joy." Throughout white, colonialist history Kooris are not only given NO VOICE they're not to be seen either. They're disappeared from the Australian scene.

 I refused to budge and then declared I was withdrawing from the project, cancel culture being an ugly aspect of the woke. Between censorship from right wing bigots and censorship from faux left wing PC neurotics there seems little hope for independent, edgy art and critique. Ok, "hate speech" is not on, neither is racism, misogyny, homophobia and fascist cruelty. I swear from my heart and life experience my work has none of this, not even inadvertently. I study, research and think out clearly the symbolic meanings of the "signifiers" in my narrative art. I showed this poster to a Koori friend and he said, "Even Blind Freddy can see your images aren't negative." 

 I have an erotic female protaginist in the foreground whose creation I enjoyed because the female form is so curvaciously beautiful to draw. In many of my previous works I often put my female characters in army pants and flack jackets so as not to be sexist in objectifying them. But for once I thought I'd try the lurid Pulp Crime cover design of her in a sexy dress to increase the narrative's excitement. And to show she's not a passive female object I've got her holding a large knife and saying, "This is a real knife" meaning she'll take on the ferocious crocodile if she has to. I pictured her as a brown woman as Im sick of seeing white heroins, particularly in Australian narratives.

 Now Im not really sure what the band's true objections were about, all four of them felt queasy. Trying to please all of them was a hard ask, a bit like "art by committee" which is anathema to my way of doing things. In my long contemplation of this contretemps I think they simply didn't realise what they were getting into when they hired me as if they didn't really look at the history of my work, which is quite radical, let's face it, I dont hold back. I also think they were chicken to tell me the truth. I bet it was their management who baulked at tbe outrè imagery, it would upset the sensitivities of the white gronks in the country towns.

From the start I asked the lead singer how they would handle the cops in every dinky, redneck town in which this explosive poster would be put up and he said, "Fuck 'em, they can lump it and we'll handle it." What I've surmised is that for all their punk bravado, on seeing the finished, punchy product in all its anti-authoritarian, rebel glory, they shat their pants, the pussies. And used their discomfort with the Kooris' depiction as an acceptable excuse.

 They offered to still pay me but I politely told them to stick their money where the sun won't shine. "Im not in it for the money, or the fame, Im in it for the sheer joy of creativity, telling a hard story and sticking it to the BEAST." And I dont mean to criticise ALL millenials, they are our hope for the future, it's many of them who are protesting the Zionazis' genocide of the Palestinians. Oldies nitpick too, wannabe experts in all that should or shouldn't be allowed. I'm just tired of having to be paranoid of my every move, it's a killer for risquè creativity.

 I will leave it up to you, the viewer and thinker, if I did indeed project negativity in these images, or if the punk rockers are just too precious in their wokeness and maybe even fearful of pig repercussions. I'm heartily sick of virtue signaling cancel culture. To me it's censorship, plain and simple. 

I am having a show in September 2024 and will show this artwork in all its pernicious glory and again you can think about art, independent expression and censorship in a world that's growing more intolerant, more touchy, even fascist, day by day.