The following is a brief preview - the full content of this page is available to premium users only.
Click here to subscribe...
About two years ago, Adam Cullen chewed the last pieces of flesh from the bones of grunge and hung them out to dry. He then took up paper, pen, squabs of paint, beer labels – a few ready-made consumer 'entertainables' (video cameras and brand new bubble-cars), and created a kind of artist's vaudeville of the 'lousy audition'.
While his earlier pieces featured mummified cats and life support systems 'dressed as urinals', it was the attachment of carefully phrased titles to these objects that brought Cullen's uncanny poetry to more mature artworld attention. There is still a kind of routine extremism that Cullen exhibits in crashing through from one exhibition to the next. And while his working methods and materials often still appear sloppy and slap-dash, the approach and the prey are beginning to appear more focused and better chosen.
Amputated phrase and spidery hieroglyph inhabit every corner of Special, Cullen 's latest Yuiii/Crowley outing (after the very successful Australian Labor Party, also at Yuiii/Crowley, in 1996.) The exhibition title, Special, may well have been cut from the title of a previous work, Special Lite Nude, which featured a foetus with a six-pack beer cap- Cullen's homage to 'fluid' apprenticeship. The title is here re-attached to a bunch of (seemingly) vapid mutterings, blobs and scribblings. Perhaps it re-iterates the sign of the six-pack, which in turn tells the story of 'beer-assessed' limited edition, drive-away, no-more-to-pay, fantastic, 'never-to-be-repeated' artworks. Cullen 's pictures repeat on themselves, an embarrassment to uniqueness, a long (domestic) champagne burp at an exhibition opening.
Yet to say that these works are 'knowingly' bereft of content is to miss the current drift in Cullen's oeuvre. Really, there