LOOK BEHIND YOU by Andrew Frost, 2005

Adam's studio is not far from his home in Wentworth Falls. The studio is in the grounds of a house in the Blue Mountains and the view is fantastic. There is nothing but bush land, hills and low strung power lines over the valleys as far as you can see. At night you can see the lights of Newcastle to the east and to the south west the glow of Sydney on the underside of clouds. Apparently the studio – and the house – once belonged to Arthur Boyd's family back in the 1940s and 50s. There's a feel of genteel decrepitude about the place you also get at the Toy & Railway Museum in Leura or at the old hotels and their cocktail lounges in Katoomba. It feels as though history is just hovering over your shoulder. In Adam's studio was a bit of text written on a wall. LOOK BEHIND YOU. I wasn't sure if it was advice or a warning, but it seemed apt either way.
This was the third time I had been into his studio while he had been working on a new show. Adam likes to collect things and put them in his studio, stuck up on the walls or propped up on shelves. There were postcards of his recent series of works for the NSW Rugby Union and the blood of a footballer was still in a vial in a bowl. On a shelf was a photo of Captain Beefheart and The Magic Band next to a blue Dolce and Gabbana box. On the floor was a tattoo magazine. And then there were all the paints and brushes. Shades of reds and blues straight out of Dulux tins, artist's acrylics in pots and tubes, spray cans with stalactites of dried paint, and almost none of them with their lids on. The brushes all seemed to be bought from hardware stores. The radio played Triple J.
Adam handed me a book. It was Japanese Erotic Prints: Shunga by Harunobu & Koryusai. He said he had been looking at the prints and how they used space. In traditional Japanese woodblocks, the spatial planes were two dimensional and, if you took the figures out, quite abstract. Adam pointed out that it was the figures in these erotic prints that defined the space and in turn defined the realism [or otherwise] of the whole scene. I realised at once that this is precisely what Adam has been doing for years. In his paintings and drawings figures float on coloured backgrounds with only occasional lines or areas of paint to suggest depth and, on rare occasions, you might find differences in scale that could translate as depth or height.
I asked Adam if the Japanese works were a direct influence on what he was doing. He said that he was taking these works and 'cretinising' them. I've heard him say that before about other things and I've taken it to be a reference to the way he siphons off elements of his influences - bits of TV, tattoo magazines, old music, movies, or random snippets of text - and then distills them down to the essential element that attracted him. It's what makes his work so startling, that energy that blasts out of the canvases.
As we left the studio to have lunch at Adam's house I noticed that he had the front page of The Sydney Morning Herald with a picture of Douglas Wood, the Australian kidnapped in Iraq, in the studio. He said he was going to maybe do a painting based on the figures. Death by execution is one of my strongest fears and I had to look away. It was an odd moment. A few years ago when Adam was going to have a show at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in Melbourne, I had visited his studio and the conversation had turned to the immediate effects of decapitation, perhaps suggested by his recurring image of headless bodies in his paintings.
We drove in separate cars back to his house through the streets of Wentworth Falls. The leaves on the trees were an early May combination of burgundy and scarlet and burnt orange. There was a touch of winter in the air.
Over lunch we discussed his use of colour. In the past Adam had only worked in monochromes, starting with black and white and then with silver. Then around 1999 when he had a show at The Experimental Art Foundation in Adelaide, the backgrounds exploded into colour. He stuck with more monochromatic brush work for about two or three years but then the techniques he had perfected in his portraits - masses of coloured paint outlined in black to create images - started to appear in his entire body of work. The latest development is a move to add even more gesture and opacity to the colours and now the paintings flow around the canvas.
So why was he using colours in this way, I wondered. He said it was simple. Art has to compete with the world for our attention, with TV or with newspapers or, as he put it, "all the other wallpaper". It has to cut through the static and say everything it has to say. The subject of Adam's works has been consistent - he depicts animals or people in states of trauma and decomposition and although his works can seem like an assault, there's a real pathos and comedy to the images. That Adam uses himself as a figure of mockery in his work says much about the self deprecating notions he has of his own position as a commentator. Few Australian artists have attempted to create such an ambitious catalogue of our collective failures, sins of the flesh, failures of nerve and will, the complacence of the comfortably well off.
As I drove back to Sydney in the late afternoon shadows were long and dark. I thought of Donald Wood again. I had seen him on TV twice. The first time he looked frightened, kneeling between two hooded men who held guns, pleading for his life. The second time his head was shaven and he'd been beaten so badly his eyes were swollen shut. He could hardly speak. The TV news didn’t let us hear his weak, bruised voice. They paraphrased what he had said with an unemotional voice over. I had wondered how Australians would react when one of our soldiers or a contractor like Wood was captured by the insurgents. The people who had been captured before - the unfortunate American civilians, the British woman who had lived in Iraq for 20 years, the Italian and Japanese journalists, the Filipino truck drivers - they had all squirmed and cried, begged for their lives before most of them were either shot or beheaded. It had all been just too horrible to contemplate. But now that this Australian had been captured, albeit an Australian who was married to an American and lived in the US, there was hardly a squeak.
The silence, the indifference, has been almost total.

