fluoroOriginal: Batman and Botany
– The work of Anthony Lister.
Anthony Lister’s upcoming show in Milan continues his deconstruction of iconography consumed by a generation of television watching, image consuming, Australian and Americans. The Brisbane born, New York based artist reinterprets pop culture symbols addressing the unconscious and repressed sexual desire of childhood icons masquerading as wholesome crime fighters.
As a child Lister’s grandparents gifted him with a comic book subscription, sparking his fascination with the heroes and villains he examines in his work. Lister now considers these childhood superheroes “a mode of contemporary mythology” – a realisation he came to while studying classical art.
After starting out running from walls, spray can in hand, Lister is now in high demand internationally – picking and choosing the cities he exhibits in. His subjects have also transformed with a new ‘grown-up’ understanding of the impact of his work – he refrains from drawing a “vagina bleeding with a bone coming out of it” to win the approval of his most brutal critics, his two young children.
Lister’s upcoming shows in Milan and Sydney address his themes of subverted pop icons, while drawing a new connection; a parallel between Batman and botany, “I am looking towards the mode of contemporary botanic paintings as superheroes, flowers meets heroes, it’s worked traditionally for a long time but I never made the connection.” This doesn’t mean that he shies away from an assessment of today’s saturation of promiscuous imagery. His work still questions the juxtaposition of adult and underage heroes leaving an inescapable question mark hanging above the heads of a generation.
This questioning fuse the inner workings of the adult mind with the child’s, to assess the impact of pop culture and the contemporary rationalising of this culture. Lister points out that his work addresses the immense impact that America has had on Australia. Evident in everything from the way we talk, to the way we interact with symbols, “I see it more as a compatibility than leadership. America is much like Australia in many ways, just with more people.”
As much as his subversive work, which started from graffiti, confronts the paradoxes of the human condition, he is not all serious. When we asked about the outcome of a Batman vs. He-Man face off, he answered seriously, jotting down a few notes, and contemplating the winner with dead-pan sincerity – “He-Man’s pretty strong… he was a secret rebel leader, whereas Batman is like this cop gone wrong, so I hope He-Man would get him.”
