Radical Slacker Beach Threat

The group ‘I am Kloot’ have a song called ‘Proof’ (look, it up)’ it begins with the lyrics

Hey, could you stand another drink
I'm better when I don't think
It seems to get me through
Say, d'you wanna spin another line
Like we had a good time
Not that I need proof

It seems to me to say everything about the world I live in now, it’s a world that is getting more abstract, more inept and visually dysfunctional each month. With now no need to think or question anything spun my way.

A form of devious electronic zealotry has invaded everything, competing for all our cultural future, it’s nowhere close to how I imagined it as a child, or even as a young adult. Granted, mine is a 1970s British childhood of slightly creepy malevolence, with a certain menace lurking behind the neighbours curtains. But it’s was also dreamy world of haunted rainy days spent indoors with a glorious technical future of strange science, linked with a hangover of a post hippy, slightly folky can do attitude, beamed by the TV into my subconscious.

But the blokes that run everything (and let’s be honest its mainly blokes) now, seem to have taken an authority position to new levels of ineptitude. Its key is to frown on any kind of knees up, promoting a puritanical patriotic spirit, it’s in their interest to tell us that our way of life is under threat, while keeping us all spending sometimes on the internet while using inflammatory language and visuals, to keep us compliant.

It’s a present my Australian self can’t fathom. A electronic proletariat is adding to the static while looking for a bigger and bigger outrage, calling for the banning of this and promoting the hating of that, all hidden behind an avatar revealing the unpleasant individual behind an amiable exterior.

I usually spend hours composing something witty to say about my paintings. But nobody is listening and why should they, we all have shit to buy on eBay, and the blokes in blazer are promoting Australian values behind flags.

I spend most of my time in complete bemusement. I am on a different hemisphere of the globe from where I started, I am a long way from a child of the 70s watching TV, I am bombarded by ineptitude and patriotism. Why not paint people upside down on the beach. Buggered if I know what it’s all about.

Gas Works Art Park August 10th  15