Richard Cornish; (b.1942) Born Summer Hill,Sydney.

Australian Artist, Writer, Teacher, Poet, Illustrator, Experimental Film Maker, Cultural Theorist and Art Historian

A.E.S.T.C National Art School 1967.

Dip Ed. I.T.A.T.E Sydney 1989.

M.A. Art History Flinders University SA 1983.

I was one of the few artists to have predicted and prophesised both the 9/11 crisis and the Capitalist financial catastrophe and the massive economic collapse of Wall St, which occurred at the end of 2008 this has become the worst economic collapse since the 193O’s Over $50 trillion dollars has been wiped off the stock markets around the world and there could be more losses to come. US alone have lost 25% of GDP. This amount of money isn’t just an anonymous number, but the residue of people’s intellectual and physical labour over generations. The future effects of such loss, excess, greed and waste, via total laissez faire global capitalism, will be felt in the next few decades and beyond on the cultural, as well as economic and social fronts and elsewhere.

The US debt is now a staggering $15 trillion which is one fifth of the entire planets wealth.

The Recent left wing critics in the US have pointed out that the amount of finance that has been lost and stolen is coming from the taxpayers pocket (above $3,000 billion) to bail out the banks and financial institutions, which caused the crisis and it could have been used ‘to pay off every problematic morgage in the US’ as well as’ build a brand new home’ for every North American.

That is the humongus scale of the deformative crisis now unfolding.

It is absurd. It is a world standing on its head. It must be changed.

We are now in the middle of what Italians in the crisis of the late 16thC Renaissance called ‘la tempesta‘ or of being overwhelmed by fate in the shape of a huge storm. This whole present period with its problematic origins contain unusual and complex cultural attitudes to crisis by artists, writers and cultural workers, etc.

There is now a malignant cancer eating away at global Capitalism. It is of a recurring and systemic character, with the expanding crisis is coming directly from the US, which is now at the centre, rather than the periphery of the economic and financial problemsof this malevolent maelstrom.

In my painting of ‘The Coming Financial Tsunami 2000’ (Fig 1) I started to attempt to name these above preoccupations.

In this art work and also ‘The Political Ship of Fools’ 2007 (see below. Fig 2;), there is in the former painting of a gigantic, gargantuan wave, a scene, which shows sympathetically millions of tiny desperate people caught up in the financial collapse of capitalism. Revealing not only how far seeing an authentic artist can function, but also, how I could move between hybrid artistic styles from both Eastern and Western cultures. Articulating and naming with penetrating insight, areas where few Western artists have feared to tread. On the middle left of Fig 1; one can see huge skyscrapers collapsing with ominous presence painted long before 9/11.

There is something very wrong if a culture cannot anticipate and name its main problems if it is totally preoccupied with cultural diversions it will not know itself very well, on neither the inside nor the outside of its culture. It will stagger like a dumb and blinded giant toward greater danger.

Culture and Art function like counter- worlds or bridges between humanities inner fantasy world of collective and individual imagination and its outer goals; it is a site where these emerging challenges are sought, asked, and answered.

Both of these art works, which I’ve created and mentioned (above and below) with their strong images grew out of intense anger at world Capitalist developments and a dislike of waste, greed and depersonalisation caused by the so- called ‘respected’ leaders of the ‘free world,’ and what was laughably referred to as ‘the new world order’ but actually looked like an old world disorder.

The innovative idea in the painting of the structure of the hull of the ship came from a large, strange type of tropical tree pod found in the Northern Rivers area, where I used to work and create.

With a mast made of a sate stick and sail of clothe, I made these pods up to amuse children as funny little boats. I was curious about their shape and set up a scene like a small stage to do the painting. It was then I placed some of the most blatant, opportunist and decadent politicians within its hull, satirising them with a satisfying sense of revenge.

Over a million people have died in doomed, occupied places like Iraq, and 4 million forced to leave on new journeys from their homes and country. All for oil and gas resources to fit the needs of US aggressive strategic policies. Whole countries and cultures have been trashed across the region and the world for the sake of arbitrary financial interests of power elites.

