ART

“I love it because it’s so useless.”

The day Adam’s retrospective closes at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, he stands in his garden wearing only his underpants and he cries. It is the end of July 2008. Through the tears, he yells into the morning, willing that the show be kept open in perpetuity, that it become a memorial. He yells and cries and yells for half an hour and then he goes inside. Sitting on his couch, in front of a vase of dead cornflowers, he fires a sawn-off shotgun into the ceiling above him.

“I was crying,” he says on the phone, immediately afterwards. “That’s not Adam Cullen. It’s the last day of my show and I just need to call someone. I’m really upset. I think it should be there forever.”

This is during a brief dry period. The drugs have not stopped, but the alcohol has. “I have been like fucking Thor since I haven’t had a drink. I can clap thunder out of every brush. I can’t talk enough.”

He says he views his job as ministering to a kind of national hospice. When Adam speaks, he has a jumbled lucidity. He spends so much time alone, rolling phrases over in his mind, that when he comes to voice them they are often badly contorted. He frequently calls his work palliative care, a means of making the world more comfortable while it perishes around him. “There’s a big part of Australia that’s actually dead,” he says.

A week later, he is drunk.

*

Paint was Adam’s first memory. He remembered as a toddler tipping an open tin of enamel over himself. His cloth nappy drank in the blue paint until it was wet through and he was finally found in the mess by his mother, who cleaned him up but did not scold him. He could remember the weight of the tin just before he knocked it over, and the coolness of the paint as it poured out across him. “I don’t know what it means,” he said. “But it’s the first thing I can remember.”

Adam failed his painting subjects at the City Art Institute, under the tutelage of Sydney Ball, yet painting remained the talent he could not escape. He avoided it for a long time, having shown aptitude as a child. Eventually, he could not deny its pull. “He was a old cunt even then,” Adam said of Ball. “I mean, what the fuck is ‘Paint Technology’?”

Adam was a painter of many subjects – of hurt and longing, occasionally even of machismo – but fundamentally he was a painter of muscle. It was with both pride and curiosity that he skinned the animals he killed while hunting, and his paintings had the same subcutaneous impulses. This explains the black lines that became a signature in his later acrylic pictures: he would begin each painting as a mess of muscle and sinew, the subject a confusion of colours, imperceptible until it was finally described by the lines of eloquent black laid down on top of it. His skill came more from the cartoons he drew in his teens than it did from study. The tricks were all cartooning shorthands.

But the paintings, when they were good, were pointedly sophisticated. The muscle he started with went some way to guaranteeing this. They were paintings of anxiety painted from anxiety. They were made always in the late evening, following an afternoon of agitation. Adam was disciplined about his work: his schedule fixed him in the studio from eight pm until after midnight. His days would be spent mostly in sleep. “There’s just more to paint about at night. I can’t make any excuses. It’s just me and it, only me and it,” he said. “It’s all in my head. I just have to pick out these individual signifiers in this vast landscape before me.”

He talked about “executing” paintings. It took him a long time to build up to them, to worry himself into a state of panic and keep worrying until his disquiet was finally hurried onto the canvas. He viewed the act almost as performance art. “They’re not paintings,” he said. “They are a recording, the final document.”

*

In the early 1990s Adam was placed among a group of artists making what was called “Avant Grunge” – a movement with which no one identified, invented by Jeff Gibson in an essay of the same name. Adam made a habit at the time of living above pharmacies, and was living above one on King Street in Newtown with Hany Armanious, another proponent of the phantom school.

Despite their proximity, they did not bond. Adam was always working odd jobs: he had the ethic of a builder’s son and this, at least in his telling, was what prevented him from fitting in with other artists. In Hany’s recollection, Adam was unemployed and Hany was working as a landscape gardener. “I was fucking working in a funeral parlour on bucket duty,” Adam said. “We’d go in and mop the person up when all that was left was juices. Hany was on the dole and showered twice a day.”

Adam was mostly a sculptor at this point. He made scrappy works from used pens and unfired clay, giving them long names hewn from theory and nonsense. Everything looked as if it had been broken and he had tried clumsily to fix it. These signs of caring were the works’ charm, and they were lost to some end in his paintings – perhaps because painting came more easily. The sculptures grew out of performances at art school: the lawnmower he started on stage; the cat he skinned while the Doors played; the cassettes he stitched to the soles of his feet; the pig’s head ball and chain that sparked his notoriety.

