terrorizing the image

He was all "Ziggy Stardust" and I know that he must have known Nick Cave.

The late 70's and 80's were an amazing time for artists in Melbourne. Nick Cave, Howard Arkley other people on drugs and making things. And Philip Brophy. I read about Brophy when I was researching that period in Art School, flicking through an old Art & Text. When he came to speak on a forum during the Adelaide fArts 2008 I made sure I went along. The forum was on Art/Music and consisted of Brophy, Chicks on Speed and Danius Kesminas discussing the aptitude of mixing the two genres. It was a disaster, but a very memorable disaster ultimately ending in one of the CoS knitting on the corner of the stage while the other two did a furniture rearranging performance and Brophy walking off the stage. I later found out he caught a cab straight to the airport and got the first flight back to Melbourne.

So, is he really the rockstar of the australian art scene or just some pretentious outdated wanker. His work is as postmodern as his getup. Altering the soundtracks of music videoclips so that the cinematicesque becomes grotesque Brophy rearranges the manner in which image and sound relate so they can no longer feed each other. His reconstructed soundscapes are still pop, sex, music but the images are terrorised> and in such are made cult. You can look at Brophy and know that he is quite clever, the ooze of confidence that makes you a rockstar even though you wish he didn't wear those pants. its all part of it. 

Having encountered Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Andy Warhol and David Bowie at an impressionable age, my predilection to the perverse and the playful has not diminished as my career has progressed. I have found great productivity in channelling their modernist and 'pre-postmodern' quips, claims, theatre and subterfuge into the socio-cultural arena of making art.'s