CAMERON HAYES
She died in the child welfare tribunal, he died in an adult bookshop 13 April - 2 May 2021 AU S T R A L I A N GA L L E R I E S MELBOURNE
Stories by Cameron Hayes Edited by Marielle Soni Published by Cameron Hayes, 2021 Melbourne, Australia © Text Cameron Hayes and Marielle Soni © Images Cameron Hayes Photography: Jon Webb
AU S T R A L I A N GA L L E R I E S MELBOURNE
Invites you to the opening
CAMERON HAYES She died in the child welfare tribunal, he died in an adult bookshop Curated by Marielle Soni
Tuesday 13 April 2021 6pm - 8pm 28 Derby Street Collingwood VIC 3066 Artist talk: 2pm - 4pm Saturday 17 April 2021 Current until Sunday 2 May 2021 Open 7 days 10am to 6pm T 03 9417 2422 melbourne@australiangalleries.com.au australiangalleries.com.au
Front cover: She died in the child welfare tribunal, he died in an adult bookshop 2020-21 oil on linen, triptych 198 x 335 cm overall
She died in the child welfare tribunal, he died in an adult bookshop 2020-21 oil on linen, triptych 198 x 335 cm overall
Left panel – The Creative Panel On the morning of the 6th day of creating the world God had created everything but Eve-women. God then asked Adam to name all the animals so that Adam could remember what he could eat and what could eat him. So, humans understand other living things only in a small way – what they mean for us. God waited for Adam to ask him to create Eve-women – so that Adam, not God, would be blamed for what happened after that. Thus, establishing blame as the primary source of human social progress and later social cohesion. Although both Adam and Eve decided to take fruit from the forbidden tree of knowledge, Eve is blamed because it was more her idea thus establishing the first law of morality – it’s OK to sin just as long as you sin only marginally less than the person you are compared to. While creating the world, God said: the birds for the air, the fish for the sea, and the animals for the land. He did this so that no living thing would have the knowledge to judge other types of animals from other environments with other experiences. When Adam and Eve chose to disobey God and eat from the tree of knowledge God’s plan turned to chaos and animals like the frogs moved back and forth from land to water, ducks from water to land to the air etc.. The multi-environment animals started to judge, then prey upon the other animals because they had acquired extra knowledge God had not intended for them. Humans therefore became capable/willing to judge other humans who should have been outside their knowledge base. Birds are lifting elephants and rhinos into their air space so they can judge them from their perspective. Waterbirds are marching land animals into (what was once) the Poolof-Life to be drowned, two large cranes are rolling a hessian sack full of kittens, the sack has baby fish painted on the outside of it, which is enough to appease them into feeling OK about their actions. Part of the judging process is to create some familiarity for those being judged. So, from a rotting tree branch birds are dropping cats with their paws tied together with only fake wings tied to their backs for protection from the fall. Waterbirds make rodents wear waterbird masks before drowning them in the expired Pool-of-Life. The Garden of Eden and everything in it was at first made up of and was part of, one unifying eternal spirit. The Garden of Eden and everything in it was beyond material and expirable substance. When Adam and Eve saw, heard, smelt, touched and tasted the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge they changed the Garden of Eden into the world of senses, the world of sensible (sensory knowledge) – the world of our reality. The world changed from one singular energy of which everything belonged and became many millions of individual sense-defined substances – animals, plants, rocks, clothes food, furniture etc. Everything became separated from God’s immortal spiritual protection and subject to the whims of the senses and the mortality of the sensible
world. By choosing the material sensible world over the spiritual, Adam and Eve condemned themselves and everything in the world to expire as real non-spiritual substances do. Because of the behaviour of Adam and Eve, humans can only know the world around them via their senses; hearing, seeing, taste, smell and touch. Senses don’t tell us what things are, they tell us what things are not, our senses compare one object to other objects and identify the differences. By separating the world into millions of material objects via our senses, Adam and Eve gave us the ability to judge others because in order to judge something you need to be able to stand apart from it, but you also have to feel like you have some knowledge or familiarity of it or them. So, in the Garden of Eden, God (with the co-operation of Adam and Eve) created the fine balance between ignorance and knowing - essential for a world of judging. We experience life not of eternal spiritual oneness, but humans experience life as a finite series of judgement sized bytes. Central panel – The reality panel When he (Adam) died in an adult bookshop and she (Eve) died in a Child Welfare Tribunal their identities made up of vast and varied life-experiences of over forty years would now always be known as the Pervert and the Bad Mother. The two death scenes were immediately circled off with police crime scene tape thus ensuring a suitable distance between the two dead who are judged and all those judges. A certain amount of ignorance is essential to be able to judge someone, knowing someone too well only creates confusion, empathy and mitigation and so - much too little certainty. In this world the ground is covered with chalk outlines of people this sensible world has left behind. Many of these individuals are remembered only for the worst moment in their lives – many caught dead with their unwashed undies on. The three cardboard skyscrapers; Twitter, Google and Facebook are overlooking the two deaths and will record their lives in that moment of embarrassment forever! Behind the skyscrapers are the remains of the zoo. The internet companies have torn down the zoo walls that would have otherwise prevented one animal from attacking the other. Without walls the greatest animals were able to prosper, eating the smaller animals – tigers and crocodiles eat the dears and zebras, but finally and inevitably the greater number of rats banded together and chased all the exotic animals away and up the trees and then rats dominated the zoo. In the far background, in far suburbia, moving vans are parked on driveways anticipating having to move people out of their old lives in the wake of public shaming events. Many who have been publicly
