Exhibitions
How Will It Be When I Have Changed? How Will I Be When It Has Changed?
Kris Carlon talks to Scott Redford
Kris Carlon: Why is the exhibition called Bricks Are Heavy?
Scott Redford: The title is sort of dumb-smart. I nicked it from an album by L7, the girl grunge band. It seemed to sum up the gravity of identity politics. Any artist who wades into 'identity' is up against it from the beginning. If I just made nice abstract paintings, which I love, I wouldn't have to explain myself so much. My biography and politics would be of little interest. The question would simply be: are the paintings any good? I've said it before, that I'd love to be like Robert Hunter and make art as he does, seemingly unencumbered.
I'm interested in the assumption that Gay artists have to make Gay work and indigenous artists have to make indigenous work. It's almost a demand.
Oh, it's total. And when you're seen as a Gay artist, it is hard to avoid personalised biographical readings of your work. I know this so I flirt with biography, playing on viewers' desires to read the work biographically and on the way they also bring their own desires to it. In the end, viewers are dealing with their own subjectivity as much as mine. In fact, a lot of so-called 'identity art' is about this space, between the artist's interests and the desires others bring to them. I could paraphrase Aboriginal artist Richard Bell: 'Gay art: it's a heterosexual thing.'1
So how does Queer fit into the Gay/straight binary?
Queer is a 'post-identity' idea. Queers tried to get rid of the straight/Gay polarity and adopt a third way. Queers almost thought they were doing a public service by saying you don't have to subscribe to dominant values, like for the heterosexual man who actually wanted to bring up the children, was happy cooking the dinner and waiting for his wife to come home. And they exist, those house-husbands. The feminists always said that they were liberating men from having to act like alpha males. Queer was very utopian. It was a great idea. But it was also vulnerable to co-option and dissipation, because it engaged everything and everyone – Gay, straight and in-between. Perhaps it vanished because it was successful, because it was absorbed into the mainstream – it worked itself out of a job.
A lot of your work, including much of this show, is a Queer repetition or revision of earlier moments of modernism.
Queering high modernism is great fun. In the 1990s my work addressed the ways homosexualities were suppressed in the classic formulation of modernism, the one I learnt at school. I revised modernism in the name of a homosexuality that was downplayed, but always there in the work of key artists. I also sometimes imputed Gay subtexts to canonical modernist works for the sheer hell of it. Queer paralleled the 'radical revisionism' employed by various Others, like feminist and post-colonial artists, many of whom also depended on appropriation as a strategy to turn the art history canon back on itself. It was actually quite conservative on one level, although it didn't seem so at the time. No-one really wanted to destroy the status quo, we just wanted to insert ourselves into it. As an appropriation artist, one becomes quite knowledgeable, even expert, about prior art and its aims. Paradoxically, in attacking the canon you become part of its being, you invest in it. You begin in anger, but the effect can be literally 'conserving'. You shore up the canon, contributing to its legitimacy and relevance. It's interesting how the arch-conservative and the avant-gardist need one another. I like to imagine John MacDonald and John Nixon, like God and Satan, meeting for coffee in a Venice cafe plotting to maintain art world equilibrium.
Did this thought of Queering modernism just appear to you in the early 1990s?
No, it was always there in one form or another. I made works in the 1980s that were precursors. In Untitled (Hero Boy Dies) (1987) I took classic black monochromes recalling Robert Rauschenberg's and overlaid them with newspaper headlines that alluded to the AIDS crisis. Also in 1987, I made a series of Yves Klein pink monochromes and pink body prints using my own body. I knew I was making 'Gay' Kleins, but I didn't have the theoretical maturity to be able to articulate anything like a Queer revisionism. I made these works, but I didn't quite know what to do with them. Appropriation was in full swing, but it wouldn't reach its 'revisionism for Others' stage until the 1990s. There was Davila, but his concerns were quite different to Queer, I think.
Does Yuppies' Blood have an AIDS subtext too?
Sort of. I did it in 1988 in my studio at Gertrude Street. Robert Hunter had been there before me. He had left traces of a try-out for one of his geometric wall paintings. And over the top I wrote 'IT'S FUN TO BE A VAMPIRE' in bold cut-out letters. It was the slogan for the teen-vampire film The Lost Boys, which had just come out. The piece looked like Lawrence Weiner doing ad copy. Like Untitled (Hero Boy Dies), it had an oblique reference to the AIDS crisis, but it was more about revisionism itself, which is ultimately vampiric. There was a play between Hunter's sublime abstraction and the intrusive social content implicit in the slogan. But ultimately I just thought it was pretty funny.
How do you distinguish Gay and Queer?
The terms have always been read in relation to each other, sometimes as synonyms, sometimes as antonyms. In the 1960s 'Gay' replaced 'queer' as slang for homosexual. It was considered less derogatory. Around this time homosexuality ceased being a mental illness to eradicate, something of concern to the World Health Organisation, and became just another sexual preference.2 By the late 1980s, as 'Gay' became benign, the activist use of capital Q Queer emerged. We felt we had to take back – reappropriate – and neutralise the bad word. African-Americans did the same with 'black' and then 'nigger'. The new Queer idea was supposed to allow for all sorts of sexualities. It was fluid, polymorphous. It aimed to be more than just a semantic shift.3
But then, in the late 1990s, Queer got popular. The mainstream went Queer and Gays went mainstream, lobbying for gay marriage and so forth.