As the creative process progressed, the centre panel came first in the painting and then I added the outer frame with symbolic ideological ‘complaints’ such as the torture of prisoners at ‘Abu Gahib,’ as well as the irony of Bush’s sign of ‘Mission Accomplished‘ and so on. There was major and minor symbolism and allegory attached to each section. The whole work of this ship of fools is a protest against inhumanity and crimes against humanity.

To understand the complex nature of recent and past history on life’s journey, we must keep our eyes focused squarely on the big picture, and avoid the armies of spin doctors of the Capitalist media, with their superficial, reduced and dumbed down view of life and reality at all costs. In that direction lie even further possibilities of crisis, catastrophe and carnage.

I also realised that one of the paintings that I did around 2000 contains a figure that looks similar to the financial Wall St con man Bernard Madoff, who was responsible for the biggest rip off in human history with his expropriation of over $60 billion from people’s savings. In my painting ‘Rich Man, Poor Man, Banker Man, Thief’ (see above, Fig 3;), the figure on the right looks very like Madoff (but without glasses). even though, I had never heard of him at that time. I was just making an artistic statement using brush drawing and collage about rich and poor nations and the exploitation, which occurs between them with a poor Asian looking through a small key hole at the parasitic multibillionaire.

I am no stranger to doing protest paintings as it’s been part of a life long passion, at least since the early sixties.

I have always been a fairly rare and unique artist in Australia who has not afraid of taking risks with political themes as my subject matter. I did this right through the 60’s. I executed a huge amount of protest work. I was also involved with Students for a Democratic Society or SDS. I was one of the only artists who was angry, empathetic and indignant enough to paint the shooting of students at Kent State University in the US in early 70’s by American Armed forces (see art work study from 1965-75, Fig 21;). This was a turning point for the 60’s student revolution across the planet. I, with many others, was a committed initiator, activist and sort of cultural warrior.

I’m sure that to regain some of our estranged humanity within the social system, we often have to rebel and remonstrate to stand upright against the estranging forces that push us down. These forces are as much ideological and psychological, as financial and social. They are all part of the cultural hegemony of oppression.

As Brecht once put it at the end of his life;

When I say what things is like-
Everyone’s heart-
Must be torn to shreds.
That you’ll go down
If you don’t stand up for yourself
Surely you see that!*.

This kind of realist ‘plain speaking’ of calling ‘things by their right name’ disappeared with Post-Modernism, as it became the new, conservative academy of cultural institutions across the earth and the ideological voice of late capitalist globalisation.

But here’s the rub. To strive to create authentic art one must create as if everything in the world mattered. The counter world of art and culture should be deeply engaged with this quest. One should be in awe of each of the mysterious and magical processes of reality forming and unravelling with a similar wonderment that the ecologist has for the unique presence and power of nature.

With my recent Multicultural works, I am concerned with finding cross over points between Eastern and Western culture. I ask where the best central energies meet and collide, and how this collision can aid a deeper personalisation and humanisation process within the images. Real artistic doors must be forced open. This subject matter and themes can be and must aspire to be as wide as life itself. Manifest in its actual and potential sphere and all its fantastic possibilities.

I have been stimulated by travels and my personal interaction with China and India. I am now spurred on and trying energetically to find what might be seen as hybrid types of cultural attitudes and styles. I try and synthesise these with more holistic quests and aspirations focusing on multicultural creative fusions, that may reflect in a small but important way, those existing and anticipated future human types of desires, wishes, identities etc. These are emerging in the present revealing affective and conceptual human artistic glimpses that can suggestively move across cultural lines.

This creative Multicultural methodology is like spirited allegorical reflection moving across and between windows of houses adjoining each other on a street inhabited by people of different races. These visual reflections can absorb aesthetic presences from the most important sector from each cultural world.

