Daniel Mudie Cunningham

Born 1975, Melbourne
Bachelor of Arts, Art History & Criticism (Hons)
Graduation show: 1995
Graduation ceremony: 1997 (Hons)
Doctor of Philosophy, Cultural Studies: 2004

Artworks in Space YZ

Gender is a Drag, 1993
Performance at UWS
12:02 mins

Drip Dry, 1995, reframed 2020
Framed towel boxes, decals
36 x 30 cm each

Backyard Movie, 1993
Bicycle, 1994
Size Does Matter, 1994
From the series Silent Disco
Performance videos
8:33 mins in total
Camera: Nathan Bridgewater (Backyard Movie); Tim Hilton (Size Does Matter);
Don Cameron (Bicycle)

The works I am exhibiting in Space YZ are Gender is a Drag from end of first-year Foundation Studies; Silent Disco - a series of performance videos from first and second-year; and Drip Dry - the only surviving component of my grad show work from third-year. I discuss Gender is a Drag and Drip Dry in my ‘Channel Z’ essay elsewhere on this site, so for this page I will go into a bit more detail about the Silent Disco works as they set the scene for the music video aesthetic I have developed and sustained throughout my career as an artist.

The key work in the Silent Disco series is Bicycle, which was shot by Don Cameron, whose family were neighbours to my family in the Blue Mountains at the time. Don and I met in 1992 and instantly hit it off. Don chose UTS to study design and visual communication, and I went to UWS to study art theory and make art. Despite our different tertiary paths, we nonetheless forged a collaborative working relationship and friendship that exists to this day almost 30 years later. He would shoot my videos, I would perform in his. I missed out on getting into Art Express but ironically made my way in to it as a performer in his video Stair which was selected for the 1993 exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW. After a successful career directing music videos for Blur, Garbage, Moloko and Pet Shop Boys among others, Don is today a renowned interior designer but still works on my videos, the last being True Colours in 2016. Fitting that the first we worked on together was an ode to Cabaret-era Liza Minnelli and the last to date being an 1980s era Cyndi Lauper tribute. Certainly, my taste for camp and pop has endured.

Bicycle was initiated as a project for a second-year class taught by Julie Rrap and was displayed on a CRT monitor in the portable window gallery, Avago-West. I was a big fan of Julie’s work, and I think my starry-eyed fandom turned her off somewhat. She took a look at Bicycle and her dismissive tone and average grade broke my heart (‘kill your idols’, they say). Years later I emailed Julie (now a friend and peer) the link to view Bicycle online and reminded her how she didn’t like it at the time. She wrote back: “I can't believe I didn't like this video given the times then... oh well... all these years later I'd give it a good mark! At that time so it's hard to see what my problem was! Maybe it was because I'd just returned after some years in dark, gloomy Belgium and had forgotten some of Australian Art's capacity for fun, humour and irony.” Taking a leaf out of George Tillianakis’s line that grades should be negotiated (“I never accepted a first offer and figured initial grades were a starting point for negotiations”). I’ll take it that the Pass mark that Julie gave me is now a High Distinction!

Made that same year, Size Does Matter was also exhibited in Avago-West. It was shot by my then boyfriend Tim Hilton in the garage of my Kingswood sharehouse with best-friend Emma Crimmings. At the time I called the work Marionette Dick, and then later titled it Size Queen. In 2015 when I mildly re-edited it (as students we were never very rigorous with video editing - ‘length’ literally was everything) I titled it Size Does Matter. 

The work evolved from reading Marjorie Garber’s tome on drag, Vested Interests (1992). In it, she describes accounts that Elvis Presley’s famous crotch bulge was faked. One account: “rumour had it that into his skin-tight jeans was sewn a lead bar to suggest a weapon of heroic proportions”. Another differing account: “He would take the cardboard cylinder out of a roll of toilet paper and put a string in one end of it. Then, he’d tie that string around his waist. The other end, with the cardboard roller, would hand down outside his drawers, so as when he got onstage and reared back with that guitar in his hand, it would look to the girls up front like he had one helluva thing there inside his pants”.

Taking these anecdotes as cues for a performance video, I literally stuffed my pants with phallic objects from around the house, interspersed with scenes of me masturbating and fellating Coca-Cola or Pepsi cans and bottles. The last scene shows my cock as a Coke can before a shot of a Pepsi billboard located near Kingswood Station, which declared ‘Size Does Matter’. Originally the video had a looped sample of heavy breathing. In 2015, I added a 1-minute 1971 Coca-Cola advert jingle found from YouTube. It works much better I think, acting as a weird advertisement for the Coke and Pepsi marketing wars of the time, and the obsession men have with their dicks.

Silent Disco is the name I gave all my performance videos from the nineties which used pop music and performance to explore my emergent queer identity. Other works in this series include Backyard Movie (included in Space YZ), Bathroom Movie, where I shave my naked body with a vegetable peeler, and Catwalk, where I simulate exactly that with friends in a hotel conference room in the Hunter Valley. Clearly our behaviour indicates heavy consumption of the region’s wines.

All these videos are raw and imperfect, using the AV resources available at UWS as conduits for my narcissism. Not much has changed really, except for digital technologies, better cameras and easier editing methods.

After my third-year grad show in 1995 I continued on to do Honours, majoring in Art History and Criticism, with Dr Susan Best as my supervisor. My preoccupations with drag and pop culture ramped up as I embarked on my thesis, which examined the debates that brought ‘queer’ into being as an identity category at the time. Rather than using visual culture from conventional art historical sources, I seized upon performer Sandra Bernhard as my case study. Naming my thesis Saint Bernhard: Towards a Theory of Queer Identity, the title was a pun on David M. Halperin’s book Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (1995).

John S. Boskovich’s 1990 film adaptation of Bernhard’s legendary live show, Without You I’m Nothing, had an enormous impact on my understanding of what queer performance could be. During my Honours year the performances I conceived when I wasn’t writing my thesis were very influenced by Bernhard’s snappy monologues. A case in point: Fucking Jodie Foster - performed at cLub Bent at Performance Space. 

As I was awarded First Class Honours I was eligible to go straight into a PhD program, which I embarked on at UWS in the Centre for Cultural Research (now known as Institute for Culture and Society). While undertaking postgrad studies I taught art history and theory on casual and fixed term contracts. The late great Dr Phillip Kent was my doctoral supervisor and my mentor and friend. Sometimes we taught together. He passed away after a long battle with HIV/AIDS, shortly after I submitted my thesis in 2003. Phillip had a Keith Haring Inflatable Baby multiple seated on the couch in his office. Thesis anxiety always prompted me to hug it like a stress ball during our consultations. I inherited it and treasure it to this day.

I could go on and on about how important UWS was to me as an undergrad, postgrad and teacher, but this exhibition is a tribute to that impulse. Each of the artists in Space YZ and so many, many others not included are testament to the importance of the art school at Kingswood’s Z block and Penrith’s Peachtree Studios during its earlier incarnation: ‘The Teaches of Peachtree’ (to evoke the great rock rebel, Peaches).

Speaking of rock, I leave you with a soundtrack of what I was listening to at art school. Many of these tracks are thinly-veiled love songs to my exes and friends, to Nepean and what was made possible.

Follow Daniel at Instagram for curatorial updates, Twitter for haiku nonsense, and Vimeo for more performance videos.