Gay men gave straight men a great opportunity to rethink their sexuality and escape old-fashioned gender roles, but today many homos simply want the white picket fence; which shows how far we have come in a generation. By the turn of the century Queer had been played out, leaving us with metrosexuals and Queer Eye For The Straight Guy.
Some of your works are more Gay and some are more Queer. Both positions are in play – oscillating – through the work.
I am now 44, which is 90 in Gay years, so I'm a bit old-school. I've survived both eras – Gay and Queer – and see them for what they are. I see their pros and cons. But something I do know, absolutely, is that sexually I just like men. It's relatively simple in my head. That was part of the problem with Queer, it was too abstract, too sophisticated. It's so much easier just to be either Gay or straight. Sometimes I feel sorry for bisexuals. Or am I just jealous? In the end I feel Queer put too much onto Gays and lesbians. It was capital T Theory, and no-one could live up to its abstraction. Sure, it was well-meaning and contained certain truths, but it didn't always help us in our day-to-day lives. Queer aligned homosexuality with social radicalism, and I don't think that's correct. Same-sex attraction doesn't preclude conservatism. There are lots of Gay skinheads out there who I'm sure don't just like neo-Nazis for the fashion possibilities.
Not The Formula For Population Standard Deviation (1993) and Untitled (Us-Them) (1996) complicate the Gay/straight binary.
Not The Formula For Population Standard Deviation was done for the 1993 Australian Perspecta at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. It's a response to the pathologisation of homosexuality, the idea that one day they will find the reason, the Gay gene. I wanted to make an equation work about HIV/AIDS, but I wanted it to be open-ended. Used by pollsters and demographers, the formula for population standard deviation assumes that in any given population there will be degrees of difference and variance. This is my version of it. A lot of people took the work seriously and reacted rather badly. Later they realised it was something of a joke. I was riffing on Lewis Carroll. He wrote Alice In Wonderland, but he also was a philosopher and mathematician, and he liked nonsense formulas. So this is like algebra, only instead of x or y standing in for something I have real things standing in for x and y. There's a shovel. I'd used shovels before, recalling Jim Dine's 1960s pop works and Daddy Duchamp of course. And I had a tyre because I like its shape, and it's for Rauschenberg. I like the photo of me because it's very flattering, but I didn't really look like that. Over it I put a Lewis Carroll text about how strolling with good-looking people makes you healthier. I found the date for the discovery of the circulation of blood by William Harvey, but it somehow got changed by me or the designer to 1691 rather than 1619. I was wondering what to put after the equals sign. Lyell, my partner, and I were sitting in bed waiting for the fridge repair man, and I thought: two fridges, identical, side by side. The glasses of water on top of the fridges were a nod to AGLASSOFWATER, the artist-run space Luke Roberts and I ran with Crow Hirst from 1989 to 1990. After we opened the gallery people started telling us what the gallery's name might mean. Everyone had a glass of water story. Someone said glasses of water were used in voodoo to draw evil spirits from rooms. Of course it refers to Michael Craig-Martin's famous 1973 work An Oak Tree, a glass of water on a glass shelf with a statement, a sort of poetic conceptualism. That piece caused a scandal when it was shown at the Institute of Modern Art in 1978. It also refers to Rene Magritte's painting Hegel's Holiday (1957), showing a glass of water sitting on top of an opened umbrella. But what does all this add up to? It doesn't add up to anything conclusive (like the idea of the Gay gene). But people still wanted to assume it did, they wanted to make sense of it. It was very Alice In Wonderland, with amusing spurs to make you think about logic.
By comparison, Untitled (Us-Them) (1996) appears simplistic.
I loved formalist painting. I loved minimalist art, the look of it. I found the absolute self-evident nature of it sexy. You knew what you were looking at, just a row of boxes or planks of wood. But at a certain point I couldn't see it that way anymore. I stopped seeing a yellow square next to a green square, and I started to read them like charts or bar graphs. This is what the Us-Thems are about. There are several. The first is from 1988. It's a small one, a floor piece, a mini-Andre. The one in the show is from 1996, from my show Learn By Heart at the Institute of Modern Art that year. It's like a Donald Judd Progression piece, with pieces of 2-by-4 wrapped in yellow and red fabric a la Blinky Palermo, one long, one short. And on the wall, spray-painted, it just says 'US-THEM'. It raises the question of whether you identify as us or them, and whether you think you share that identification with me. People immediately assume the bigger yellow bar will be the majority, the mainstream, and the minority is the smaller. But is that the case? Because if a straight man goes into a Gay bar he immediately becomes the minority. It is inherently ambivalent and keeps flipping, so it can actually mean anything. Another thing, 'us' is actually spelt 'US', so after September 11 people may read it differently. Perhaps Islamic fundamentalists will
like this work.
As a Gay artist did you feel like it was a matter of us versus them?
