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" Read My Lips - Drink My __

> Words"

* Adam Cullen's Art Of

Beer Energy ..

~

__________

There are four glasses of Irish Cream to the 750 ml bottle," howls the dishevelled young man to his slightly catatonic train companions. "My mother has four bottles at home all the time." We crawl with screeching brakes past the Lidcombe Catholic Workmans Club (special guest performers - The Delltones).

The trusty suburban Iron-Horse spits out its lovely refuse into a grey-orange sunset. I'm not coping very well with the colour of this afternoon and the noise of a distressed suburbia. Too bad. I'm already late for my artist's interview.

Adam Cullen tugs an anemic-looking red Alfa across a stew of Newtown traffic into a no-standing zone. Flushed moon-face, he looks pretty well knackered at work days end. But it's just my own projection of feeling shithouse. Picture the car and the man: roiling cigarette smoke, old car smell, a chesty guffaw bursting from a hole in his pointy beard stubble. I'm being driving back to the outer limits of inner-western Sydney - awake in 'matey' fright.

Pretty soon he's asking me questions about a show he had last year called "The Australian Labour [sic] Party" (at Sydney's Yuill Crowley Gallery) - and a bunch of stuff I hadn't thought about yet. I'm sifting nervously through refuse stuck to the bottom of my briefcase. Find a pencil. Switch on the tape. Get to the heart - and the art - of what Cullen describes as the "neurotic alchemy of coping."

Cullen exhibited seven major new works for this show. First question - roll it:"Adam, you know you've inserted an English 'U' into the the battler's ex-best friend." "Ab-so-lute-ly," he replies, crooning syllables every which way.

The title "glamour photography/shane monopoly" sticks to a gloriously girdled (or is it 'pubicised') paint smear. What happened here? Did Linda Evangelista spew her crusty pizza, Moët et Malboro Light onto a crisp white napkin? Cullen submitted the work for the Gold Coast Art Prize. It currently resides in The Gold Coast City Art Gallery. I switch my attention from the smear to the couplet, laughing cross-eyed.

Once upon a time the patrons sniffed and thought a bit. Cullen had punctured the polite vacuum wrap that secures most artists to the dumb fabricators of beautiful objects supermarket shelf. "Now ..." they thought, quite wisely, "... we're getting an extra 40% free for the cost of last years 750 ml scunge and grunge."Soon the gazumping started, with clever connoisseurs buying Cullen's "elaborately bad work"an hour before show time.

I'm just settling into Cullen's garage when two full-size personality portraits lurch into my art-loving personal space. The first, one of radio/TV comedian Mikey Robbins, was accepted into this year's Archibald Prize exhibition. The second, dimly (yet fondly) recognizable as 'bucket of brains' media studies cyber-cyclist McKenzie Wark, had just taken a tumble from the roof rack.

He pops the bar fridge door open, cradling a longneck in his painty hands. "It [the painting] fell off driving in from the city," explains Cullen. "It got run over a couple of times before we rescued it. "Looking better for it today though. "Do the email Wark yeahh!!"

Flipping through another bunch of transparencies - First stop: a picture of a foetus wearing a six-pack on its head. It's called "Special Lite Nude". Helpless unborn meets the sign for the (soon to be) legless drunk, aided and abetted by 'clever' copyrighting.

The fuel and food of "beer energy"takes us from the womb to the grave on many - unpredicatable - escapades. It's just one task on Cullen's agenda - one bottle out of the six-pack - to chart the absurdity of our many drinking cultures.

While work-a-day ales have been re-tooled and made decent and product differentiated for corporate beaux and femmes, their use-by date for art has been and gone. Smart designer beers, guaranna spiked 'alcocolas' won't do for art what boozing and Jungian psychology did for Jackson Pollock's squirty charisma back in the days of abstract expressionism. "Alcohol just isn't an artist's tool anymore," says Cullen,"it's just a bad excuse for not getting on with the job."