shamed drag their old homes behind them with FOR RENT signs attached and rats have taken over their homes/lives and made them unliveable/unlovable. The city looks like a jungle of bones as rats have taken over all the buildings and eaten away all the character with only skeletons surviving. The communication pylon, a symbol of the pile-on, stands in the centre of the picture and the middle of the cemetery. A funeral is taking place and a tourist bus has stopped to let the tourists out so they can contribute to the obituary of a stranger. The cemetery statues are not of saints and angels, but comic book heroes signalling virtue with kicks and punches. The gravestones are miniature clothes lines with dirty underpants hung on them. Everywhere around the cemetery trees are stripped of their branches for sticks and the earth dug up for its stones. In some areas the top layer of ground has split open and exposed the more complicated world beneath, but these tears are quickly steamrolled over - the whole world now policed by tourist guides. Marching on the roads, encircling the cemetery, is an Anzac Day Parade including Horizontal Collaborators, veterans from the War on Sparrows and children from the local prison – a celebration of blame. Lindy Chamberlain leads a group of elderly robots being sticked and stoned for outliving their purpose. The attraction to us of public shaming someone is that the most important time of someone else’s life (the shamed) is the only time that their life intersects with our life (shaming period). The publicly shamed person is defined by the moment of intersection with our life. The shamed person doesn’t just wander through our life and live on without us, they are trapped and marked in that time of intersection – forever. It is as though by our act of or participation in the shaming, we have brought this stranger’s life into existence. The pile-on is an opportunity to believe in our pre-eminent existence by trapping the shamed person in that only moment in time that you share together. Every time two people meet it is a threat to both of their expectations of the pre-eminence of their own existences. A human meeting is a competition for the raw materials of pre-eminent existence. This existential pre-eminence established with our mother and tiny brain during our infancy becomes a constant battle for us to maintain within a world of other and which rehabilitating these others has become our life’s work. The spidermen and women in this comic book world are the people who have to drag everyone they have ever met into a giant spider’s web, to see people escape this life’s web is a painful rejection of their omnipotence. The idea that someone can know your life and then choose to leave your life, like a family member, close friend or romantic relationship is too damaging to our sense of self; not because that they no longer exist for us, but we no longer exist for them. Our infantile omnipotence requires us to kill theses exiles. It’s why we have to redescribe them into non–existence – see most obituaries - stalk them as criminals or un-Facebook them. Hearing
of an ex’s current relationship strikes at the core of our pre-eminent existence. In parts of the central panel superheroes are reversing taxi loads of their current social group over the bodies of people who chose to leave the group. Life is experienced as a short series of crimes against our belief in the pre-eminent of our existence. Right panel – The Consequence Panel Halfway down the right panel three cardboard housing commission flats mirror the skyscrapers in the central panel and the three characters in the left panel. The housing commission flats are being torn down, not by comic book villains, but by the weight of their spider’s webs which are overloaded with casual acquaintances and near strangers. In front of the flats in the town square the traffic lights are covered by hessian bags with only green lights painted on them. Below this, humans wearing obviously fake animal masks are hunted and barbequed. Public shaming is becoming so essential that only the most contrived and artificial excuse is required. In the new Pool-of-Life the drowning people are able to be ignored because of the fish masks they are forced to wear, the fishermen offer them, not hands, but hooks. Only after they have drowned and been hung from a tree do their fish masks slip down to their hips and their humanity is revealed. ”Oh, let’s forgive them now!” The people of the comic book city, line up with crude masks they have made out of hessian bags to put on the corpses that are hanging from the public gallows. The masks are of somebody or anybody that isn’t there and can’t answer back. The top right panel shows the logical evolutionary human adaptation of all this stick and stone throwing. Children with one giant muscly arm bursting out of their new school uniforms in their first-day-of-school photos. In the middle of the right panel a shocked birthday boy finds himself suddenly isolated and randomly unworthy of a musical chair. The blindfolded mother (Eve) stops his music, and his father (Adam) smashes his present. The life ahead of him, a subject reacting to objects, stranded with no help and caught in a period of time where social preference is for blaming, rather than being the blamed, an urgency to be the predator not the prey, he is the benefactor of Adam and Eve’s original sin.
