ollie olsen

Alright. Where I live, the formal lockdown measures ended in early 2022.

Personally, I think one reason the employment rate is so low right now is because a whole pile of people around retirement age, or quite a few reluctant to retire, realised that hanging about the house wasn't such a bad thing after all. 

In fact, life itself wasn't meant to be spent piss-farting about in a drab office trying not to grimace at the forced jollities, the strict dweebness and the sheer bloody pointlessness of necessary screenwork. Sure, some things need to be done. But we seemed to get by without a hell of a lot of it during lockdown.

And don't get me started on the poor bastards who worked through the pandemic, the nurses and doctors who (as far as I'm concerned) all deserve a 10 percent wage rise (and, for those who actually worked with the Covid patients, an Order of Australia each).

Josh Lord is, despite the agit-prop-like art, a conservative. The morning after the opening of his Melbourne exhibition, Josh rose at 7am and started work on his next series of artworks. Then he went to town and did an interview. Then, finally realising he was still wrung out from the night before, he crashed.

Now, if most of us had worked all year and put everything into one night - granted the exhibition runs for a while yet, but the opening was “the event” - we’d be reeling around all wibbly-wobbly and a bit dazed for most of the following two days.

Josh is a working man, really. And art is his business. Whoever said that all capitalism is evil? Josh makes art which criticises both art and capitalism, but capitalism itself doesn’t have to be evil. There’s a lot of evil nasty sods out there. And it only takes a small percentage.

Michael Foxington photo

1978 - Young  Charlatans (Eminent Vinyl)

If you go on YouTube you can see a remarkable clip of two 18-year-old kids, Rowland S Howard and Ollie Olsen, being interviewed by the ABC. As the teenagers walk down St Kilda Road in Melbourne, they are jeered at for looking like aliens with art school aesthetics.  

It was 1978 and a vastly different time in Australia. In the beige, conservative world ruled by the Tories and the Country Party. Every second house had porcelain ducks on its wall and a framed picture of Queen Elizabeth the 2nd. The Robert Menzies vision of Australia ruled and the fashion mindset embraced Dennis Lillee’s porn star moustache and safari suits.