Erik Jensen > Quotes

“I’m so used to absolute freedom. I can shit anywhere. I can piss anywhere. I can take drugs. I can kill things. But in there I was nothing,” he says. “For the first time in my life I felt what Ned Kelly felt. The last month has been hell. I don’t think I was that mad. My own illness is news to me. They say that I’m borderline bipolar. That was odd – not to have the diagnosis but to swallow the diagnosis.”
― Erik Jensen, Acute Misfortune: The Life and Death of Adam Cullen

“He [Scott Morrison] says Greg Hunt saved the Great Barrier Reef.”
― Erik Jensen, The Prosperity Gospel: How Scott Morrison Won and Bill Shorten Lost

“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.”
― Erik Jensen, Acute Misfortune: The Life and Death of Adam Cullen

“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.”
― Erik Jensen, Acute Misfortune: The Life and Death of Adam Cullen

“Bulletin a decade earlier, his definition of art: “It’s the only profession in the world where your employer wants you to die.” I think, in this strangely griefless church, it is perhaps the most honest description he gave of his career. I count up the art dealers in the room: there are four.”
― Erik Jensen, Acute Misfortune: The Life and Death of Adam Cullen

“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.”
― Erik Jensen, Acute Misfortune: The Life and Death of Adam Cullen

“A new phrase occurs to him, and the neatness of it opens his face a little. "It's crystal-clear, at this election," he says. "It is a choice between me as prime minster and Bill Shorten as prime minister. You vote for me, you'll get me. You vote for Bill Shorten and you'll get Bill Shorten.”
― Erik Jensen, The Prosperity Gospel: How Scott Morrison Won and Bill Shorten Lost

“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.”
― Erik Jensen, Acute Misfortune: The Life and Death of Adam Cullen