In the South Pole the explorers were so afraid of not having enough food for winter that they starved to death in summer Polar explorers, including the famous competitors, Scott and Amundsden, would camp on the coast, and then set out on dog-powered sleds to the South Pole in spring. Many of the explorers were so terrified of being stranded inland during the Antarctic winter that they would not eat their supplies during the summer and consequently starved to death with a sled full of food. Other explorers were so aware that they depended on their dogs’ health to guarantee their return, that they gave their own share of food to their dogs. Many starved and skeletal explorers were pulled by overfed, fat dogs. The South Pole from 1910 to 1920 was covered with dog shit and dead explorers. For these polar explorers, summer was their favourite season at first, but they could not enjoy it because they knew it was all downhill from there. So, spring became their favourite because it was leading up to summer. But summer had become their least favourite season, so winter became their favourite because all the good seasons were to come. Although winter was cold and miserable, at least they could look forward to improvement. This story is about people who use unhappiness as insurance against disappointment. The panel on the left is of the explorer, Scott, as a young man showing his envious sisters his uneaten Easter egg in July and tearfully covering his new schoolbooks on Christmas day. The middle panel shows the South Pole, a mountain of frozen dog shit, surrounded by flags that didn’t quite make it. Young women endlessly exercise on their sleigh pulled by old fat ladies. The self-inflicted misery caused from their fear of aging makes the adjustment to old age more bearable, and even a relief. Cows, whose udders are bursting with milk, drag the coffins of their dead calves to the pole. The right-hand panel shows the explorers’ funeral and finally the meeting of Scott and Amundsden in the frozen section of the supermarket in heaven. In the top panel, the cast of the story takes a bow to the applause of the seals and bouquets of frozen fish.
In the South Pole the explorers were so afraid of not having enough food for winter that they starved to death in summer 2001-02 oil and glitter on linen, polyptych in four parts 188 x 254 cm overall
Before there were laws for corporate paedophilia Before there were laws for corporate paedophilia companies were infiltrating culture to sexualise girls younger and younger. Over the last twenty years they had steadily reduced girls’ childhoods to the point where most girls went straight from early childhood to adolescence. There became a generation of women who did not experience childhood. In the centre of the picture models haven’t learnt to stop wetting their pants and leave puddles on the catwalk, so that smart attendees take umbrellas. Most women are still besotted with dolphins and drag them around on dog leashes. The streets are littered with bloodied, abandoned dolphins and “women” dying of mumps and chicken pox. The protagonist of this picture is Lois who works for a women’s magazine but is otherwise a kind of activist superhero in order to get laws passed to protect girls’ childhoods. Her cape is a bunch of kitchen doors that hang from bits of string tied to the baby teeth that in adult life were too ingrown to pull out. With rocks, Lois breaks the windows at Parliament, institutions and corporations. She digs up golfing greens and sets fire to golf clubhouses. When girls line up to be weighed at the official government weigh-in station, Lois agitates to have the girls weigh their birthday cards, diaries, trophies and drawings as well. Weight has become the gold standard. Traffic signs and signposts have been replaced by repeated and reoccurring trivia about celebrities, resulting in many car accidents. Instead of ambulances adoption agency vans are called, as most of the victims are still suffering adoption fantasies and feel like everything would be solved by a new set of parents.
Before there were laws for corporate paedophilia 2003 oil on linen 213.5 x 198 cm
When the rain came the terrorists didn’t know which way was up The rain has made the ground appear like a mirror, and the stars and planets look like they are beneath our feet. So north appears south, and east is west. This is causing great confusion amongst those that need to pray toward Mecca. Other men are trying to dig a hole toward heaven but are going down rather than up. In the mental home, the teddy bears are taking down lotto numbers from those patients who only get revelations during sleep and are tormented by the vague memory of them during the day. On the upper level, the nurse is throwing the false teeth of the orphans out the window and onto the ground outside. A truck has overturned and the teddy bears, drinking the spilling carrot juice, are wearing the discarded false teeth. These bears now have the power of speech, the faith of revelation, and the power of vision and start to lead millions of sleepwalkers around the world through Chinese whispers. Some of the faithful store their food in the reflection of a fridge on the wet ground, while another puts her money in the reflection of a bank safe. There is a special parade day for E.T. because he came from outer space to visit Earth and spent all of his time here hiding inside a bedroom cupboard. Terrorists have hijacked a plane to negotiate the release of political prisoners, but the Manson Family get in on the act as well and hope to use this threat of terror to free Charlie. Through an apartment window we see Eddie Fisher opening his mail. Manson acolyte Squeaky Fromme has sent him Elizabeth Taylor’s eyes as a retributive tribute to Debbie Reynolds.