People have this idea that there is this merry band of Gay artists, all politically aligned. It's not my experience. There was never really any such thing as the Gay mafia. It's a myth. There were bitches and queens, and some of the most homophobic behaviour I have ever come across has been from Gay men in the art world. And that's not just those fags who would be better off dealing antiques, but militant Gays for whom you were never Gay enough. You might have a couple of Gay friends, but that's true if you're heterosexual or bisexual, black or white.
The word 'Photo' appears in a lot of the works.
A photo is a document, a proof, truth. I like the idea that something can be a 'snapshot', so a text or a graph might provide a 'snapshot' of a suburb in an election campaign, say, meaning we are looking at a detail that is giving us some wider truth. In some of my Photo works, the word 'Photo' is reversed, because in photography – before digital, anyway – things get reversed. The initial inspiration for the Photo works was a 1925 Joan Miro painting. On a white canvas ground Miro deposited a splotch of blue paint and wrote over it 'This is the colour of my dreams'. In the top-left corner of the canvas he painted the word 'Photo' in a cursive script. It's poetic. It suggests the painting is a photo of a dream, a photo of the unconsciousness. But I like it because it seems so proto-conceptualist: the idea of painting the word 'Photo' involves a deft shift of signifier and signified, and it seems to predate Magritte's famous example, This Is Not A Pipe (c1926).
Photo (Rosetta Stone) (1994) refers to the idea of decoding.
The Rosetta Stone is an old tablet in the British Museum. It has this decree written in three different languages, classical Greek, Egyptian Demotic script and Egyptian hieroglyphics. We couldn't read hieroglyphics until we had the Rosetta Stone. It became a crib. So this thing has an incredible significance. And it's become a metaphor for the mysterious impenetrability of language and for unveiling the truth. Both. The impetus for my Rosetta Stone came from an article that argued that HIV/AIDS was a Rosetta Stone of disease. It said that if we could unlock such a complex virus, it would provide keys to unlock many other things. And that's proven to be the case. I read that and thought this de-hystericises the disease and puts it into an historic narrative, which is better. Photo (Rosetta Stone) is a large painting, five panels, over six metres long. I put vinyl lettering onto the canvas then spray-painted over it, so paint seeped through the canvas. Then I stretched the canvases wrong side out, so it's painting backwards. It looks like a badly developed photograph. It also looks like skin. It's very textural. At first the reversed text is indecipherable, but you can read it. I used a series of found texts that aren't linked, except by me. I forced them together like the diverse objects in my earlier black combines. One text came from Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations: 'BUT I KNOW HOW TALL I AM'. The original text says 'Imagine someone saying “but I know how tall I am” and laying his hand on the top of his head to prove it.' Wittgenstein's remark is now taken to show the limits of body-based knowledge.4 It relates to the metal 'yardstick' I sometimes show to the left of the painting, which is my height. '16 SURFBOARDS 14 GUYS 24 HOURS' sounded funny but ominous, like a Dennis Cooper high-concept film pitch. Another text had been stencilled on a crate: 'BATHE WALLS ONLY IN EXCESS'. Another came from medical guidelines for HIV treatment: 'TESTING OF THE BLOOD IS RECOMMENDED EVERY THREE MONTHS, WHEN T-CELL COUNT FALLS BELOW 500...' It's all wilfully obscure. But if the text in the painting was easy to understand after getting around its being back to front, the work would be a one-liner. It's the complexity that deepens the work.
Photo: The Pizza Boy ... (1995) includes a pizza warmer, a tyre, and a leather jacket and boots. It's like evidence. Every thing seems like a clue.
The work came out of my finding a Silvio's pizza warmer on the stairwell outside my apartment. I saw it and thought: where did the pizza boy go? And I thought of the classic porn scenario, with the pizza delivery boy. Obviously, it's nostalgic. It could be about human remains, the things left behind after someone dies. 'THE MOTORCYCLE BOY'S NEVER COMING BACK' is a quote from the film Rumble Fish. A friend of mine went to the opening of the show it was in – she's not really an art person – and she said, 'Oh, he could have gone to university to get a degree'; which was taking the poetry a bit literally. I enjoyed finding the things. It was like I was gathering the costume for a character in a film. The tyre's not a motorcycle tyre; it's a car tyre. The piece looks like a shop window display. I used to be a window dresser, just like Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol.
All good Gay artists. Rauschenberg liked his tyres too.
Didn't he just! These references are so embedded in my brain I don't even think about them. They're like second nature to me.
I often wonder if Rauschenberg regretted using the tyre in Monogram (1955-9). So much was read into it.
Rauschenberg's work has absorbed endless Queer readings. Even before Queer, there was Robert Hughes describing Monogram – a stuffed ram with a car tyre around its middle – as 'the satyr in the sphincter'.5 I am not convinced by Hughes's argument that the paint on the ram's nose represents shit. I think the artist probably put the paint there because the ram was moth-eaten and he didn't like the way it looked. From a formal point of view, the whole piece is enlivened by the bright paint there. Rauschenberg was Gay, but he was quite closeted. I think he probably anticipated these kinds of readings, but he probably thought there was more going on. The problem with biographical readings is that critics see what they want to see.