His sculptural masterwork, Residual paroxysm of unspoken and extended closures interrogated by a malady of necrogenic subterfuge with a nice exit, finally sold to the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2008, almost two decades after being shown there as a part of the era-defining Perspecta shows. It was, like many of his assemblages, maternal. An air-conditioning unit, padded with disposable nappies, sits in a bathtub, connected to a television by a length of plastic tubing and, further on, to a battery of pharmaceutical instruments and drying mucus. The impression is of a failed life support, an ectopic womb. The unplugged television exists as an aborted power source. It is an extension of the idea explored in Cosmological satellite mother denied depressed speech, a beer keg to which he affixed a length of umbilical cord preserved in formalin, a specimen stolen from a closed teaching hospital. The works represented what had nurtured Adam: television, and then beer.

“It’s taken me eighteen years to fucking sell it,” he said by way of celebration. “They take this fucking shit out of my house and call it art. It’s just so great.”

*

Adam never started on the doctorate he talked about in his final years: Death in Australian Art. He bought a monograph on Sidney Nolan but got no further. Perhaps fittingly, he died before he began.

A decade earlier, at the University of New South Wales’ College of Fine Arts, Adam had completed a master’s thesis he called Birth of an Idiot – or Where I Would Have Got if I’d Been Stupid. His model was the Jerilderie Letter, Ned Kelly’s 8000-word manifesto, dictated to Joe Byrne in the summer of 1879. Adam treasured his edition of the letter. He marked his place in it with a notice from his own probation officer, as if he and Kelly were both outlaws conversing across the centuries. “This is Ned Kelly’s DNA,” he said when he lent it to me. “It’s his bloody DNA on the page.” I was at home before I realised the line was Peter Carey’s, and it was printed on the book’s cover.

Adam said he wrote Birth of an Idiot in a single afternoon with the assistance of a six-pack of beer. This was not true. The thesis began as a map of the “psychic geography of the Australian landscape”. Esoteric language aside, it was an attempt by Adam to characterise his portraiture as a kind of suburban landscape painting. Certainly, he never tried to escape the flatness of Australia. He made paintings of the vast spaces between things. Faces became mountains; his lurid backgrounds, the sky. Text was now the horizon line. Some of this was wit: “Art has to look like art. Children grow up to be just like adults.” Some of it was openly mocking of academia: in his footnotes Adam quoted the jingle of a Pizza Hut commercial, and noted Pro Hart’s contribution to the Stainmaster brand of carpets.

“I make no attempt to frame my investigations in traditional methodological terms. Like my practice itself, this text is not so readily classifiable; its meanings remain ambiguous and incomplete. Instead, what emerges from this piece of writing is a kind of self-critical story,” he wrote in the abstract. “So, instead of being a generalised theoretical account, this has become a neurotic chronicle, composed by a corpulent stooge … The opinions expressed in this story aren’t necessarily shared by the rest of the world. Nor should they be. As Mike Kelley says: ‘Too much is always expected of love and art.’”

The thesis acknowledged Adam’s experiences of intoxication and isolation, although it did not press these themes. It recounted fondly the television of his childhood: Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp; Phantom Agents; Captain Scarlet; Thunderbirds. “TV has always been there for me,” he wrote. “As a child, I would eat, sleep and get ready for school in front of television. It was my way of getting out of the house. It taught me to see and to use my imagination.”

Birth of an Idiot praised the suburbs as the apex of human development, a site of endless nourishment undeserving of cynicism. But at the heart of the essay was a desire to engage with the bush of his parents’ youth – a longing, as he would later express it, to live their country childhoods.

This same longing had given rise to the most indelible image of Adam’s youth, a provocation that fascinated him and from which he never recovered:

I was an adolescent, and like most white, middle-class, male teenagers from the northern beaches of Sydney, I hadn’t experienced anything. It was in the far west of NSW on a sheep property. I was in the company of two older cousins and two dogs. We were in a truck pig-shooting in the blackness of early morning in God’s Own Country. My cousins caught a large red kangaroo by lassoing it on the run. While two kelpie bitches held it down, they proceeded to cut its tail off with a chainsaw. At the time I thought it was pretty amusing, it certainly held my attention.

There was morose comedy in the kangaroo, Samson-like, its strength gone as it tried hopelessly to right itself without a tail. Adam brought this up occasionally. Sometimes he laughed; sometimes, it caused him to cry. He felt a need to match the attention-grabbing nature of this act, and at the same time live up to its masculinity.

The closest thing he had to a model was the German artist Martin Kippenberger, who died while Adam was writing his thesis – suffering a “ferocious liver”, as Adam quaintly put it. “Playfully vicious and hopelessly addicted to self-parody,” he wrote. “Kippenberger reconstructs normalcy and makes it hysterically tragic.”