When the rain came the terrorists didn’t know which way was up 1999 oil and glitter on linen 152.5 x 198 cm
The empty suit One Sunday I went to the antiques and collectables market in an empty ground floor carpark – 112 West 25th.St. New York. The market was packed with people and covered in other people’s junk. In the far corner there was an empty space where only two men and their few items were for sale. Later that night I made a drawing of their space. I had painted Orphanages make the best skyscrapers it was about how the rise in public conservatism had mirrored with the rise of single mothers, absent fathers and public fatherlessness. Orphans – people without fathers were having their need to win affection/approval from a strong white male figure exploited by big corporations – skyscrapers. A garage sale is a presentation of your life to the public, your stall is your life told in objects – junk. The two men in their stall at the antiques and collectables market gave off an immediate air of awkward sexuality – they seemed captive to it. The first man caught in the act of stealing glances at a underwear catalogue was wearing a $2 shop wig and seated as if posing for a school photo. The second man wore thick make-up like a clown and wore a bright yellow raincoat that looks more like a protective shield from judgement rather than the rain. The two men of ambiguous masculinity had surrounded themselves / their lives with alpha male objects: toy soldiers, army equipment, hunting trophies, super-hero comics, gun and hunting magazines. Their stall looked like a plea for us the public to confirm / buy their maleness. I painted a family portrait at art school called The Repo Man. As a child my family owned nothing, everything was rented or on hire purchase. My father, forever absent emotionally and physically was an unreliable and dishonest money manager. My family faced having all our stuff repossessed regularly. My father as the repo man is depicted taking back the one thing the family feared missing the most – the TV. In an effort to stop the repo man an aunty on my father’s side is showing some leg, while an uncle on my father’s side is offering one of my sisters as a trade for the TV. My oldest sister has dressed up in her best first communion dress to beg for the TV. In the far back corner of the room, I’m holding tight what I feared most the repo man would take – my pet rabbit. My mother used me as a yardstick to beat my father with, she praised me for qualities he lacked and pointed out to him his lack of influence - bad influence upon me. A feeling of stealing from my father his wife’s affection and the responsibility of being the sole recipient of my mother’s male love made me uncomfortable with female attention and compliments from girls made me cringe. For this reason, I didn’t have a girlfriend till my late twenties. People thought I was gay, asexual or just too into painting to notice girls, to them I probably looked just like the two men at the market stall looked to me.
The empty suit 2015-16 oil on linen 167.5 x 254 cm
Orphanages make the best skyscrapers Orphans build the most successful corporations because so many of the people who work in them especially investment bankers, lawyers and management consultants - are driven to win the approval of older men in suits. The more neglected a child is, especially as a boy by his father, the harder he will work as an adult for “the Corporation”. The rise of conservatism in the working population is a direct result of the increase of absent and negligent fathers. The Human Resource departments of big companies see a generation of needy workers subconsciously drawn to them, wanting to be patted on the head by rich old white men in suits. HR departments know these people will take work home, work for unpaid overtime, eat lunch at their desk, and adopt the goals and values of the corporation as their own. Without fathers, these workers still live in the wish fulfillment fantasy world which they and their mothers created. They expect everyone else to know intuitively what they want and how they feel. They believe in blowing out candles, gambling and throwing money in wishing wells. They pray in front of gym equipment as orphans pray in front of phones that don’t ring for them, empty letterboxes, and taxis that never return their fathers. In these skyscrapers the elevators only go upward. Not constantly striving to the top through work means only to freefall to the bottom. Many workers carry their chalk drawings in their briefcases, and many psychiatrists are sent straight to the top of the skyscrapers to wait for the most successful workers.
