PERSONA
“Everything is on the record. Everything else is fucking gutless.”
It is by accident that Adam shoots me. We are camped on a bend of the Turon River, past Hill End, in the sheep-paddocked middle of New South Wales. Adam and I have been drinking vodka all day, him toasting each mugful: “Arriba el culo; up your bum, no babies.”
A dead kangaroo is hanging from a tree, shot with a revolver as we pulled up the night before. Adam had fired a few rounds into the campsite darkness, and it was only in the morning that we found the carcass where it had struggled to climb an embankment. I had spent the evening hiding in the car, worried by the handful of ammunition Adam had thrown into the fire he was sitting beside. By the afternoon we are both drunk, and I am too close when Adam fires off a round of birdshot. The spray catches me in the thigh.
It hurts less than expected. I am wearing heavy jeans, my legs numb with cold and drink. I taste metal in my mouth and then a kind of sweet wooziness. My tongue is dry from liquor. In the end there are only a few pellets, high up and glancing. I will dig them out with a pair of tweezers at home the following evening, sitting on the lid of my toilet. “Terribly fucking sorry, mate,” Adam says. “Terribly fucking sorry.”
It is an accident, but also a kind of test. Adam is never satisfied until he knows where the boundaries are, until he knows how far he can push a person. “I have heard this a few times from people,” he says. “‘I can’t spend too much time with you, Adam. You’re too dangerous.’ I do take things a bit far, but it’s not with other people. It’s with myself.”
Adam’s reflections on himself are always reflections on purpose. How one should live is a favourite topic. The advice has been harvested from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and is delivered with bitterness that the world is not more the way he wants it to be. “I thought we were here to wear ourselves out. Isn’t that the trip?” he says. “I’d hate to be really old and just boring. People are too judgemental because they’re scared cunts. I think – or I thought – I was sort of helping.”
Later, Adam throws me from the back of a motorcycle. It is not an accident. He reaches back and pushes me off in one smooth motion, just before we take the hairpin bend that holds his house in place on the edge of Wilson Park. Cold air stings against my grazes, and the back tire tears up my shirt in the fall. There is white pain in my wrist and gravel buried in my hand, but nothing is broken.
He doubles back and stops beside me. Reaching down with one arm, his legs still straddling the motorcycle, he offers to help me up. He smiles a little as I take his hand: “How was that?”
*
Adam viewed art as a means of checking whether society was still paying attention. He always wanted to see how far a person would go, how willing they were to join him. In a strange way, he wanted to know if they could keep up. “I think that sacrifice is everything,” he said. “You sort of have to sacrifice yourself. You have to stick your neck out – this whole thing of endurance.”
He was preparing to deliver his favourite quote: a line of Bukowski’s, never attributed, that Adam wrote in the front of all his books and offered as explanation for most of his acts. He inscribed gifts with it, and the words would end up on a memorial card printed after he died. His father did not realise the words were not Adam’s. In a sentence, it said everything he thought about life: “Endurance is more important than truth.”
The line was from the film Barfly, a loosely autobiographical fairytale of drunken talent, ambiguous as to whether the brilliance of Mickey Rourke’s character has been squandered on scotch and waters, or whether he needs them to write. The film was a checklist of Adam’s beliefs: that art could not be made in comfort, that drinking was to be revered, that there was beauty to be found in squalor.
Adam saw the film in 1987, when it was first released, although it would be another twenty years before he read Bukowski, just as his first symptoms of alcohol-related pancreatitis were showing. That was how Adam absorbed culture: in fragments. He spent his life a scavenger. “Anybody can be a non-drunk,” Rourke’s character says as he accepts a cheque for his first published work. “It takes a special talent to be a drunk. It takes endurance. Endurance is more important than truth.”
Adam continued instead: “I don’t know what truth is. It’s such an abstract term, truth. Truth is active, but people are scaredy-cats. They want something to rely on, but there’s nothing there.”
*
People loved Adam. It was his voice they remembered most, then his eyes. They were his mother’s: dancing, intense, never quite settling as one colour or another. “I don’t know what colour Adam’s eyes are,” his father said. “They’re all mixed up, like something in the bottom of one of his damn paint tins.” Adam stole girls with them when he was at art school. They could fix people in place if he wanted them to, a talent he exploited early in his career. “I used to be quite handsome,” he said by way of explanation. “A little blond boy and quite fucking handsome.”
The voice came from somewhere calmer than Adam ever was. It was helped along with cigarettes, although it never lost its mellifluousness. It was a radio voice and it gave assurance to everything he said. Adam used it to great effect. It was the only constant in a charisma on which he built a career and ran out two lifetimes’ worth of friendships. It was the ballast for his restlessness.
As with the colour of his eyes, Adam’s signature never settled. With each year it lost another letter, until it was a single loping A, tailed by a rush of peaks and troughs – like a lie feeding out of a polygraph machine. “I just wanted it to be this mark,” Adam said: “Up, down and around and around. With time it will lose those marks, too. I always had a terrible signature.”