But a work like Photo: Jason For Etienne (1995) needs biography to function.
I guess. It's a memorial for Etienne Roy, a Sydney art dealer who died of an AIDS-related illness. I used a photo of actor Jason Priestly from Beverley Hills 90210 as a stand-in. So it says 'JASON LOSING HIS MEANING / STANDING IN FOR ETIENNE'. Priestly was big at the time. I was using all these pop boys as ciphers rather than as actual individuals. I was interested in using the wider social meaning of Jason Priestly. That work reads differently now that Jason Priestly himself has lost his meaning. He's back, but he's not where he was in 1995. He never will be.
His style no longer speaks to us. The Photo works are so stylish, but Photo: Jason For Etienne transcends the style of Jason and Etienne.
The Photo works play up the aesthetic of conceptual art. The piece looks like a page layout, like a pagework. It's camera-ready. Like Jason Priestley, 1960s conceptual art has a classic look. It can be 'beautiful'. Lagerfeld loves it, these days. Kosuth and Co. said aesthetics was beside the point, but they would, wouldn't they? I mean Kosuth was the ultimate stylist. He chose typefaces that reeked 'serious'.
You did some pageworks around this time, for Art And Text.
They're not in the show. The main one used the pretty boy photo of me, from when I was 23. The text – 'OUR GOAL MUST BE NOTHING LESS THAN THE ESTABLISHMENT OF SURFERS PARADISE ON EARTH' – was superimposed on the image in mirror writing. It was a provocation. Art And Text was this high-up journal, and here am I putting in this alluring promotional photo of myself, and it's almost slapping them in the face. And it was taken as such. At the time, art was meant to be serious and here was this Gold Coast Gay boy inserting himself into their art history.6
Well, they still allowed it. They could have said no.
Yeah, but Paul Foss was editor and he was Gay.
So was Art And Text Gay?
Yes, but the Gay thing is not as much of a club as people think. People band together at times for political reasons, but these groupings don't sustain themselves for long. They're certainly not rusted on like union membership, at least not in our rancorous bitchy art world. On the other hand, being from a minority does tend to politicise you. So I don't think it's a surprise that Australia's best-ever art journal was instigated by one Gay man and continued by another. They thought things in the culture were worth fighting for. Of course most people who wrote were heterosexual. I don't think Gay identity politics directed the content much, although Paul Foss did do the famous 'AIDS Crisis Is Not Over' issue.7
Speaking of AIDS, you once painted a wall with white paint laced with AIDS medicine.
I first did it for Everything That Happens In Culture Happens Because It Is Needed / PURE MASSACRE – silverchair, my show at Artspace, Sydney (1996). I used paint mixed with AZT (an early AIDS drug, still used), prozac, speed and soluble aspirin. AZT was originally developed as a cancer drug in the 1970s. I put up this text that reads 'PHOTO' and then says exactly what you're looking at, 'WALL PAINTED WITH╔' Again very 'conceptual'. The white-walled space looks no different to usual, and yet knowing there is AZT in the wall, it's like everything has changed. And there is a can of black Dulux and a can of white Dulux with their lids off, sitting on a sheet of metal on the floor. I had other text works in that show, but I should have shown just that work. I chickened out because it seemed too extreme, too minimal. I'm doing this in 1996, and I'm scared of alienating people. There was a huge backlash against this type of post-conceptualism – work playing off the look of conceptual art – at the time. Everyone asks: did I really put those drugs in the paint? It's basically just an assertion that I did, and in the end it doesn't matter. Rex Butler says, now we have to assume that any white walls in any gallery might contain either these drugs or some other agent. It's a classic instance of Queer, in that Queer theory suggests a hidden element behind what is known or accepted. That's why we are starting the show with that work. Rafael Von Uslar made a really interesting reading. He said the text could be like a label telling you what you are actually looking at ą the wall has indeed been painted with drugs. It could be a conceptual work in the manner of Lawrence Weiner, and we are simply asked to ponder the concept and its treatment – and the wall may not have been painted with drugs. Or it could be a call to arms, an idea waiting to be realised, an instruction to the viewer to paint the wall with drugs ą which makes sense of those paint tins with their lids off. In Munich I did a sequel called Bleach Room (Kurt) (2001) with bleach and soluble aspirin in the paint, Bleach being Nirvana's first album.
Can we talk about AIDS a bit more?
I know what you're wanting to ask and I'm going to respond with the correct answer, which is all sexually active people are at risk of exposure to HIV. In the Australia and the Western world the risk seems higher for Gay men and intravenous drug users. In Africa, Asia and Papua New Guinea, worryingly, it seems to be predominantly heterosexuals who are affected. Worrying because of the sheer numbers involved. This is a global pandemic with far greater consequences than one artist could hope to come close to adequately commenting on; a pandemic the art world has long assumed it somehow 'solved' – at least aesthetically – in the 1990s.
Did You Are Here, the Gay show you co-curated in 1992, comment more effectively on these things because it contained multiple Gay voices?