Orphanages make the best skyscrapers 2011 oil on linen 198 x 254 cm
Instagram, kidnaps and ransoms, white slave ships and a donkey market When you travel around many parts of the world you seem to see thousands of donkeys litter the landscapes wandering aimlessly, seemingly unvalued and unloved. Then at the donkey markets they are coveted, physically inspected everywhere, monetised by everyone and speculated on by near strangers. Like stolen bicycles, donkeys are only interesting when they are for sale. When you are kidnapped for ransom it is important to convince your kidnappers that you are not very valuable and for a successful trade your ransom price must be very low. You have to convince your kidnapper that you are from a poor family, have no friends, take public transport, buy reduced-to-clear food, don’t drink champagne and have absolutely never been on a yacht. In this upside-down social media world, you first have to convince everyone of your worth, so that they in turn can convince (like/tap/swipe) you of it. Underwriting this self-promotion on Instagram is the fear that we are taking more from the world than we are actually worth. While white holiday makers are making Instagram posts of themselves drinking champagne on a yacht, floating in a hotel swimming pool which they walked to across a red carpet, the African kidnappers are circling like sharks attracted by the smell of the fear, their slave ships are shipping containers disguised as luxury yachts and removal vans painted as ambulances. Many of the previous slave trades have confronted us by how little a person is worth at auction. Recent science has priced the raw materials of our bodies at US$168 but that price is even less when you factor in the labour costs to put us back together. Branding has always been a characteristic of slavery and the white holiday makers are foolishly branding themselves with conspicuously expensive brands like Chanel, Gucci, Ferrari etc. These Instagram posts will make it difficult to convince their kidnappers they can’t attract a high ransom. Like the tethered donkeys at the donkey market, the kidnapped are also tied to their posts. In this upside-down world the life of an endangered rhino or lion is worth less than the picture of their hunted body. The areas around the holiday resorts are dotted with headless corpses of trophy animals, the bodies draped in national flags and surrounded in empty champagne bottles and cigar butts. The malaria hospital is full of big game hunters who are dying from a mosquito bite. At a local trash and treasure market the clothes and accessories of the kidnap victims are selling better than the pile of kidnap victims. In this painting the private worth realised through ransom has caught up with the public performance as captured on Instagram and the white holiday makers are finding that, unlike the trophy animals they have hunted, no-one has bothered to make an endangered sign for them. The systemic problem of wealthy white abundance has caught up with the biographical solution of conspicuous self-promotion.
Instagram, kidnaps and ransoms, white slave ships and a donkey market 2020 oil on linen 198 x 244 cm
The race to be the first celebrity: Elephant Man vs Jack the Ripper The 1880s: Darwin had convinced most people in England that the process of evolution meant the next generation would make their generation look like monkeys in comparison. To prove their status and relevance, people in the 1880s were determined to celebrate regressive rather than progressive character traits. They wanted to celebrate the aspects of people that they considered backward and regressive. People wanted to promote qualities in their fellow man that were humiliating and anti-evolutionary, to inhibit the feeling of being surpassed. The local government replaced all the statues of heroes with statues of toilets, irons, and vacuum cleaners. Everything inspirational was being replaced with the acceptance of the debilitating filth of human mediocrity. In the afternoon, people lined up along the driveway of the mental home to applaud the new patients forcibly being dragged in, as well as outside the jails to view the violent criminals. They line up along the hospital driveway to watch those maimed in factory accidents crawl to the hospital door. The trail of blood they left behind started the tradition of the red carpet for celebrity arrivals. Many formerly famous people have to make their achievements even more spectacular to keep up with the new fashion of celebrities. Dr. Livingstone tried to convince his audience that everybody and every animal he met on his adventures were cannibals. He did this by starving baby animals and then stuffing the mother’s skins with fresh meat. Soon, lying and pantomime replaced discussion and history. But the more emotionally and physically disabled they were, the more their celebrity status became invincible. As more and more machines of the industrial age threateningly represent to people that they were becoming evolutionarily obsolete, people became more attracted to those who were previously outcast: prostitutes, the exotic other, mental patients, criminals, and the physically impaired. The greatest celebrities of the age had to involve a combination of crime, mental illness, sin and prostitution: like the crime and mental illness of Jack the Ripper and the physical deformity and “nativeness” (mother squashed by an elephant) of The Elephant Man. As a child The Elephant Man was thought so shockingly grotesque that the only job he was suited for was selling women’s stockings door to door. A theme park called “The Elephant Man’s Mother” celebrated how Joseph Merrick suffered without his mother’s milk (nature): children could buy elephant man masks, head sacks and trinkets at the gift shop. Great thinkers and achievers made people feel inadequate, like old school friends who have made it big. People blocked them out by filling their minds with the lives of the needy and emotionally retarded: Karl Stefanovic, Alan Jones, Kardashians. Images of great art were replaced by Instagram pics of restaurant meals. Philosophical proverbs and heroic mottos were replaced by tweets about – well – other tweets. Prostitutes (then) and skinny models (now) are symbols of non-reproduction, and, along with criminals, are celebrated as an affront to the next generation to the certainty of evolution. Ugliness becomes the new trend with dog baiting and talkback radio, adults toileting and fighting in the streets to affirm their human / non-robot status. The ultimate machine of the age - the clock - torments people by reminding them of an evolved future of which they will not be part of and obliterating the past which they felt superior to.