*
Adam’s first significant mention in the press was incidental: a positive reference deep down in a review of several shows, written by the curator Felicity Fenner for the arts pages of the Sydney Morning Herald. It was May 1993 and the sculptor Hany Armanious had included an installation of Adam’s in the seminal grunge show Shirthead. The show – the last at Mori Annexe before it closed – was described as a final childhood romp for the artists involved. Adam exhibited a teddy bear sprinkled with naphthalene flakes, the lining of a chocolate box upturned on its head like a helmet. Already, the major themes of his career were showing. Fenner called it “a poignant mixture of childhood innocence and adult malevolence”. While the mention was incidental, it was also prophetic: Hany and Adam, Fenner wrote, “represent the cool end of the grunge movement and are two of the most interesting artists here”.
Six months passed before Adam was made the subject of a feature, again in the Sydney Morning Herald. It was the newspaper Adam most often read and to which he most owed his career. In the piece, Catharine Lumby held him up as a new kind of artist produced by the recession of the early 1990s. A photograph of him in his Annandale studio was taken to accompany the story.
From here, he became a fixture in the press. His shows were almost always reviewed. In print, you could track writers as they turned to his work. The language often went from dismissive to hesitantly reverential. His art was discussed on the letters pages of newspapers. When journalists called, he was always good for a quote.
“Cullen’s works traffic in a suburban readymade aesthetic – a recent work, for instance, consisted of a stuffed cat, lovingly wrapped and bandaged like an accident victim. It’s innovative and exciting, but hardly what the average commercial buyer is likely to put in their boardroom,” wrote Lumby, whose sister Adam started seeing around this time. “Like many artists of his generation, however, Cullen has no expectation of making money from his practice. ‘It’s a non-issue,’ he says. ‘Totally irrelevant.’”
*
The fruit trees in Adam’s garden never set their crops. There is an apple and two apricots, their arms gnarled and slightly twisted, stunted by a driveway and the large drinks fridge Adam says he will fill with sculpture if he is ever selected for the Venice Biennale. He says the garden is a hanging swamp, but in truth it is just overgrown. The trees look as if they’ve been abused. They cower in front of the house. A trailer full of bush rock shuts in the Holden FC that Adam would drive if a court had not taken his licence. A sign on the front door reads “Beware of the God”.
It takes a while to get the lights on and we are in the back room by the time Adam finds a seat. This is the house the Archibald bought but did not pay off, where he was supposed to settle down with Carrie Lumby. There is a couch spread along one wall, looking to a television and a coffee table crowded with cigarette butts and insulin needles. Adam won the Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize in 2008 for gluing the table’s contents to a jamón stand and spray-painting it silver.
The back room is connected to the rest of the house by an unused kitchen. On the edge of this precipice, a table is piled with unopened mail: overdue notices on his mortgage, invitations to art shows, unpaid ambulance bills. There is a bathroom off to one side, not much more than a shower and a toilet, the floor lined with wet towels that have dried to fit around the vanity. In the front is a dark room where Adam hoards taxidermy. Two bedrooms come off it, although he sleeps mostly on the couch.
Adam puts his hands into his pockets and removes three billiard balls stolen from the pub we have just left. He pulls a Dremel engraver from under the couch and starts cutting his initials into the balls, a block-lettered answer to his loping signature. Adam signed everything. Occasionally, he spoke in the third person. He was proud that his name meant something.
“I’ll always be a sort of existentialist, an aesthetic Catholic,” he says, settling in for one of his dissertations on the Irish. “Let’s face it: Jesus Christ was crucified by the English in Northern Ireland.” Adam is turning the billiard balls over in his hands. Alcohol has dulled his senses and his Dremel cannot get purchase on the rounded surfaces. “I’m more Irish than the bloody Irish,” he says. “I could walk anywhere on Bell’s Road. That’s bloody Irish.”
Adam has never been to Ireland.
*
The phrase enfant terrible attaches itself and never leaves. Adam dresses for it, in elaborate boots and outsized hats. An adolescent talent for shock has become an adult hallmark. There is – mostly, at least – enough wit to take off the edge. Adam says of the director Neil Armfield, whom he was commissioned to paint for the National Portrait Gallery, that he “had a smile like a little boy who’s pissed himself and knows it’s funny”. The same is true of him.
Interviews with Adam follow a predictable arc. He surprises one journalist by producing a screed of paper from which he reads a list of thoughts he feels are important to the piece. In his final years he becomes something of a bored tour guide, showing people through his life.
Invariably, Adam begins these later interviews by claiming his girlfriend has just left him. It makes writers forgiving of his anger, and explains away the mess that is his house. His next trick is to take the journalist to his studio, usually before they have been inside. The change of location is disorienting, he tells me, and it puts him in charge. Adam barks the same command as the photographer’s car turns down the steep driveway leading to the studio, and it is printed in at least one profile: “Keep right. Keep right. A few friends have lost cars down there.”
