by Quentin Cockburn

“Who could look at a beach and not be inspired by God the creator?”  What a fucken load of bull I thought whilst watching Martin Sharp say this on the 7.30 Report.    I was absorbed in another Sharp bio earlier in the year, saw him with the respirator (emphysema), and thought, ‘jeez mate your time is well and truly up’.  He was a contradiction of sorts, clearly difficult material for the art industry, self defined, marketable, yet mercurial. They couldn’t capture this one.  A man in the right place, the wrong place and my place all at the same time.

Martin Sharp deserves better.  Never knew him, but became aware via my big brother’s record collection that he was, for a brief time, a genius.  Later I began to think of him as a conservative.  That was unfair, but I felt that like so many of his generation he came back to us not as a radical but as a keeper of the status quo.  Also unfair.  But in his time he burnt brightly.  He put light on the ordinary.  His paintings – the album cover Disraeli Gears was more than luminous, it pulsed, like so much of his art.

He gave us that much and along the way had something to do with the rejuvenation of Sydney’s Luna Park.  But that was a superficial love, the gaping maw, the inscrutable face, whilst behind it, the rotor, the dodgem cars, the fairy cave fell into despair, and now Luna Park, preserved, but strangely lost amidst the late night curfews and the creep of gentrification.  I felt this.  Perhaps it was because our own Melbourne Luna Park lingered on along the St Kilda foreshore with the pimps, the prostitutes, the drug afflicted well into the 90’s until, like the Palace and the St Kilda triangle, it started to crush itself, killed off beneath the weight of property development and the incoming tide of suburban values.  The Melbourne Luna Park was always grittier, more tactile and sleazy in comparison, like all of Sydney Harbour, window dressed to the max, and behind the facade, an ego…..

Back to Disraeli Gears.  Cream were around for such a short time.  That’s the sixties, episodic and rich.  Cream for three years, just, several records and I had no idea that Sharp wrote ‘Tales of Brave Ulysses’ for Eric Clapton.  These days an album like that and they’d be doing farewell concerts, product syndication and all the rest for the next thirty years, milking it for all its worth.  And for the record I have a copy of Ginger Bakers Flying Circus, another Sharp masterpiece.  For a period so fleeting, the radicalism, the nurturing in the UK, the recognition, the scandal and validation by being ‘famous’ in the UK, and then recognised by Australia.  And through it all this textured sinuous weaving of art, design, and incisive social commentary.  Not all undergraduate either, but infused with desire to improve the status quo, and ask questions, a thinking realm of participation and activation.  Now, it seems we only think in certainty, bricks and mortar and share portfolios..

So how do we equip ourselves to be and not to be?

I was shocked when after all that experimentation he’d become what I understand to be insular in that Australian kind of way, once a radical, and now a conservative.  That’s really sad.  And what have they left us?  I love Disraeli Gears, but sorry we’ve cashed ourselves in for comfort , complacency and complicity.  But that’s my naive inner self, his was a great oeuvre, his portrait of Gulpillil, on the thousand dollar note for the Archibald wipes away all my posturing.  In that one instance, and perhaps for all time, Sharp has left us with a legacy we can all appreciate, and without the crutch of ‘art-speak’.

He spoke to all of us, but got one thing  wrong.  Beaches are the inspiration, not the idea of a Creationist God.