Darwin’s theory of evolution means babies are the masters of the next generation, exploiting the adults’ fear that they would have to mutate to survive. Babies are destroying the old London by driving steam train tracks through old buildings and replacing trees in the parks with wooden chairs stacked in the shape of trees. Mothers used long handled prams because they feared the violence of their pumped-up babies. Babies in top hats roam the streets looking to kill regressive human forms and at the races shooting any non-winning horse. The London zoo is the only sanctuary for the adults from the oppression of evolution. The zoo animals in cages were confirmation that the adults weren’t the bottom of the evolutionary ladder, the skintight cages they put the animals in demonstrated the adults’ superior freedom and intelligence, the wheels they put the cages on made it possible and convenient for the adults to express their anger at the animals rather than the system. Like Lord Curzon, Captain Cook and Gordon of Khartoum, adults felt it safer to concentrate on the individual not the system.
The race to be the first celebrity: Elephant Man vs Jack the Ripper 2011 oil on linen 198 x 254 cm
The fight between Moomba and Lent In Bruegel’s 1559 painting The Fight Between Carnival and Lent, the public performance of piety (LENT) is shown to be undermined by suspicions of fakery and signs of evil, and therefore is as bad as the public performance of sin in the Carnival. The two behaviours portrayed in Carnival, then Lent, lead to the question - can you pay for bad behaviour with good? Can you buy permission for bad behaviour with public performances of good behaviour? In Hayes’ The fight between Moomba and Lent the government - via the Moomba parade - gifts the people an opportunity for a public performance celebrating their acceptance of cultural diversity and their tolerance of racial and religious difference. Australians are accepting of consistently appalling behaviour being insured against by very public displays of much less expensive good behaviour; Richard Pratt’s PRATT FOUNDATION, Shane Warne’s THE SHANE WARNE FOUNDATION, the major banks with their charitable partnerships and sponsorship programs. Melbourne city is the backdrop for the Moomba parade, but the city buildings are barely visible now amongst the growing stacks of shipping containers. Everything Australian’s want comes from overseas shipping containers: fashion, music, cars, tv, acclaim, etc., and everything Australian’s fear comes from overseas: wars, poverty, queues, sharks, refugees... Australians are constantly told they are the “Lucky Country”. But when everything you have is because of luck so too nothing you have is earned. Therefore, nothing you have is truly owned and everything can be taken by unlucky people from unlucky countries. At the back of the Moomba parade representatives of different ethnic communities are stealing our natural resources. They have hooked up their toasters to our power lines to drag the power poles along the parade route. The Tampa float shows the stranded asylum seekers still living in their Tampa container building more and more empty letterboxes and feeding on a single pig and cow. The children overboard float has two women “dressed as Muslims“ turning small paddle steamer wheels with babies tied to them through the water below reflecting the published claims of the Australian Prime Minister, of what refugees will do to gain access to Australia’s prized, lucky shores. Lindy Chamberlain’s Seventh Day Adventism was enough to forfeit her burden of guilt regarding the public accusations of baby killing. The Lindy Chamberlain float has two bikini models wearing dingo costumes fighting over Azaria’s jumpsuit underneath a clothesline heavy with dingo bitten infant jumpsuits. The 2007 fake flyer from the fake Islamic Federation of Australia created and distributed by members of the Liberal party to create new fear of Islam and inflame existing hatred of Muslims is celebrated in the next float. The man in the float wearing a fake beard and wig continues to hand out the flyers, the float is decorated with suitcases, planes and bombs. The parade has been delayed because a boy riding the Australian Mining float has become trapped under the wheels of that float. While his father leans onto the float to get a closer look, the mother meets the boys outstretched hand with a lit cigarette.
The African gang fear is sponsored by Channel Seven and represented by giant giraffes around whose necks hang the front doors they have broken into and in their mouths, they are devouring fluffy white sheep. To continue the fearmongering, dolphins are dressed up as sharks and white men in life saver costumes are everywhere to sedate, lead and justify our need for protection. The Aboriginal wheelchair ballet school celebrates our social ability to decorate a few Indigenous Australians for achievements in sports and the arts, appeasing the social reality of ignoring the major problems of the many. The parade separates immigrant Australians on one side and older, second, third and fourth Australians on the other. These older, whiter, Australians wear head bands and wrist bands and tennis outfits. For these white Australians, Australia is something they remember not something they experience.