As if on cue, he points out a stone wall beside his studio and claims it was built by Sidney Nolan. The grand white house behind his work space was once the Boyds’, he tells everyone. If he likes the journalist, he ends the interview by digging around in a pile of books and paper and giving them an etching. It is an act of calculated generosity, a gift that makes the journalist feel they are somehow special, that this famously difficult man has decided to let them in. Mine is the scratchy outline of a child’s face. It is called “Infant”.
“I’ve always painted human beings in various stages of physical and psychological trauma,” he tells Joyce Morgan in one profile. “I am drawn to people by their psychological intensity. I don’t care if it’s an actor or ex-con or a plumber or some crazed gun freak. Or that guy.” Adam is priming himself, preparing to borrow Bon Scott for a point he has made a hundred times before. “He’s so ugly but so sexy. I like people with a death wish.”
And it works. Morgan is impressed. She writes of a technique Adam has spent two decades perfecting: “He peppers his conversation with such provocative, declarative statements. Comments delivered apparently off-the-cuff but crafted with an attention to detail. ‘Now these quotes are very easy to fuck up because they could be twisted if you miss out a conjunction,’ he warns.”
*
Adam was in his late twenties when he told Carrie that he had a brother who had died from a heroin overdose. By this time he was using heroin himself. He said the brother had been a surfer, an outgoing boy who spent long, perfect hours at the beach with his father and found easy success with women.
Caricature fascinated Adam. As a teenager, he drew cartoons for the local paper. He had a handful of personas he used for different occasions: sometimes he was the sensitive artist, misunderstood by a cruel world; more often he was the dangerous provocateur, dispatching paintings from the fringes of life so that the rest of society would not have to live there. The smaller he became – the angrier, the more cut off – the larger the characters got. His friendship with the standover man Mark “Chopper” Read, whom he met in 2002, intensified the act. Both were performers and they learnt from each other. “I suppose I put things on a bit,” Adam told me. “I’m not always happy with who I am.”
It was not until Carrie brought up Adam’s dead sibling at a family occasion that he admitted the story was an invention: a description of the boy Adam wished he had been, a version of the father he idolised, cut down by the drug that had become his addiction. He did have a half-brother, Mark, who outlived him.
*
The last serious profile of Adam was written for Good Weekend during one of his bouts of pancreatitis. It appeared in late November 2008, under the title “The Devil in Adam Cullen”. All the predictable tropes were there: the just-departed girlfriend, the dramatic mention of his diabetes, the trip to the studio. Adam started the interview as he always did: late. He began in a flannel dressing gown and a tiger-fur belt, and ended it with a severed goat’s head on his lap, a hunting trophy he had pulled from the freezer. “Cullen grasps a rusty trumpet off a nearby shelf and starts playing, badly, The Last Post,” Janet Hawley wrote. “It is clearly time to go.”
And yet, as always with Adam, time was made for dictation: “I paint human car crashes. I’m not a romantic painter; I’m the inverse, I romance the dark side of life. I’m not afraid to explore it. Most people are too scared to look at the dark side, too fearful to face their own demons – so they don’t explore it and don’t understand it. Everyone loves a car crash, but they stare from a safe distance. I go right up close.”
Hawley got all three acts of the Adam Cullen Show: the provocative showman, the dark intellectual and, finally, the repentant Catholic. “Next morning, Cullen phones, gentle as a lamb,” she reported. “‘I’m trying to get rid of that bad boy image,’ he says, and asks me not to mention several other things from the previous day. ‘I’m 43 now, a more mature and reflective person. I might say things that sound outrageous – but they’re actually not. We need to talk some more.’”
*
It is early 2008, a month after Adam and I first meet, when I get my phone call. I had interviewed him for a profile in the Sydney Morning Herald and he had enjoyed the piece. He asks if I will write his biography. “Thames & Hudson want it,” he says. “And I’d like you to write it, digger.”
Within a week, I am staying in Adam’s spare room. I am nineteen and impulsive. It is Adam’s studied disobedience that draws me to him, his mischief. I am intrigued by his reputation and disbelieving of his stories. Over the next few days, we begin a series of conversations that will last four years. They begin as manifesto: observations about himself, polished over two decades, that approximate in varying degree his several personas. For the first six months at least, they are stitched with lies. With time, they become more honest.
“People don’t like you to change. People like to have you as one thing,” Adam says in this first week. “They like reliable. They like a harmless, good-looking, reliable failure. Sorry, I’m not that. I used to be good-looking, but I’m not reliable. I don’t care about people.”
He begins a riff on notoriety. Modesty is not a mark of our early conversations. “It’s not a conscious thing. Everything I do: I can’t help if people like it or they don’t. It isn’t my fault everyone else is so fucking boring.”
I never hear from Thames & Hudson and I begin to doubt the deal existed.