MAKE THE WORK THAT YOU WANT TO SEE

UWS 2000-2003

George Tillianakis

“Make the work that you want to see” - Debra Porch, 2002

When I first walked into the University of Western Sydney at the beginning of 2000, I had no idea that I would be a completely different person four years later. I had no idea Fine Arts would lead me to wreak havoc in a punk band with my teenage enemy. Nor that I would end up having my life threatened (nearly gay bashed) on campus, prompting a quick transfer to the College of Fine Arts (COFA) and back to UWS a week later because I found it so utterly boring and reserved. That I would be exposed to artists who would teach me about the importance of honesty, truth, and the raw power of vulnerability. That I would have my work and ideas challenged by likeminded, uninhibited weirdos and freaks, who in those days made you feel bound together, not apart. We were mutually broken and disturbed, and our art was personal and cathartic. We inspired and confronted each other. It was a mix of excitement and anxiety; no trigger warnings. Life would never be the same again. Thank fuck.

In first year, one student carved words onto their stomach, documented it, and thumbtacked the images onto a white wall without any thought or design. It terrified everyone. I had never seen anything like it. Or at least I hadn’t been up close to this kind of work and I was excited. It was what I needed to see. Till this point, I had only dreamt of accessing such vulnerability in my own work. It stressed to me how art could provoke adverse reactions, causing people to silence an artwork and its creator. A small group were offended and disturbed, loudly calling for the piece to be removed. It was one of many kicks in the arse that made us rethink the kind of work we were making. Things got real.

Our lecturers, who were also contemporary artists, were from another planet. In our very first lecture, in a darkened theatre at the Werrington campus, performance artist Peggy Wallach performed a quasi-lecture/spoken word piece in her thick hybrid Jewish New York/Australian accent. It confused and inspired us. We were mostly from the western suburbs of Sydney and had not had the privilege and access to performers of this stature and complexity. Peggy’s bravado and delivery shook us out of our daydream and back into the theatre. We had no comprehension of what we were witnessing. I relished it.

Our lecturers had a unique sense of humour and irony, which they also attempted to instil in us. I would later understand that artists need it to survive. Not only were our Readers crammed with hilarious interviews and ironic pieces from intellectuals, historians, philosophers, curators, and artists, but lecturers like Kit-Messham-Muir, and particularly David Haines, taught me to embrace the macabre, see humour in things, and find something in the work to celebrate. Phillip Kent was a generous soul that gave us four highly skilled years of imaginative and informative lectures until his death in 2003. His lectures were loaded in history but it was his sensitive delivery that resonated and made me tune in.

The final lecture featured the Riot grrrl movement from the 90s, delivered by Daniel Mudie Cunningham. Mind blown! Eight years at a sports-oriented Catholic boys’ high school with no one to understand my love of female driven rock was erased. Daniel taught me more about the movement than I could ever learn online today. We didn’t have YouTube in 2000. We didn’t need it.

David Haines’ courses were unconventional and had cool names like Radical Rock Vid 1 & 2, and Video Ideologies. As part of an assessment, David gave us the entire My Bloody Valentine Loveless album, in reverse. We had to choose one song as the soundtrack for our video. Mine was a grainy obscured mess that slowly revealed itself: my partner’s hand filled with thick semen emerged from speckled black, eventually turning to liquid. High Distinction. I became used to these grades. A few times I fought David for HDs. I always got them. I never accepted a first offer and figured initial grades were a starting point for negotiations. I interned with David and Joyce Hinterding at their Coogee residence. I had a raw behind-the-scenes look at two professional artists at work on their uncompromising craft. If it wasn’t for David Haines’s eccentricity and unique sense of humour, my work and outlook wouldn’t have evolved.