The fight between Moomba and Lent 2019 oil on linen 198 x 254 cm
During the looting of the Kerch Museum babies traded with ancient coins At the time of the Crimean War, the Kerch Museum housed one of the world’s best collections of ancient artefacts. The soldiers of the Russian, Turkish, and French armies didn’t wait until the battle was over to loot and destroy the contents of the museum. The battlefield became littered with stolen and abandoned priceless ancient vases, statue rubble, marble arms and legs, historic maps, public records, fragile shields and delicate spears. The average age of a general in the Crimean War was 77 years old. It was the last war that talentless, inexperienced old men could buy control of an army of young men. Generals directed a battle from a safe distance and insisted on living a “civilized” lifestyle despite being on a battlefield. They drank and bathed at the top of every stream. The young soldiers got cholera and typhoid from drinking at the bottom of the stream, forever soiling their pants and coughing up phlegm. They became deaf from the close range of the canons and crippled by the activity of the battle, appalling sleeping conditions, and the far worse medical services than those provided to the old generals. The old men were relaxed and invigorated by battle, comforted with the knowledge that in war how old you are is measured not by how far you are from birth but how close you are to death. The local children – who looted the museum after the soldiers – have loaded themselves with coins from the Hellenistic Period. They are finding that, despite their wealth, they are being ignored at the antique auctions, turned away from the “all you can eats,” and the slot machines merely fire back their coins quite hard and at shin level. Most tragically, their money won’t buy them the medical attention reserved for the old generals. Some old generals have tied strings of babies around the vegetable gardens to protect them from bombs and erected baby scarecrows. Other generals have tied babies to the front of their horses like fluffy dice. A bomb has landed and exploded in the local fortuneteller’s shop. Thousands of fortunes are sent flying into the air, chased by giddy old men through the battlefield and across minefields. A palm reader has set up shop to service distraught wives who collect blown off hands and arms in search of information about their husbands.
During the looting of the Kerch Museum babies traded with ancient coins 2002-03 oil on linen 165 x 254 cm
Los arboles de mierda de Mexico This is about a taxi ride in Mexico. The driver speeds and swerves in the chaotic streets, a contrast to the careful and calm way he has cut the outlines of the porno images he has pasted on his steering wheel and dashboard. La Merced, the world’s largest market, has the world’s largest porn section. Porn is so abundant that the merchants use it to wrap their sales. Pornography litters the entire area. When you look down, you realise you are walking in a sea of erections and shiny vaginas. Behind the porn section is a “park” where old prostitutes lean against trees, which have been fenced off to stop people from leaning against them. From behind the trees emerge pimps with vicious dogs on a chain On the right is Garibaldi Plaza where all the Mariachis wait to be picked for a party on Friday or Saturday evening. Couples drive up to be serenaded, and frantic hosts go to audition Mariachi bands. Most Mariachis go to Garibaldi Plaza to pretend to have a gig or to try to get in on someone else’s gig. They pose, prance, show off their outfits and generally do nothing to make it look like something.
Los arboles de mierda de Mexico 2003 oil on linen 35.5 x 228.5 cm
Details of Los arboles de mierda de Mexico
CAMERON HAYES Born 1969 Sydney, New South Wales, Australia Bachelor of Arts (Fine Arts), RMIT, Melbourne, 1992 Lives and works Melbourne, Australia Represented by Australian Galleries, Melbourne and Sydney, and Ronald Feldman Gallery, New York, USA Selected Solo Exhibitions 2021 ‘She died in a child welfare tribunal, he died in an adult bookshop’, curated by Marielle Soni,
Australian Galleries, Melbourne
2019 ‘Taking the wood from the only hospital to build a new casino’, curated by Marielle Soni,
Australian Galleries, Sydney
2018 ‘A History of Terrogees - paintings from 2005-18’, Melbourne Art Fair presented by
Australian Galleries, Melbourne
and curated by Marielle Soni
‘Cameron Hayes’, Ronald Feldman Gallery, New York, USA
2012 ‘The Incomplete History of Milikapiti’, Dark Horse Experiment, Melbourne 2011 ‘Tattles’, Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York, USA 2008 ‘Cameron Hayes’, Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York, USA 2006 ‘Melville Island’, City Library Gallery, Melbourne 2004 ‘Cameron Hayes’, Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York, USA 2001 ‘Cameron Hayes’, Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York, USA 2000 ‘Cameron Hayes paintings 1994-2000’, Australian Galleries, Melbourne Selected Group Exhibitions 2021 The 66th Blake Prize, Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, Sydney 2019 ‘Castles in the Sky: Fantasy Architecture in Contemporary Art’, Coral Gables Museum, Miami, USA 2018 ‘Castles in the Sky: Fantasy Architecture in Contemporary Art’, Lehman College Art Gallery,
