Some said Adam Cullen dragging a rotten pig’s head through art school was the great moment in Australian art. A Paddington curator quipped, Francis Bacon would’ve loved it. I knew a vegan who lived between Nimbin and Mount Warning who wanted to spit on Adam, free that pig.
Adam made David Wenham look like the most handsome homeless bloke in Australia with that Archibald depiction (he even had a shiner, as if someone had smacked him with a bottle of bourbon or a gold Logie).
All those artworks: silicone-babes riding pigs, piranha-toothed clowns, imprisoned asses, deformed harlots, Stormtrooper priests, Tasmanian Devils with bleeding faces (he gave money to save them) Lassie (with no intentions of coming home), an untrue history of Ned Kelly etc.
There’s a hotel named after Adam in Prahran. Guests have complained about hearing cursing, rifle shots and the scalpchilling yawping of wild boars after midnight. Chopper, Adam’s old mate, had quiet words with the whiners.
Adam was lucky he wasn’t jailed for driving with that blowingup-TVs-in-the-name-of-expressionism-and-existentialism-
and-every-other-ism arsenal. There was even a Taser in the mix (it had enough kick to cripple a stretched Hummer).
I only saw Adam once, at Gallery Ecosse in Exeter. This was a few months before the blue mountains in his body claimed him in his Blue Mountains studio. He was frail, but dapper in Thylacinebrown threads. A young disciple was on her knees by where he sat, handing him sycophancy so he’d give her a second coat of paint.
Adam will be hanging out with Ned Kelly right now. He’ll be wearing Ned’s helmet, taking potshots at angels. They’ll be surrounded by hundreds of Tasmanian Devils with unspoiled faces. And the sort of colour one only finds in a Cullen print.