Archibald Prize Finalist 2009

This work is a finalist in the Archibald Prize 2009 at the Art Gallery of NSW and then part of the Travelling Exhibition throughout 09.... On the one hand this work is perhaps a basic game of join the artistic dots, to pass time while waiting for megan gale to decide if she would pose for me, or perhaps it's a grand, mocking, absurdist statement about that and/or art and originality made through the pre-speech primordial language that is painting. Perhaps it is sarcastic and perhaps adoring, perhaps both, in quoting various artists of various mediums, some you may be aware of who might play a harmonica or a kind of harp, and others you may not, less prominent and slightly more dead than you. Maybe it's parody of the badly painted basquiat and whiteley wannabees that seep daily from every orifice of art school alleyways, or could it be a middle finger salute to the perpetuation of that much loved and highly bankable art world fantasy of the penis-wielding enfant terrible? Is it a pro room-service manifesto bound in leather and covered in 3am condom-drool and pasta sauce nudes? On another level I could see it, possibly through rose-coloured beer glasses, as being visual drunk-dialing...a basic statement of desire and yearning for a former lover hidden behind a protective mask made from re-used rubber-chicken humour. It might be that I have always been very interested in what she sees looking back at her from the mirror, and what broke the mirror, and in turn what broke her. It also might quite simply mark a basic visual record of the starting point for an intensely hedonistic exploration into the expressions of sexuality in superheroes and the lifecycle of supermodels, that might well never conclude. Maybe that just seems like a post-artschool-cool thing to say it means for now, to bait the sexless and insipid academics with herring red glibness for my own mild amusement, when in fact it means something different that they can never know because it will never be written down for them, or maybe in the 8 1/2 minutes it took to stack these words, that's all I could summon. That's clearly a matter for you to decide and will be entirely subjective. To borrow from the brain of anais nin, "we do not see things as they are, we see them as we are." Maybe meaning is something you need find in your own life before you look for it in art and maybe meaning is not the thing I want to discuss at all because it borders on irrelevant. Maybe I am too distracted by thoughts of cheese or my real intent is beyond your understanding in a way that cheese isn't. Maybe I just don't have the written vocabulary to say the things I can say in a visual format or maybe I don't feel the need to do so. Maybe my entire art practice represents the perfect artistic fusion of the ugly dionysian reality with the delicious overlay of apollonian gloss as a final nod to friedrich nietzsche before I get fitted for a jacket myself....but seriously who gives a rats?... surely you are not still reading?....you should not be reading about art but looking at it!...nothing ever has only one meaning or this might be something that has none and in that state causes you to look far too vigorously, tripping over your PhD in semiotics in the process and missing the point entirely. It may just be a visual jotting down of ideas requiring further action, when no post it notes were at hand, as my beautifully damaged friend and I re-launch our oft-stalled but rigorous search for meaning in the colour blue, and/or vice-versa, by reading and discussing the works of Miller, Bukowski, de Sade, Nin and Nabokov, whilst touching ourselves as a priest might, one of the aims being the breath testing of our own philosophies, so effectively corrupted by years of the subtly weaponised dogma injections at the hands of catholic education, as they may have been. While this may have been an important and thoroughly enjoyable pursuit in itself-particularly with the introduction of lycra and latex - it is/was also hoped that some art, (whatever that is...) in some form, would be produced from in and around that experience.
Of course it is entirely possible, and I do not for one minute shy away from the proposition, that this might also just be an overly elaborate justification of what is nothing more than a strong desire to get laid and play with wonder woman for fun and profit...maybe it's all these things, maybe none....but alas...while being delivered to the broken hill gallery this work was dropped and is now broken hilled beyond repair...