Consume two standard drinks - no more - before test driving "Life Fitness - Sophisticated Nagging." This 1997 installation featured two - identical twin - affordable state-of-the-art bubble cars packed to ceiling height with empty 'piss-weak' beer bottles. Hard to appreciate while you're seeing double. You're still sober. Right? And getting more sentimental by the moment. You want art to fall in love with? Someone to tell you why it's beautiful? As writer, Catherine Lumby remarks, "The artist has left no room in his cars for the nattering theorist (or the nagging lover) to sit in."

There's a kind of routine extremism that Cullen endures in crashing through from one exhibition to the next. While his working methods and materials often appear sloppy and slap-dash, the approach, and the prey are always well chosen. Having seen the down-side to over-managed perfection, he's here to make some art and noise about it.

And how does he get from the very clever titles of individual works to the name of the show itself? Is it just an advertisement for his latest range of products? "No, it's more like an album cover really - and the titles of the songs are like the paintings."

Cullen's work fits best once you've changed out of the leisure wear of "personal obsession", "art of grunge" or retro "arte povera" (the 60's Italian movement which stressed poor materials of everyday life). While his earlier pieces featured mumified cats and life support systems "dressed as urinals," it was the attachment of carefully phrased titles to these objects that brought Cullen's uncanny poetry to more mature art-world attention.

Before the paint (or the magic marker) has dried, he's a maniac with words. I fondly remember the ten minutes I spent proof-reading a film review Cullen had submitted for publication in one of Sydney's most free (read invisible) cultural tabloids. Half-baked, shatteringly funny words spill everywhere with nobody to clean up after them.

"I'm not a great Jim Carrey fan, but when you get crammed into a velveted cinema-cineplex and you've got one hundred, eyebrows-joined inbreds laughing at this goof with a small dick, it's pretty funny ... This is a documentary about relief, not release. This is why it's not a film for people trying to live an alternative lifestyle, contemporary bisexual theorists, or people who think they're really good looking."

Cullen takes his TV and (mostly video) movie watching very seriously. "Friends", he remarks, "is a little too complicated" for his taste - but the film Free Willy is without doubt, a "satanic masterpiece". How so? "Well, its got kids, dehydration, aquatic elation." Cullen steadfastly refuses to change his adjective. "... And it has all the ingredients for badness."

The aggressive ambivalence, caught between redneck rage and the pique of political correctness is captured brilliantly in a little Mabo cartoon he's drawn for a recent show in New Zealand. Careless words crafted carefully:

The news is out: words have invaded Cullen's paper and canvas, turning grunge into the gold of illuminated manuscript-grafitti. When Cullen spray painted - "My Parents Phone Number is 99821676" onto an otherwise bare canvas, they appeared like the painty daubs of an alien life form. Lights on but nobody's calling home.

It's an unexpected challenge to anyone caught loitering in the 'safe house' of a gallery space: "Do you want to be a dumb reader or do you want to be a smart looker?" The artist steps in for a moment to ease the panic of feeling forced to choose: "My paintings give you the feeling that I'm talking to myself. There's also an awareness of the sub/urban landscape, its painted language and anatomy".

Cullen understands that writing about the visual arts is a much too serious occupation to be left in the hands of critics and reviewers alone. Near the centre of a white enamel canvas (entitled: "A Body Without a Head is Not Worth Living") is an acrid fluoro green drawing of a baboon skull. Above it is written in biro the specifications of a high-calibre hunting rifle."It's the subject of an urban/urbane white male in a landscape that's 'downloading' - ever so slowly".

So how has his art adapted to the realities of Australian life? "Sidney Nolan's Ned Kelly is finally dead. His scrotum isn't a Qantas bag but a surfboard fin awash in crumbling low surf ... home videos come to mind, along with the never-ending wet dream of domestic violence."

Domestic violence - in Cullen's imagination - is like going eye-ball to eye-ball with Waiting for Godot as a TV sit-com. 7.30 pm weeknights at everyman's RSL. Give him an inch and he'll give back an infinitesimal fraction to successfully molest the sturdiest grey matter.

© Colin Hood 1997

colin hood