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I’ve always regarded myself as a musician first, then an artist. I was always very hands-on with my band: writing the songs, playing guitar, singing, producing, drawing, painting, photographing the album cover and designing and printing the shirts. Back in Australia in the early 80s, I was considered “too weird” while I was looking for a job. Accordingly, I was unemployed my whole life. These days, in order to work at Kinko’s or Starbucks, it seems almost compulsory to have a large neck tattoo or heavily pierced face, as opposed to the tie required during my job-searching youth. |
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Vile Kinetic Horror – Stu Spasm
I’ve always regarded myself as a musician first, then an artist. I was always very hands-on with my band: writing the songs, playing guitar, singing, producing, drawing, painting, photographing the album cover and designing and printing the shirts. Back in Australia in the early 80s, I was considered “too weird” while I was looking for a job.
Accordingly, I was unemployed my whole life. These days, in order to work at Kinko’s or Starbucks, it seems almost compulsory to have a large neck tattoo or heavily pierced face, as opposed to the tie required during my job-searching youth. In this period then, I thought music and art were my jobs and, although without alternative sources of income, I was not prepared to sell out or to go commercial.
My sculptures began as busts with springs for necks ranging from famous and infamous characters to commissioned portraits. I used to sell them at a monthly market in a park in Sydney or at art shows that my friends and I would put together at this huge, fantastic house that we lived in. From busts, they became more elaborate until there were all sorts of moving parts on springs and wire. I used to put my own hair on them and, sometimes, just for my own twisted amusement, even my own pubic hair. If I were more superstitious, I might have suspected my hair was being used to cause me ill fortune. Irregardless, I stopped using it a few years ago.
I’ve sold a lot of sculptures of Bud Dwyer, the politician who famously blew his brains out at a TV press conference, which, ostensibly, he had telephoned only to declare his innocence of the embezzlement charges against him. I created him in the pose of Dyer’s famous photo, the one where he has a huge gun to his face and looks like a cross between “divine” and Linda Lovelace in action. Anyway, that sculpture has evolved and is now a head being blown apart with bits of brains, noses, eyes and general gore suspended, mid-air, on guitar strings. One can hold the gun to the sculpture’s head, then release it and the whole thing rattles and shimmers in a pleasingly vile kinetic horror. I’ve also sold tons of Satans, Hitlers, Gacys, Geins, Nick Caves, Reg Christies, Monk Eastmans, Elvises and Frank Sinatras. Of course, there’s also my Bin Laden with a plane smashing into his forehead, dynamite and a bloody Koran.
I don’t like my sculptures being referred to as “Puppets” or “Dolls.” Lately, I’ve gotten more into doing oil paintings and have been doing a series of classic, saucy, naked bar-room ladies—except that they’re all actually beautiful, demonic temptresses.