The final line of Birth of an Idiot quoted Martin Bryant, who had killed thirty-five people and wounded twenty-three more at Port Arthur two years earlier. This was a man said to buy round-the-world plane tickets so that he might talk to the person in the seat beside him, whose parents chained him up because they could not contain his energy. “I wanted to meet up with normal people,” Bryant said, “but it didn’t work.”

*

Adam was a painter by the time he started the thesis in 1997, but only just. He had exhibited a collection of pictures at Yuill/Crowley gallery the year before, in a show he called The Australian Labour Party. The Sydney Morning Herald’s art critic, Bruce James, reviewed the work and was unenthused.

The paintings, however, were some of the most electric of his career: drunken koans spray-painted onto canvas or the reverse side of photographic paper, works such as My parents telephone number is 99821626, and later My dad had sex with my mum. Both paintings were no more than their titles, spelled large across the picture plane, yet they seemed to hold in a sentence all of Adam’s life: a permanent adolescence, the responsibility for which was abdicated to his mother and father in suburban Collaroy. As with his earlier sculptures, he began by rebelling against materials. These were paintings against all odds. The former won the 1996 Gold Coast City Conrad Jupiters Art Prize. His father still receives phone calls to the number. “I’ve had about ten since he did it,” Kevin says. “The bugger.”

Reviewing the work, Bruce James wrote: “I find the displayed canvases flaccid, self-conscious and ungenerous. I don’t know what they mean, either – rather worrying in my position.” But he found hope in a portfolio of drawings by Adam, shown elsewhere in the gallery: “[They show] all the communicative life lacking elsewhere. Truth, wit and even artistic taste leak from them like a juice.”

James became an important critic of Adam’s work. A year after dismissing Adam’s first paintings, he wrote about the film Inappropriate Elation – a home video of a playground rocking horse being jolted wildly back and forth. His preface had the nervousness critics reserved for Adam’s early work. It was “an acquired taste”, James warned. The work could be “offensively ham-fisted” from a man “who put the faux in faux-naivety”. But he also saw for the first time Adam’s “gift for clowning”, and called the video “Sydney’s laugh of the month”.

What confounded critics about Adam’s work was its simplicity. Few could accept that he painted what he meant: there was no hidden meaning, no deeper purpose. If he tried for one in his thesis, it was fitted retrospectively, tongue in cheek. These were pictures of pathetic men and smudged women, painted because that is what he saw on television and in magazines. Save for his Archibald entries and a few other exceptions, Adam almost never painted from life. His pictures were transcriptions. The text was harvested from popular culture, lifted from late-night television: phrases repeated aloud, over and over, until they had either shed or gained meaning. There was no judgement and little empathy. He disliked the term “Loserville”, coined for the universe in which his subjects existed: the name was often attributed to him, but it had in fact originated in an essay on his work by Ingrid Periz. “I don’t think of them as losers,” he said. “I don’t think of them at all.”

By the time James reviewed Adam’s 1998 show, World Fantasy, he saw “an artist of real merit”. James was among the first to recognise that the meaning of Adam’s work sat on its surface, that he had no opinion of his subjects, good or bad: “Cullen’s abjectness is not luxury at ease; his emptiness is not profundity; when he scribbles, his poor syntax is not a form of epigram. His crudeness is what it is – unabashed … He’s a bottom-feeder, none too pernickety about taste. Every pond needs one, especially the cesspools of popular culture.”

A year later, James paid Adam the substantial compliment of a catalogue essay for his show at the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane and Adelaide’s Experimental Art Foundation. He was, like a number after him, convinced.

*

Adam resented other artists. He lived outside their world and often thought them weak. Occasionally, he would make a brief but intense friendship, as with the painter Ben Quilty. But his phone calls would quickly become too much and his demands too taxing – the overtures to come immediately on unplanned hunting trips, to pick up grenades for him from a store on George Street or heroin from a man in Darlinghurst. Other times, Adam would watch a career from afar, envying its achievements. He was never ashamed to express this, raging that he should have been selected for the Venice Biennale in place of Shaun Gladwell. “They should be approaching me,” he said. “I was making that work ten years ago, carrying around roadkill. He lives in fucking Potts Point. I am Mad Max.”