When Luke Roberts and I curated You Are Here, we had no idea what we were doing. It was a Gay identity show given impetus by the AIDS crisis and its effect on Gay men. We believed it would be a good thing. We thought all these lovely Gay boys would be happy to be together and to be a community. We learnt the hard way. You Are Here went to four venues. A huge amount of writing came from it. However, there's a problem with artists using social issues like AIDS. It looks like they're making space for the issues, but really they can just be making space for themselves and their careers. That's incredibly suspect, especially when it's an issue that affects the entire human race. I think a lot of AIDS works will seem naive in the future.
Including yours?
In a way, yes, but I'm always trying to tie the issue into wider questions of representation, history and the art object, and away from 'easy' biography. Also, I must make it crystal clear that Gay/Queer does not equate with HIV/AIDS. My equation works signal that this does not equal that. It's a Queer reversal of the American activist-group ACTUP's maxim 'Silence = Death'.
Are your collage works happy or sad? Are they love poems or eulogies?
There was an AIDS quilt panel I'll always remember. It had a big poster of Madonna on it and a small snapshot of the person commemorated, who was obviously a Madonna fan. I wondered two things. Why didn't they get a bigger picture of the dead guy? But also, why did the inclusion of the Madonna poster say so much about him so efficiently? My collage work comes out of a time when there was a lot of criticism of Gay artists' use of sentimentality. In America, artists like Ross Bleckner and Felix Gonzalez-Torres were using minimalism, but subverting it with sentimentality. When the Guggenheim's Bleckner show got trashed, suddenly Gay artists thought, 'Well, if you thought that was sentimental, we're going to shove your face in it now.'8 That's when I really started focusing on the collages. But interestingly, they were very popular, because they refered to things people already knew and loved. The earlier neo-conceptual work was off-putting; people didn't know how to relate to it.
In the collage works you appropriate images of heterosexual boy pin-ups, movie stars and musicians.
Chris Chapman always maintained that the pin-up boys I used were objects of mass desire, set up for boys and girls both. Whether they are Gay, straight, or in-between, it doesn't matter. I like David Beckham. When he said he was proud of being a Gay icon, it undercut everything. That's why he's the ultimate metrosexual. Brad and Keanu probably don't mind their Gay icon status, but they've never actually come out and said, 'Oh I'm proud'. Kieren Perkins, the swimmer, had a great line when asked if he was Gay: 'Oh, aren't all famous men Gay?' So clever, without being the least bit homophobic.
Have you ever used images of Gay men in the collages?
Yes, I've done Greg Louganis, the great Olympic diver. I'm toying with the idea of doing a work on Ian Roberts, the Gay Australian ex-footballer. But I'm interested in the subjects for what they communicate to others, it's not about whether they are actually Gay or not. They have to be familiar. Sometimes I use anonymous male models, but then everyone knows what they represent. It's like Jasper Johns and his stencil lettering. He was asked: 'Do you use these letter types because you like them or because that's how the stencils come?' And his answer was, 'But that's what I like about them, that they come that way.'9
Let's talk about the wall painting Untitled (Keanu Crying For River) (1996).
It was first done in 1996 at the Institute of Modern Art. It also exists as a canvas, at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. It's like looking at the names of Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix rolling up and disappearing like the credits of a film. Or it could be that Keanu is rising up to Hollywood heaven, disappearing into the ceiling, while poor old River is disappearing into the floor, like the pavement outside the Viper Room in Los Angeles (I had myself photographed lying there). Of course it refers to the film they're in together, My Own Private Idaho (1991), where River's character is in love with Keanu's. Everyone knows what's going on there. We all know the story, even if we haven't seen the movie. Interestingly the director, Gus Van Sant, has now pretty much clarified that River did cross the fence a few times. But I wasn't trying to out him. I was more interested in the role he was playing in the movie and the wider roles he was given in society.
Were you re-casting the boys?
Of course. I was making my River Phoenix, my Kieren Perkins, my Kurt Cobain. They're all mine. I detourned them, but only softly. It was a soft Queering. I was trying to understand the way personal desires are mediated through mass cultural material. Something that really gets me though, I recently did a portrait of Robert Hunter from that wonderful shot of him in the catalogue for The Field (1968). You know those great shots in The Field where the artists look like ANZAC soldiers or footballers? Robert probably thinks I'm Queering him and that's not true. I mean Queer is a totalising theory in one way, but for me it wasn't. Just because I Queer certain things doesn't mean I want to Queer everything. In fact that piece was about Australia, about being homesick – it was made in Berlin. I don't think Robert is Gay (and he's not). I'm not even saying there is any Gay subtext in his work. I mean there is not enough subtext in his work anyway, it's such minimal painting. Even with Keanu, I didn't want to say he was Gay. That wouldn't really interest me, not at all.
Aren't you attracted to Keanu because he's kind of vacant and to Hunter's paintings because they're kind of empty? Their lack of a forceful exterior opens them up to being rewritten, even though you say you don't want to rewrite either of them?