New York, USA
2015 Sir John Sulman Art Prize, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney 2014 Sir John Sulman Art Prize, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney 2008 ‘Drawing Review: 37 Years of Works on Paper’, Ronald Feldman Gallery, New York, USA 2004 The Armory Art Show, represented by Ronald Feldman Gallery, New York, USA 2003 The Armory Art Show, represented by Ronald Feldman Gallery, New York, USA 2002 ‘Museutopia - Steps into Other Worlds’, Karl Ernst Osthaus-Museum, Hagen, Germany
The Armory Art Show, represented by Ronald Feldman Gallery, New York
The Blake Prize for Religious Art, ACU National Gallery, Sydney and Melbourne
2001 The Blake Prize for Religious Art, S.H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney
‘A Private View 1971 - 2001’, curated by Marielle Schwerin, McClelland Gallery, Melbourne
The Armory Art Show, represented by Ronald Feldman Gallery, New York, USA
1999 ‘Sampling’, Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York, USA 1998 Sir John Sulman Art Prize 1998, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
The Blake Prize for Religious Art, The Gallery Darling Park, Sydney
1996 Moët and Chandon Touring Exhibition, Australia 1995 Sir John Sulman Art Prize, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
Blake Prize for Religious Art, Mitchell Galleries, State Library, Sydney
1994 Blake Prize for Religious Art, The Blaxland Gallery, Sydney
Moët and Chandon Touring Exhibition, Australia
1993 Hugh Ramsay Art Award, Melbourne Selected Media - Periodicals 1. Adams, Thomas J.; “You can’t have carnival without Lent: Cameron Hayes’ tableau of globalization”,
Overland Journal, November 2019
2. Cheung, Eugene; “Under 10K”, Art Collector, July 2018 3. Chopra, Tasneem; “A History of Terrogees: An Exhibition Review”, 5 August 2018 4. “Cameron Hayes”, Wall Street International Magazine, 16 January 2018 5. Blouin Art Info; “Cameron Hayes at Ronald Feldman Gallery, New York”, 17 January 2018 6. Kimberley, Cate and Catherine Schwerin; “The Rescued Refugees . . . Part 1.” Word and Affect, 2 June 2012. 7. Schuster, Robert; “Best in Show: Recommendations”, The Village Voice, No. 16, April 2011, p. 23 8. “Cameron Hayes ‘Tattles’ Exhibition at Ronald Feldman In New York (PHOTOS)”, The Huffington Post,
29 April 2011
9. Maloney, Evan; “Which films are like herpes?” News.com.au, June 30 2009 10. Potter, Polyxeni; “Traveling Light and the Tyranny of Higher Expectations,”
Emerging Infectious Diseases 15, No. 1, January 2009, pp. 140-41
11. Pearse, Emma; “Artist Cameron Hayes Paints Missing Link Between Sugarhill Gang and Hieronymus Bosch.”
New York, 2 June 2008
12. Glueck, Grace; “Cameron Hayes,” The New York Times, 27 February 2004, p. E30 13. Schwerin, Catherine; “Claiming space: Aspects of Territoriality and Identity in Cameron Hayes’ Painting
‘The Rescued Refugees”, Presentation, Australien – Raum und Bedeutung, 9th Biennial Conference of the
Association for Australian studies, Hamburg University, Germany, October 2002
14. Nelson, Robert; “A moral painter who dares what few will,” The Age, 21 January 2004 15. O’Steen, Danielle; “Squirming Derangement in Icicle Blue.” NY Arts 9, No. 5/6, May-June 2004 16. Clamer, Matthias; “Cameron Hayes,” The New Yorker, 19 March 2001, p. 22 17. Levin, Kim; “Cameron Hayes,” The Village Voice, 27 February 2001, p. 92 18. Maxwell, Douglas F.; “Cameron Hayes,” Reviewny.com, 15 March 2001 19. Timms, Peter; “Devils in the Detail,” The Age, 13 December 2000, p. R7 20. Cotter, Holland; “Sampling,” The New York Times, 11 June 1999, p. E31 21. Nelson, Robert; “Struggling with the Angels of Reason,” The Age, June 1997 22. Nelson, Robert; “A Prize Alternative,” The Age, 21 February 1996, p. A19 23. Nelson, Robert; “Mix of visual, Culinary Art,” The Age, 1995 Selected Media - Books 1. Bland, Bartholomew; Castles in the Sky: Fantasy Architecture in Contemporary Art,
Lehman College Art Gallery, City University New York, New York, USA 2018
2. Maloney, Evan; Tofu Landing, T J International Ltd, Cornwall, England 2010 3. Schwerin, Marielle; Cameron Hayes. Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York, USA 2004 4. Museutopia: Schritte in Andere Welten, Neuer Folkwang-Verlag, Hagen, Germany 2003 Selected Media - Artist Interview 1. Sarah Lewis, Cameron Hayes – Emergent Melbourne series, Sarah Lewis Films, July 2011
CAMERON HAYES
Instagram, kidnaps and ransoms, white slave ships and a donkey market (detail) 2020 oil on linen 198 x 244 cm
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