Can people of a broadly western racial and cultural background actually empathise imaginatively and with deep feeling with what it might personally for example be like to be Chinese lovers on their important wedding night in China? How would these kinds of situations challenge our and their identification and their personas in the cross cultural mix? Also, how would newly arrived Chinese visitors empathise with figures at a western wedding in an opposite interaction? But it’s the racial and cultural meeting point and overlap in the middle of these meanings that is interesting within the context offered above.

My trips across China and India and living with Chinese and Indian families and relatives have helped me focus ever closer on these important new questions of finding these points of cultural cross-over. But on all sides we live in a dilemma ridden world where late modern Multiculturalism is a very fragile entity.

It’s amazing how so many of today’s avant guard, as well as traditional cultural and art establishments, and their powerful institutions with their nurtured ideological viewpoints and representative artists were totally caught out by the unfolding of the main events of the largest financial crash of our time.

It was as if both traditional and Post- Modern culture right across the globe (like the worlds major financial economists) were absolutely unaware of an emerging and quintessential reality, which would affect everyone’s life. It was as if they had all been culturally hypnotised as indeed they were.

Marcuse once spoke of ‘one dimensional man’, but there also arose the one dimensional contemporary ‘cultural courtier’ who was a total opportunist. It may all have been a big game during an historic period of cultural confusion.

Only by separating myself from the hypnotic hubbub of hierarchical cultural worlds and establishments, could I focus on emerging truths and authentic aesthetic presences, emerging around me. That has been difficult to do, whilst living beside semi- hypnotised and drugged- up worlds and of cultures suffering from private solipsism, narcissism and political and cultural amnesia. Also with the capitalist mass media these smoke and mirrors campaigns now function as huge enterprises that further contribute to cultural confusion, and work on a humongous and horrendous scale across the globe. People without real information or authentic culture easily become either lost estranged souls or the unseeing members of easily manipulated crowds. Sometimes becoming strangely passive and almost anonymous. The culture talks of ‘individuality’, and yet everywhere people become more held down as tiny screws in larger machines of institutions and other bodies.

How does the artist find a way out of this abyss or maze of hostile cultural and political impediments?

First step is to name in the magical counter world of art, those who might be responsible for the present, decadent shemozzle. For example those who took whole countries to war under false pretences with trumped up evidence. To some extent these people could be considered war criminals. Cultural satire grows out of a great love of truth and a hatred of folly, philistinism and a repugnance in the presence of hypocrisy and sheer bunkum.

We live in a world where the targets for satire are increasing and expanding exponentially by the hour.

The Multicultural hybrid images which I have done above are mostly brush drawings executed on watercolour paper. I have used rice paper in the past but found it wasn’t bright enough as a white background for my type of artistic experimentation. There is also collage like use made of Chinese festive objects such as joss paper and ghost money, etc. Within the poetics of the art work I try to create a dynamic balance between the dialectics of the visual metonymy (the still object that can also represent something else) of this collage. The metaphorical inclinations of the visual movement within the brush drawing (the ghe energy) create a double visual conceit to interesting and fresh effect, which can be used in playful, lyrical or serious ways. This then acts as a an invisible type of aesthetic net attempting to catch an important cross cultural presence.

This double visual conceit can be observed above in Fig 9; ‘Mother and Child in Shower’. In this, the two rival centres both oppose and harmonise with each other in the embrace of the mother and of her child contrasted with the bathrobe. They are like magnetic energies. These poetic devices are used to demystify a slice of life that is about nakedness and the covering and hiding of fecund nudity.

This kind of creativity can also function as a joke (always a bit dangerous in multicultural situations) as we see below in Fig 10; ‘Make Something Out of Nothing.’ that is also written in mandarin and refers realistically to its own creative illusion.

But creativity isn’t this rational as it occurs in praxis; much is intuitive and grows out of a sequence of guesses within the magical counter world of the art work. In creative situ and in process of innovation with the art work, it’s like trying to find a path through an over grown rain forest. Only later through critical hindsight and reflection and changes to the art work do we see the pattern of our journey through each obstacle. During the creative process the art work will start to kind of talk to you and make suggestions on how it might be completed. It’s part of your own internal dialogue. Like planning to write a love letter or poem in your mind before you do it. If the art work is successful, it will name an important presence and if strikes something essential it will strive for universality. If this occurs, (which is rare and is really only glimpsed by the creative psyche in art works) then the art imagery will seek to speak to everyone for as long as possible until it exhausts its address. Artistic universality also has its own inconstant history and must be renewed or changed with every generation.