Despite his accolades, Adam always felt an outcast. He could never stand another person’s success. “Artists are fucking wankers and it’s almost embarrassing to be one,” he said one night after a burst of painting in his studio. “I suppose I’m just very disappointed with other artists. They are all wankers – male and female. They just don’t get that they will hit this wall and will be fucked. They haven’t hit their head against the wall of existence like I have. They just don’t understand what life is about. With art, when you’re making something completely fucking useless, you can lose your sense of play. But for me everything is fun. If I lose that sense of play, I would just die or fade away. I love it because it’s so useless. It’s the most indulgent thing you can do, to make art. It’s so fucking selfish and I love it. I reckon I’m worth eight thousand dollars an hour, and the rest.”

*

Adam did not talk much about influences. The art books he bought were tattoo magazines. He made a mischief from agreement: whatever meaning a critic proposed for a work, he would concur with it. Questions about art had to be open-ended or else the answers would be useless. “In my twenties it was Kippenberger and Goya and performance art – Joseph Beuys,” he said of the artists who shaped his early work. “Not necessarily the intent, but the work itself was so new and aesthetic and human and dead. It was all about death, a ‘good death.’”

Among Australian artists, Nolan and Mike Parr were the only figures he consistently respected. “I’m just really interested in how he looks at colour. It’s very helpful,” he said of Nolan. “I don’t think he was ever a very good drawer, whereas I really, really enjoy it and get a lot out of it. I really do think an artist hits his prime in his older years. Nolan has come to me late in life, or as late as my life has allowed.”

*

A few weeks after Adam died, the Art Gallery of New South Wales hung his painting Comedic relief in its main hall. It is not a great Cullen, but nor is it a bad one. A craggy male head looms forward beside a bound figure. Everything is set in hastily mixed Dulux. The picture entered the collection via the proceeds of a dinner to mark Adam’s 2008 retrospective – bought not with one generous sum but with the dribs and drabs of thirty donations; two of them from his art dealers, another from Lucy Turnbull. It seemed telling: this was a man no longer capable of mustering singular enthusiasm.

The gallery owns better examples of his work – his morally ambiguous Portrait of John Travers, named as the ringleader in the rape and murder of Anita Cobby; the calamitous epic Lets get lost – but Comedic relief was a fitting tribute. It was a capable depiction of Australian impotence, unsentimental in its outlook, laced with what would become Adam’s plainest mannerisms: brisk drawing; spray-painted antennae, so his subject might better interpret the world; drip marks cultivated by rotating the picture while it was still wet.

This would be the first time a wall plaque for Adam had an end point: “Adam Cullen, Australia, 1965–2012.” It gave the work a greater power than it might otherwise have had. Already, the explanatory text was making excuses – trying to defend through euphemism a legacy tarnished by ten years of uneven painting, by the fact that the indifference which had been the strength of Adam’s work also meant he struggled to pick a good picture from a bad one. “Adam Cullen was a unique and larger-than-life figure in contemporary Australian art,” it began. “His public persona obscured to a certain extent his significant contribution to art practice … The pathos of his subject matter also has a form of abject beauty, the beauty of the decayed and coming apart, of a humanity that is to be found in failed endeavours, misunderstandings and missed connections.”

*

Adam’s final artistic controversy was a painting of Christ, made for the Blake Prize in 2008. The picture’s inclusion among the finalists forced the resignation of one of the judges, Christopher Allen, who accused the picture of an aesthetic bluff. To be sure, it was shoddily painted and offered no reason for its garishness. “I’ve never even met him – I just don’t like his work,” Allen said. “It has a kind of deliberate ugliness which has been exploited as a gimmick. This isn’t a personal preference, it’s a judgement.”

The resignation made the cover of the Sydney Morning Herald and was reported by the BBC. The work was later defended as a feminist reading of the Bible, on the basis of an inscription in the lower left-hand corner: “Only woman bleed.” This was not its intention; nor had been controversy.

The picture was painted the evening before it was due in Sydney, without time for the background to dry ahead of work commencing on the foreground. Adam’s paints were rotten in their cans, as they often were. They had separated and congealed. As he fixed Jesus to the cross, copying the figure from a Velázquez poster, he could not get his red acrylic to adhere. “More blood,” he repeated over and over. “More blood.” Standing in the studio, I joked that the problem was addressed in a song by Alice Cooper, “Only Women Bleed”. By this stage a bottle of vodka had been drunk and the phrase was misspelt onto the canvas. Adam had a gift for success through accident. “Sometimes I think all I have to do is wake up in the morning,” he told the Sydney Morning Herald at the time. “I just have to fart and there’s flames.”

A sub-editor later called to be reassured that the quote was genuine.