I don't think they are empty. In the right circumstances Keanu is the very best actor a director could have and Hunter's minimalism is perfect. I'm interested in the fact they are so quotable. If something can be quoted so easily, it means it's very successful. If you say 'Keanu' you don't have to say any more. If you say 'Robert Hunter', at least within the art world, you don't have to say any more. That's the ultimate achievement. It means they are so resolved, so mediated, so understood, that they become this one thing.
When I met Robert Hunter he wasn't what I expected. I thought he'd be a rough heroic figure, but he had white socks and sandals and was terribly sunburnt.
Yeah, it's a game. He's got good spin.
Mike Parr and Robert Hunter did a work in 1997, a photo of Parr in his wedding dress in front of a Hunter painting. It's titled Dead Sun (Art Is Probably Homosexual). It surely plays on the 1983 Juan Davila painting 'Art I$ Homosexual'.
Heterosexual art: it's a gay thing.
In All Apologies Kurt Cobain sang, 'What else should I say? Everyone is gay.' When did you fall in love with Kurt?
I only became interested in Kurt after he killed himself in 1994. I'd seen him in Vanity Fair, the famous spread with Courtney and him in the dress and eyeliner and red hair, and I thought you look great. I bought the magazine, but it was only when he killed himself that I became really fascinated. It wasn't even his Gay icon status. That was just the icing on the cake. It was more that he seemed to be the ultimate artist, the last artist. To kill yourself, to stop your work sliding into repetition and commerciality, it's the ultimate punk gesture. He also had a family history of suicide, so the poor thing was a bit of a marked man, the great tragic artist. Subconsciously he seemed to know that that was where he was going and he must have wanted it.
You respect that his work didn't slide into commerce, and yet you're aspiring to exactly that in your recent work.
More than happily, I am sliding. Yeah. I see Kurt as being wonderfully misguided. There was this incredible naivete in him, it was beautiful. He's a Christ-like figure. He looked like Durer's Christ-like self-portrait. He must have known that.
So you're attracted to the tragedy, but you don't want to be tragic yourself?
That's right. I fight tooth and nail not to fall into that. I remember once before you asked if I saw myself as being tragic? I reacted quite badly. I threatened to punch somebody in the nose.
Kurt is quite aggressive too in We Are The Language (Kurt) (1999).
I did that poster for an exhibition at Metro Arts. We're redoing it for Bricks Are Heavy, so everyone can take a copy from the stack, like a Felix Gonzales-Torres. The text is a quote from the liner notes from Incesticide (1992), where Kurt was having one of his famous rants about some journalist who criticised Courtney. He basically writes: 'At this point I have a request for our fans. If any of you in any way hate homosexuals, people of different colour, or women, please do this one favour for us. Leave us the fuck alone. Don't come to our shows and don't buy our records.' Signed, 'Kurdt (the blond one)'. Apparently someone misspelt Kurt's name 'Kurdt' in a review and he liked it, so he used it all the time. It's a fascinating quote. It still packs a punch. It is not abstract. It's also very politically suspect. I mean you can't lump all the minorities together. But maybe he needed to do that to get his point across to his redneck fans. Saying 'The Blond One' is like saying even my fans don't know who I am. The poster was the most popular piece in my show. Posters were pasted onto a corrugated iron fence near the old Bellas Gallery, on James Street, Fortitude Valley, and they were graffitied by Resistance, a left-wing group. They just co-opted my quote and put 'FIGHT OPPRESSION – resistance/ CHOOSE SOCIALISM' in the white space underneath. So they agreed with the quote and appropriated it. I was flattered. More posters were put up in the stairwells at Metro Arts, at the University of Queensland, and in public toilets and cruising areas. A lot disappeared within days. It was very popular. I liked the quote, but I didn't anticipate it would have that effect.
You are doing a new Kurt piece for the Bricks show.
House Of Cards (Kurt) is new and old. It was an idea from 1997, but I'm making it only now. It's a remake of Richard Serra's One Ton Prop (House Of Cards) (1969), starring Kurt as the unstable modernist/minimalist hero. Serra stood up four lead sheets and had them leaning against one another in a square. Only their top corners touch, so it's precarious, dangerous. It reminds me of Warhol's line, 'I never fall apart because I never fall together.' I used to fantasise that any canonical post-war artwork could be redone while channelling Kurt. Lawrence Weiner's Two Minutes Of Spray Paint Directly Upon The Floor From A Standard Aerosol Can (1968) becomes Photo: 8 Seconds Of Spraycan Enamel On Wall (Kurt) (2001). Poor old Kurt gets eight seconds of fame rather than Warhol's allotted 15 minutes. Bruce Nauman's photo Self-Portrait As A Fountain (1966-7) is easy because Kurt did a photo where he blows water out of his mouth. Just go through any art book, especially of American art, and Kurt fits everywhere. It's a great party game. It works, trust me.
Did the metal surfaces of minimalist sculpture influence your Urinal photos (2000-1)?