One of the difficulties and yet great joys of artistic creativity is to be involved passionately in these types of quests. It’s the closest we can move to the processes of knowing and feeling the energies of being and becoming within life itself. Art and culture can be used to affirm or challenge ‘reality’ in the name of smaller or larger presences.

In the following works I’ve attempted to use Chinese philosophical history as a subject of humorous cross cultural images. There has also been many years of research behind this involvement and there is a pronounced feeling that our society has lost interest in the big philosophical questions, especially of the artist coming in from a humorous angle.

We live in a world where everything is connected.As Capitalism evolved through the 18thC and 19thC and expanded in 20thC and 21stC in Europe and the US and elsewhere, the world of free moving and wild animals receded and their place was supplanted with armies of domestic pets. Zoos’ arose like animal museums as the autonomous animals retreated from urbane life (except those bred for slaughter, sport or pets). They also became more ambiguous to the human imagination. A vacuum existed in our minds and even from within our primordial unconscious, which the passive pet and zoo animals attempted to simulate and mimic. Wild animals were then depicted as curiously seen exotic objects. In circuses man played the master over the symbolic animal kingdom. In zoo’s the pathetic animals were incapable of seeing us, but were somehow related to us, in what became a forgotten presence that was increasingly enigmatic. They became distant as had peoples from third world countries (and just as exotic) and sometimes, these animals could be seen through xenophilic eyes as if they were somehow ‘born free,’ which was our romantic concept and not theirs. They remained a forgotten ‘other’.

As the process of industrial and commodity production has intensified through the 20thC so to did the speed in the decline in numbers recede. The question of man’s relation with animals (and vice versa) has become a metaphysical question that remains ‘on hold’ for capitalist and consumerist society and others.

When a lion tamer occasionally gets attacked by his lions, we do not react to a tragedy, our feelings are far more ambiguous. It’s because the question of humanity and empathy and our power over animals is left unresolved.

Zoos remain a bit like glasshouses as a place where we take children to see the originals of their phantasies. Gleaned from illustration, toys, photographs, video’s and cartoons. But the two realities rarely synchronise together because in children’s imaginations these animals are unique and ‘free’ Yet in zoo’s their animals are spiritless and lacking will because of their narrow incarceration and existing in a kind of psychic limbo that humans created for them.

In Zoo’s, animals even look smaller than they are because of their lack of voluntaristic presence.

One of my most precious memories is of hearing roosters crowing in the dawn in Beijing and other Chinese cities. A sound that has totally disappeared from other first world metropolitan cities of the world.

By half growing up in the country I became aware of the importance of the secret world of the animals in the wild.

Humanities dialogue with the animals helps people get out of themselves and puts their egocentric lifestyles in perspective. We share birth, life and death with the these warm blooded animals and this should make us a bit more humble and keep in check our inclination towards narcissism, solipsism and greed and the new culture of the appertitive.

Chinese type brush drawing and traditional Western water colour technique are ideal methods of painting animals. It has a similar elasticity in rendering muscular and tendon animal movements. The flow of the Chinese brush can very easily suggest the flow and can become a gestural metaphor of animal motion with their running, jumps, hops, leaps and walking or scampering movements. Oil paint is a bit greasy and acrylics somewhat chalky to render this fluidity.

My endangered frog above in Fig 18; evokes a sense of movement and what Fuller called ‘moments of becoming’. The use of money as collage is meant to suggest the survival of the species is symbolically threatened by the world of money, investment, profits, greed and total commodification. Whilst being the cause and source of major threats to the frogs global habitat. The survival of the frog species is important for as scientists say the frog acts as a barometer or seismograph for the health of human survival.