Anthony Lister with Rock & Roll Girl
Inside Robert Fontaine Gallery’s pristine white showroom in Miami’s Wynwood Arts District, ballerinas are twirling and leaping around the walls. Their diaphanous tutus are saturated with color splashing like splattered paint and dripping from their bodies. They’re dressed in red, yellow, purple, blue, black, and pink. Their skeletons are sometimes exposed, like an x-ray, offering a peek at the fine-tuning and muscular mechanics behind their fluid motion. These are the works of Australian street artist Anthony Lister, a man who claims to have “multiple creative personality disorder” and the inventor of adventure painting.
I spoke with Lister shortly before he arrived in Miami for his solo show “Never Odd Or Even” at the Robert Fontaine Gallery, opening this Saturday May 11 and running through May 25. A conversation with him is something like an epic lyrical poem filled with riddles and surprises. Read on to see what I mean.
WC: Tell me about what we can expect at your upcoming show at the Robert Fontaine Gallery?
AL: Since my last visit to Miami in December during Basel, I’ve been working on ballerina theme works. You can expect to see ballerina paintings. I see ballerinas kind of like strippers, only they don’t take their clothes off. I do motion paintings of ballerinas in a fluid style. And I’ve been working on a few large murals, some of which can be found around Miami.
Ballerina mural at NW 2nd Ave & NW 24th St
Tell me more about the relationship you see between strippers and ballerinas.
From working on the street and associating with a number of graffiti artists, I’m constantly having to kind of redefine, or at least give analogies, of my practice to my peers and my collectors, and somehow I find myself caught on the fence between highbrow and lowbrow, and the classification of fine art, so I guess it’s just more of me trying to extinguish the idea of perceived value and trying to put the work at the forefront rather than the context of how it’s been perceived in the past.
Tell me what it’s like to work in different mediums, specifically street art versus work that hangs in a gallery.
I suffer from the graffiti disease and I have what I call “multiple creative personality disorder.” I’m always in my practice talking about social conditions. I’m constantly talking about the lack of guidance within males today. I’m constantly talking about the condition of guided missiles, misguided men. I say one man’s mess is another man’s message. I’m constantly finding myself around misguiding role models. Coming from Australia, it has a history of prisoner culture and big crime culture. I guess I’m just constantly trying to find a role model. Not to say that I’m it. Even though I roll with a lot of models.
What’s a day in the life of Anthony Lister like?
I’ll sleep for three days and then I’ll wake up and I’ll stay awake for two months and during that time I’ll just basically hibernate in my laboratory, which overlooks Central Station in Sydney, Australia, and I basically sit here and try to break out what painting is and what beauty is. Basically, I’m just trying to break art.
Tell me a little about your career path.
I was raised in Brisbane and as soon as I finished some schooling for a few years in university I went to New York City to do a mentorship. Then I moved there and got arrested a number of times, and then moved back to Australia. But I’m constantly finding myself back in New York City, as well as Los Angeles, Berlin, or Italy. This craft that I do, these multiple creative personalities just have a way of finding themselves around the world. I really don’t know how to explain it as a timeline because I’ve been too busy. I have a website and we actually just saw 10 years of posts on my new section. That’s kind of the best timeline. If you can imagine a spider drinking coffee and then trying to weave a web, there’s a lot of back and forth. What does a spider do if a spider doesn’t need to eat? How does a skeleton smile?
Your upcoming show at the Robert Fontaine Gallery is called “Never Odd Or Even.” What does that mean?
It’s a palindrome, so if you spell it backwards it spells the same thing, just like “party trap” or “race car.” But what does it mean? That’s a very good question. I think I’m more interested in raising questions than giving answers about a lot of things in life. But the most common answer to what is never odd or even, is zero. I think the justice system is never odd or even, as well.
Tell me about the process of creating one of your large scale murals.
I try to work from front to back. I try to see the future and I get caught up along the way, and then I realize what I’m painting actually is. It’s basically solving problems. Even Chuck Close said he’s far more interested in problem creation than problem solution, and I have to agree. Sometimes in paintings—actually, always in painting, the problem needs to be solved. In Miami’s Wynwood neighborhood, there’s a big red wall with ballerinas on it. That took me six hours and that was done all from the ground.
You describe some of your work as adventure painting. Tell me what that is.
Adventure painting is owning chance and accident. Francis Bacon and Robert Rauschenberg were adventure painters, but they didn’t say that they were, and I’m not sure that they truly embraced it. It’s another word for chance and accident. I came to light with it a few years ago when I developed diptych paintings where I painted mirror images of the same image side by as a diptych. I don’t use any tools or projectors or anything.
The best analogy is through skateboarding. When you land a trick, it may have been a fluke, it may have been lucky, but to do it again is to own it. It’s to own it as your trick. In diptych painting is when I truly embrace chance and accident. I’d make a mistake on one side, the left or the right, and then in order to find the same solution aesthetically, I would need to make the same mistake on the opposite side and then resolve it in the same fashion, so it’s kind of like rubbing your hands through a bunch of wet paint and then discovering that that’s beautiful, and well I need to do it again. That’s how I invented adventure painting. All I can say is it’s never odd or even—until you build it.
How does the wall you paint on affect the work?
Different walls evoke different characters. This craft that I’m involved in, I’m pretty much built to take everything, but it’s not always me. I suffer from multiple creative personality disorder, so I have many aliases, and many creative beings inside of me that thrash to get out and it’s just about timing, really. Everything depends on how much time I have with something, with just how much I will love it as Anthony Lister. Otherwise, the other guys just take it.
I feel like graffiti is the final frontier in true artistic integrity and I guess I’m disguising myself as a fine artist until the revolution is fully here, and then I can actually tell people who I’ve been the whole time. But until then, I’m happy being a fine art painter. And I’m happy talking about the distinctions between highbrow and lowbrow in order to educate the public.
New mural at 175 NW 23rd St
Tell me more about this high/low distinction.
There is no class in art. I’m very much interested in following on the path of other revolutionaries, like Ned Kelly, John Lennon, and Aleister Crowley, and I’m interested in breaking everything so it can be rebuilt again.
Will you be spending much time in Miami during your show?
Yes, I’ll be there secretly and then I’ll be there publicly and I’ll be there secretly again.
How do you like Miami?
I love Miami. I think it’s wonderful. It reminds me of a splash of home and a splash of away. You know, I could be specific, but for me things that are familiar just feel right and I feel like Miami feels very familiar. And I’m very fond of the gallery that I’m showing at. I like to have a good time when I travel and I travel for a long time, and having a good time makes the difference between wishing you had and wishing you hadn’t and Miami’s a place that I’m always glad that I did.
What do you like to do while you’re here?
I like to roam the streets as a homeless man. I like to tag the bars as a street urchin. I like to buy incense off of people on the street. I like to go to fancy parties and meet people that are influential. I seek out imagination rather than knowledge, so I’m just that dude on the street that isn’t expecting anything.
Any final thoughts?
Recently, I just discovered that wow mom written above itself can be switched upside down and be spelled again. Vision is noisier. Build a suit, make a stand. I guess I’m just building a suit right now to make a stand because the message has always been the same, and it’s just, do as thou wilt. Graffiti and public space intervention can change the world. You know that there’s something wrong with the world when disaster is dressed as entertainment. Hey, here we are, so let’s dress entertainment like disaster. It’s the beauty of failure, right? Never odd or even. Imagination is far more powerful than knowledge. Albert Einstein said that. I could go on all day like this. It’s a beautiful day in Sydney. I’m peeping through my eyehole looking at the people being busy.