Debra Porch was the first person to tell us to take what seemed like could be wrong with us and run with it. She got us to focus on our obsessions and take them to the extreme. What are you obsessed with? Yourself? Ok, how do you use that? She taught me to make the work that I wasn’t seeing. That has stayed with me. She was also generous, lent me cool shit like The Decline of Western Civilization I on VHS, and made me mix tapes of Serge Gainsbourg, Tom Waits, and Patti Smith. She taught me how to write and exposed me to writers like Gustave Flaubert: “Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” I’ll never forget asking her if she was going to see the movie Amelie, to which she replied in her high pitched, extrovert, Chicago/ Californian/Australian accent, with lit cigarette in hand, “No! I don’t like cutesy films!” Her encouragement, enthusiasm and support still means the world to me. There isn’t a day that I don’t think of her and she knows it. No embellishments.

Debra loved and supported Politikal Graphitti. For a third-year assessment we had to collaborate with another student. After an almost 5-year mutual detesting of each other, my teenage enemy Jemima Isbester and I decided to reconcile. We had, after all, a lot in common: an unwavering love of loud punk rock, Lil’Kim, and the same ex-boyfriend. I rang her: “We’re doing this assignment together. We’re going to start a band called Politikal Graphitti. You’re going to be the lead singer, I’ll play guitar and sing back up, we’ll write the songs together, and I’ll make some shitty beats to play on a boom box”. Jemima was in. It was a perfect disaster. It was funny and it was scary. We performed everywhere: galleries, pubs and music venues around Australia. Our performances were well rehearsed yet became their own monster. To our surprise, our generally pseudo pretentious art audiences stopped and gawked, whilst we lost ourselves in purgation. Jemima was a beast on stage. She was, and remains, unafraid, tough, resourceful, hilarious, and conquered the stage like it was her last time. Debra believed in the Politikal Graphitti ethos so much that she booked us a gig at QUT. They had no idea what to do with us Blacktown rejects. 

UWS was a place where you somehow became friends with people you hated. I met Jon Wah whilst performing on stage with Politikal Graphitti. He threw things at us; first his left shoe, then his right, then his socks, then his pants, then cups, he burped throughout our slower and personal songs, trying to outdo our thrashing by aggressively screaming at us throughout our set. We had no idea who he was and I thought: who is this prick? At our Honours Graduation show he cornered me and spoke at me for over an hour about my work and how it distressed him. But it had given him impetus to continue in that vein in his own work; ripping your heart out and showing it to everyone as purification. It was his empathy that created a connection. Jon is no longer with us but I’m sure his spirit is thrashing in the mosh pits of heaven.

Ann Finegan and Eugenia Raskopoulos are two extremely intelligent and empowered women. They mentored, challenged, and fed me what I needed to develop and evolve my practice. Ann Finegan was our cheerleader. She was our mascot. Aside from exposing me to brilliant writers, she turned me onto brilliant films like Pasolini’s Teorema, and Fellini’s Satyricon, which encouraged moments of silence in my performance work. Ann has written about my work several times over the years and has remained a good friend. As my Honours supervisor, Eugenia pushed me in exceptional ways. She was straightforward. She cut through the bullshit but was also maternal. The day she looked over the first draft of my exegesis she rightly scoffed, “What is this?! This is not good!”, to which I burst into tears, completely overwhelmed with my own personal tragedies. It was not her intention to make me cry but in that moment the true Greek came out, something all too familiar to me.

My Honours work, DISTILLED DISTORTION (2003), is a five part performance video series that depicts me in various suburban domestic settings, obscuring my face with make-up and paint, wearing vintage female garments, playing distorted guitar, singing in Greek and crying hysterically. Each video has its own guise, yet is broken by a spoken stream of consciousness coming from the shame that surrounded my sexuality and ethnicity. It is a work that I cannot watch from beginning to end. But I am proud of it because it led to two major solo shows at Artspace and Casula Powerhouse, a year out of art school.

The nurture I received during those four years from both teachers and friends kept me going during tremendous personal heartache, turmoil and loss. A fortunate rite of passage for my art and my being.

Thank you to Peggy Wallach, Ian Were, and Nicholas Manganas in the assistance of this piece.