There’s a scene in ‘Have You Seen The Listers?’ where Anthony describes being a teenager, and after some months of experimenting with high doses of LSD, he and his friends decide to get high from the Datura flower. Anthony then enters his own hellscape, with lurid toxic streaming colours, and bright flickering soundscapes flashing across the screen of nineties Australiana cartoons. There’s strange footage he’s shot from the time of of neon board shorts and skateboards, confusion and crossfire. It’s the kind of visions a kid really shouldn’t have, but this is what happens when a teen experiments with psychedelics.
“When the toxins, or whatever it was, left my body, I knew I wanted to be a painter.” He really doesn’t look that different from how he does now, but he is a just baby with a deep tan. Way too young to be playing around with heavy psychoactive drugs, he emerges focused and adult. The following scene is stark, Lister leaning over a canvas laid on the ground larger than his body, silently flicking streaks of paint across the surface. Its reminiscent of the scene in this Jackson Pollock documentary, where Pollock is finally silent and transcendent. This cycle of toxicity and refocusing, one set from a young age, is one that would come to inform Lister’s sense of self, his practice.
Addiction stories can be frustrating for viewers in their circularity, we know them well. Everything was amazing, the work was profuse and the tide was high. Then, like a tidal wave receding, addiction sucks you dry. The fish are flapping on the rapidly drying sand and you have to start again. It is a dramatic but wholly natural disaster.
Director Eddie Martin is unflinching and unafraid when he approaches his subjects, I would call his approach deeply Australian. Martin also directed All This Mayhem, chronicling the meteoric rise of Australian pro skaters Tas and Ben Papas, and their eventual foul fall from grace. In that film, Martin tries his best to present the humanity in these brothers, but the task wasn’t an easy one. Tas was eventually jailed for smuggling cocaine and benzos from South America. Ben brutally murdered his girlfriend.
Lister is a different story, arguably more straightforward insofar as that he is just a great artist. Part Banksy, part Basquiat, part Brett Whiteley. Its possible that his greatness is not fully acknowledged within Australia. Without a doubt, he’s an artist that threatens Australian sensibilities of keeping your chin down; his interviews are not self-effacing. Lister is from the streets, but actually he is university educated and intimidatingly well-read. He is a man of our time, comfortable chronicling his feelings in the first person, diarising, reflecting in the moment. For street artists, his in-studio practice makes him the easiest target as a tall poppy, tarnishing his authenticity as a true renegade. In galleries and in his own home his drug addiction has marked him an outsider. But Lister can circle around; he always has the art itself.
Banksy once said “Anthony Lister seems to piss good art in his sleep.” I only know of this quote because his best friend, celebrity criminal lawyer Charles Waterstreet posted it on his Instagram account, along with a number of other garbled hashtags, praising him. Waterstreet and Lister seem like an odd pair to be best-friends-forever, until you think about how often Lister’s street practice has landed him in front of a judge.
After I met Anthony Lister, he came to my house and texted me that he was ‘close, nearly there.’ I sat in on my lounge and waited like another 45 minutes. I was totally confused as to what he was doing. But I made allowances for Lister, as I have always done for artists, because I just don’t really consider them to be normal people. In the morning I left for work and noticed all the laneways around my place had been scrawled with LiSTER tags and I finally understood the title of this film. Have you seen the Listers?
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Like other artists I have known, Lister is a pack rat, hoarding the magical accoutrements of his practice over the years. He showed me photos of his storage unit, and reams of photographs on his phone of paintings he stayed out all night painting all over the cities all over the world. He had a beloved, creepy garbage bag full of letters and drawings from now deceased murderer-cum-celebrity Chopper Reid. And for his whole life, he has filmed everything he has done. (It was this archival footage, capturing suburban Brisbane, childhood, cartoons and graffiti, nostalgia, confusion and Australiana, that Lister handed to Eddie Martin to be spliced into this documentary.) In his studio, his art was endless, prolific and mysterious. His walls would be covered in canvases that looked labored and intense, like six months of work. I’d return to his house a few days later to find everything gone and replaced with totally new works.
He was always proud of this, but also it was very much not a big deal. He creates and he clears it out. It was just the art, made, destroyed, reworked. The same thing comes to mind when I think of his street practice, where his enormous murals around Sydney, like offerings to the community, are often quickly defaced by locals or painted over by the council. I started to think very much of his process of nonchalant creation and destruction like a Tibetan Mandala.
When Lister first showed me this film, which he had filmed from his seat in the preview screener in Melbourne, on his iPhone, we sat in his studio for an hour while he held up his phone and bluetoothed the muffled audio onto a portable speaker. He mentioned to me that he hoped his obsessive filming of everything would be something he could let go of now, but I looked at the footage Martin had acquired from Lister and used to compose the film, and considered that I was watching this film on Lister’s iphone, and thought about how clearly this process of filming and documenting every single minute of his life was clearly a permanent fixture in Lister’s life.
Lister was super proud to see the film come to fruition, as it is, I suppose, a cut-your-chest-open, lay-it-out-on-the-table, take-me-as-I-am, life’s work. Doing something like this is brave, and Lister’s life is easy to judge. He’s been a drug addict, a philanderer, a squanderer. Different from his paintings, the footage Lister has catalogued of his transgressive and divergent life is arguably less ambiguous and open to interpretation than brushstrokes and spray can impressions.
There’s a scene where Lister’s marriage to his beloved childhood sweetheart Annika has finally fallen apart after years of travel, trauma and dissonance in their lifestyles. He is high and wild, living in some kind of playboy-ish mansion in Bondi. He is talking at a frenetic pace into the moving camera about drugs, “bit a speed, bit a coke”. The frame settles into Lister wearing sunglasses swiping rapidly on his phone, “This is how you do TINDDDERRRR!” he says as images of girls whip across the app. He said to me, “I really wanted Eddie to take that out.” Its raw and confronting, I will admit. These are the cycles of loss and denial, this is addiction. The tide is receding, and filming doesn’t stop. As Lister told me at the time, director Eddie Martin said the Tinder scene made him more relatable. Those moments of desperation, coming down, lonely, clutching pathetically to a dating app is something a lot of people have done. Famous, drug addled artists do it too.
Have You Seen The Listers is a struggle between ego and an unnamed channel to what drives Lister’s creativity. His art enslaves him and orientates him, and learning to recentre and normalise around his children and family is ultimately what was the most unnatural and greatest lesson for Lister. Whatever you make of the artist himself, Martin’s mastery of what is thousands of hours of precious archival footage from the artist himself is what makes this film a great treasure. Go see it, and make sure you look out for the Listers on the walls of your town.
In cinemas April 5.