They're pretty aren't they? Everyone liked them, which is ludicrous when you think about it. They're images of surfaces men piss on constantly, but they are also light and water, beautiful reflective surfaces. A lot of men are piss shy, they don't like to piss with other men. For Gay men, you might be picking up a guy at a urinal, if it's a communal one. There is all that. There's a frisson around what is basically a utilitarian thing. On a website recently I saw images of a guy down the Gold Coast licking this urinal, like he's obviously into piss sexually. I took the prototype urinal photo in 1988 using my snapshot camera. I used to use my Instamatic as a drawing tool. I'd just go around snapping whatever took my eye. I'd get the film developed and I'd find things that I never expected to. Immediately I knew this was a good image. It's the look I borrowed for all the subsequent ones, with the flash glare right in the middle of the stainless steel, like a Barnett Newman zip. I was thrilled that the flash came out like a ghost or something weird.
In the Urinals there are references to Duchamp, to Pollock and Newman, to Morris Louis, to Warhol's piss paintings, to Judd, to Bleckner, even to Ian Burn. The list is endless.
Actually, I think Alfred Stieglitz is the closest to the Urinals. In the 1920s he did a series of photographs of cloudy skies that he thought were evocative of emotions, and that's why they're called Equivalents. The Urinals are similarly studies of the fugitive and fleeting. The Duchamp thing is interesting. Obviously, like Duchamp, I'm making room for the aesthetic contemplation of something vile, but maybe I'm a bit more sincere about it.
Around 1997 you largely leave behind the explicit Gay/Queer thematics as you embark on your Gold Coast project. In some ways the new work is a continuation, in others an about face. It's been said that you Queered the Gold Coast as you had Queered modernism.
For me the early and mid 1990s is about Queer politics, and after that it is about sheer acceptance of the Gold Coast as a product of capital. The idea of dealing with something like this with no guilt or anxiety, just enjoying it, wasn't around in the early 1990s. Back then I always felt the need to analyse and justify why I liked this or that. With the Gold Coast work I didn't need to, because it's about stuff that everyone likes. I've moved so far into the popular with the Gold Coast work, which is where my head is now. And it's worked for me. I'm more successful financially and with the public, and theoretically the work is just as interesting.
So you came out of the Gold Coast closet?
It was a big coming out. I got a lot of flak. Some art people questioned my left wing credentials. I've always been too right-wing for my leftie friends, too left for my right-wing friends. I wanted to liberate myself from having to do what I'm expected to do in art terms, and the easiest way was to go commercial. Capital linked with mass culture is the most dynamic creative force. My current favourite is Takashi Murakami. I'm totally jealous. I'd love to be in fashion. I'd love to be totally mass. So I was scared when the Institute of Modern Art asked me to do this show. It wasn't something I was looking for. My energy is going the other way. I wondered if the Queer work was still interesting a decade on. Of course I said yes, because all artists are whores.
You returned to the Gay/Queer thematics when you went to Berlin in 2001.
Yes, I went to Berlin for a year on an Australia Council residency. Suddenly I was a nobody in a city full of artists. No-one knew me, and no-one wanted to know me, because I wasn't going to be hanging around. Actually, I didn't mind that. It was quite liberating. I got less and less interested in art. I saw all this art-life, but couldn't see myself within it. I didn't show my slides to anyone. I didn't know what to do. I was having one of those crises. The only currency I had was in the Gay bars, so I went to bars a lot. And there there's hardcore porn as you're ordering your beer and guys having sex right next to you. Suddenly I was a great adventurer in this other world. So I decided to make porn movies. I made I Need More (2002) and Clown Fuck Punk (2002-3) in Berlin. I needed to test myself at the most extreme level I could think of. I put myself in the position of maybe causing a huge controversy and certainly it psychologically challenged me to do this. I thought many times: you are crazy. Why are you doing this when you have a perfectly good art career back home? You're not going to become famous in Berlin for doing this. But being there made me a bit fearless, or reckless. I just thought, well, fuck you, I'm just going to, and if it all falls over in a heap, well at least I tried. Strange thing is people seem to like the idea of the porn video. They probably don't want to watch it – in fact I'm sure most of them don't want to watch it – but they do like the idea that someone did this. They like it conceptually. They like the concept.
I Need More is porn and art. What is it about porn?
For art, porn is an undiscovered country. It is much more complex than people think. It has a huge range. Gay porn is often sentimental, or you can get sentimental about it, especially pre-AIDS era vintage porn where unprotected sex is now seen as being from 'another place'. All those beautiful 1970s and 1980s boys were mostly dead by the late 1980s, and on a cloud somewhere in heaven having fun, like modern angels in a Pierre et Gilles photo.10
Speaking of death, you've made a couple of videos featuring smoking.
Smoking Youth (2002) is my homage to Andy Warhol, his early slowed-down black-and-white films, and to an image that appears at the end of Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising (1963), a skull with a cigarette hanging out of its teeth. 'YOUTH' is written on the cigarette. Youth is going to die, it smokes. It's that eternal beauty/horror thing, of living like there's no tomorrow. As the star of my film smokes, the camera pans down his body so the audience can check out every inch of him. It's sexy. Then the camera moves off to a still-life of Gold Coast white bread in plastic packets and containers of kerosene. I've used food in installations over the years. It's meant to be grave goods, offerings to the dead. In Bricks Are Heavy, Smoking Youth will be shown on a plasma screen as Warhol's Screen Tests are now shown. Then I thought I'd make a second one, a companion piece. I went through all my old notebooks and found I'd written 'Inhaling Kurt'. And I thought, okay, someone smoking a cigarette with 'Kurt' written on it, playing smoke games, inhaling and exhaling the smoke. It became a collaboration with the artist Jeremy Hynes, and the cameraman I use a lot, Ben Wickes. Jeremy is a chain smoker. He loves smoking and the camera loves him. Smoke is getting in his eyes and he's crying, but he's also communing with Kurt. It's all very vanity/vanitas-based.