Andrew Frost
May, 2005

STUPID HEAVEN by Alan R Dodge, 2007

Around 1507, Albrecht Durer drew a portrait of himself in his mid-thirties. This was not the first self-portrait the German artist had made. There is a fine silver point drawing of him at 13 years of age and another made at the age of 28, in addition to placing himself in paintings (two self-portraits are masterpieces) and other drawings. But Durer’s nude study of c.1507 was different. Durer stares at himself, displaying his nude body with unblinking criticism. Within that gaze is the look of a man of experience, a man with both weariness and hauteur in his eyes. He confronts himself in the mirror with the cruelty of caricature. The brushed-in black ground throws into relief the folds on the right side of his torso and accentuates his bony knees. His genitals are drawn with strength. Here is a man who is both an animal and an intellect, recognising himself as such. Durer has used line to render his surface anatomy with great skill, but the unfinished right arm, the half painted in background imply an unfinished work. However, the work is signed in the upper left hand corner with his characteristic “AD” initials. What is even more surprising in Durer’s drawing is the apparent disjunction between the use of fairly fine cross-hatching to render the volumes of the body faithfully and the treatment of Durer’s face. The lines describing his facial features are spare, sketch-like and take on the appearance of a merciless cartoon. The face is gritty, tough and uncompromising. The portrait could be a 16th century precursor of Adam Cullen’s work.

Cullen’s work, like Durer’s, is the result of endless drawing with an eye focussed on the human condition. In a telephone conversation, Adam stated “I’ve spent my life drawing. I’m just constantly drawing.” 1 It is Cullen’s use of line (as with the head of Durer’s self-portrait) as a calligraphy of caricature that gives the work its strength. Calligraphy is actually the key word. Angry/funny outlines, drips and expressionistic swabs of paint provide a visual vocabulary that brings the canvas alive. Missing in these new works are the spray paint elements that appeared in earlier works. For example in TEMPLAR BIRTH – THE DEVIL IS TIRED IN WAR, Cullen has hoisted a helmeted torso on a pole of applied and dripped paint. In a painting from the year 2000, SHUT UP, NOBODY WANTS TO HEAR YOUR STORIES, another torso with equally small feet is buoyed up on two shafts of sprayed paint. Also, in most works the use of text has diminished, if it appears at all. The energising force of line against mass now dominates more or less completely.

Like Durer, Cullen has travelled and has been constantly on the lookout for armatures in what he sees in the world, the media and in other art. Most recently Cullen travelled to Spain and reacquainted himself with the Prado and its collections and a number of works in the present exhibition are inspired by paintings he saw during this visit. The Prado has long been a fascination for Cullen. For instance, it was at the Prado as a 10 year old that he “was struck dumb” by Goya’s painting of Saturn Devouring His Son. 2 Adam stated that while overseas this time he was interested in historical episodes in Spain’s history. He isolated them all arbitrarily and realised the difficulty of contextualising these episodes in terms of the Australian psyche.

One way into this, though, was through popular culture. WESTERN ASS ALMERIAN SPAGETTI has references in the desert area in southern Spain where a number of the spaghetti westerns were filmed in the days of ‘A Fistful of Dollars’, ‘For a Few Dollars More’ and ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’, when Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach and Lee Van Cleef strutted across the screens. While in Spain, Cullen also got hooked on bullfights. He particularly admired the horses “who were incredibly skilled and lean and look also comic”. 3 For someone who hunts pig and who has been skinning and tanning hides since he was 9 years old, fascination with the bullfight would seem a natural connection. It is possible to read some of the dramatic force and bravado in this contest between man and beast in the way Cullen has so forcefully executed this new body of work.

DO WHAT I DO was inspired by a painting of Christ, which “had so much thorn around his head that it looked like a hair-do”. 4 Adam said it was “like a pun and quite camp”. Another painting, LA MUJER BARBUDA (UNLUCKY ENOUGH TO BE BORN) had its genesis in a painting of an African who has a breast. ART DEALERS – OEDIPUS AND BACCHUS IN OLD AGE conjures up memories of Goya and Dix. In response to my questions about the paintings PROFILE and TESTOSTERONE MUCUS MAN, Adam recalled ads on buses in Spain which used people with Downes Syndrome. 5 While considering works for the Greenaway Art Gallery exhibition, Cullen decided to include a small work entitled BORN A SWINE. He states that the painting “was there when I came back and reminded me of people I saw in Spain”. 6 It has an uneasy relationship with the other works, but to me the sheer attack of gesture makes it bubble with anger and vitality.

Recently Cullen has had a major health challenge which he feels has really changed his attitude. For one thing he says he feels less urgent about things. These new paintings not only have elements of continuity with earlier work, but also have a maturity and a voyeuristic remove about them. Underneath it all sits a vulnerability that hearkens back to the Durer self-portrait of c.1507. Cullen has an eye that is unfailing, a calligraphic repertory which animates the surface, and a view of humanity which is at the same time scathing and humorous. In these works Cullen champions the bizarre, the funny and the pathetic; elements that cast humanity as products of both visceral and conceptual forces. In Cullen’s world man exists in an arena of dysfunctional activity and moral failure.

Alan R. Dodge

1 Adam Cullen, in telephone conversation with the author, June 2007.

2 Ingrid Perez, Adam Cullen: Scars Last Longer, Craftsman House, Fishermans Bend, Victoria, 2004.
3 Adam Cullen, in a telephone conversation with the author, June 2007.

4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.

6 Ibid.