It reminded me of Jean Genet.
Absolutely. Genet's Un Chant d'Amour is the great Gay smoking film. He made it way back in 1950. It's a half-hour black-and-white film depicting the fantasies of a Gay male prisoner and his prison warden. The prisoner is in love with a young inmate in the next cell, but they can only commune by blowing cigarette smoke through a hole in the wall between them. The older man blows the smoke into the open mouth of the younger one. It is one of the most erotically charged moments in film.
And you are planning more stuff with Jeremy.
At the moment, Jeremy and I are writing a feature film script called Last Artist. The title is from one of his performances. Basically, he is the last artist and he's adrift in Bris-Vegas. He is fearful that the art he has always loved is disappearing because of mass culture.
Will it be an art film? If it worked, would you abandon your art practice and become a director?
I don't think I'd abandon my art practice, but I certainly would become a director. As for it being an art film, it's all merging. In the end it's all just culture. An anthropologist will tell you that an advertising flyer, a matchstick or a soup tin is as interesting as the crown jewels. They're all things that you glean information from. Some people see that as a cop-out, but I think I'm just interested in the information things hold. I buy secondhand landscape paintings on E-bay. I'm really into them, they've become so Ian Burn. I like the information in them. Whole systems of art making and thinking and taste come together in a small landscape. In fact these works are actually quite perfect and self-contained. This type of painting is deemed outmoded now, but Burn was correct, the more you look at these paintings the more interesting they appear.
You seem drawn to outmoded styles. For instance there's a lot of period imagery in your Gold Coast project. And in your 1994 show Nostalgia you redid your early 1980s neo-expressionist drawings as large paintings. That seemed to be a reply to an earlier show where you redid your brother's teenage footballer drawings. Is Queer a period style? Is it over? Is it coming back?
Certainly Queer is now a period 'look'. Perhaps it will return as style. Everything comes back, it just doesn't come back the way you expect. Queer Eye For The Straight Guy. The left invented revisionism, but it's been co-opted by the right. They call creationism 'intelligent design' and John Howard, a genius of spin, labels Gay marriage advocates 'fundamentalists'. Revisionism must be a huge success if it can be taken up by those originally opposed to it. It's a strong concept that will outlive us all. Now that Queer has sort of disappeared, it can be analysed and reapproached from the outside. Actually, that's not a bad thing.
You can't simultaneously be in a field and see it from the outside. How will these works read in a post-Queer moment?
Let's see.
Kris Carlon is a Brisbane-based art writer and co-editor of Machine magazine.
1. Brisbane artist Richard Bell won the 2003 Telstra Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award with his painting Scientia E Metaphysica (2003) featuring the slogan 'Aboriginal Art: It's A White Thing'.
2. In 1973 the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from the revised Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) after intense debate. They stated that homosexuality 'does not necessarily constitute a psychiatric disorder'. Effectively, this saw its official acceptance as a viable sexual orientation and supported the increase in Gay liberation throughout the Western world. Many other associations across the world followed suit soon after. The American Psychoanalytic Association made similar steps and began accepting openly homosexual men and women. However, it wasn't until 1992 that the World Health Organisation ceased to classify homosexuality as a mental disorder, followed by the UK Government in 1994, and the Chinese Psychiatric Association in 2001.
3. The key literature includes: Kenneth E. Silver 'Modes Of Disclosure: The Construction Of Gay Identity And The Rise Of Pop Art' Hand-Painted Pop: American Art In Transition 1955-62 (ed. Russell Ferguson) Rizzoli, New York, 1993, pp179-203; In A Different Light: Visual Culture, Sexual Identity, Queer Practice (eds. Nayland Blake, Lawrence Rinder and Amy Scholder) City Lights Books, San Francisco, 1995; From The Corner Of The Eye Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1998.
4. Ludwig Wittgenstein 'The Private Language Argument' Philosophical Investigations (1953).
5. Shock Of The New BBC, London, p335.
6. Art And Text 40 1991, np.
7. Art And Text 38 1991.
8. See David Deitcher 'Sense And Sentimentality' Parkett 44 1995, pp212-21. Bleckner's 1995 Guggenheim retrospective solidified his position at the apex of the New York art world.
9. Michael Crichton Jasper Johns Harry N. Abrams, New York, 1977, p14.
10. Pierre et Gilles, a Gay French duo, are famous for their stylised hand-coloured portrait photographs. Their work features images from popular culture, Gay subculture including porn (especially James Bidgood), and popular religious imagery. Their work is charactised by an alluring kitsch sentimentality.
This interview was conducted in September and October 2006, prior to Jeremy Hynes' death in early November.