When Brisbane released Anthony Lister as a hostage to the legal system for his extraordinary beautification of what was otherwise another country town, he came to Sydney where all the creative DNA and spiritual memes within his imagination found an ideal concrete palette.
Sydney is the cauldron of witchcraft, with a pinch of creative criminology and endless outpourings of identity displacement and countless freaks and geeks without a cause, even the homeless adore Lister for adding to their skyline and ceilings—some fantastic things to look at from the gutter. Lister pours his paint over the places the public poor inhabit, Sydney is an enfant terrible’s playground where crime intercepts with crooked cops as a respected way of life, where he makes the ordinary become extraordinary with just a roller, spray-gun and the gift that Banksy described as “you appear to piss great art in your sleep”.
Lister has uncovered the dark mythology hidden under the Westfieldian plains, from the horned man of the ashes of Luna Park where Martin Sharp roamed for a while, where sniffer dogs nuzzle women’s crotches in search of drugs while the importers dine in mansions sublime, with bankers and merchants on harbor side balconies, their purchased wives laid out ‘like patients etherized upon a table’.
Most of all, Lister is democratic, he scorns hypocrisy and skates with dirty knotted haired street boys with the same panache as he brings to the rich man’s commissioned work.
Sydney is a slut with her legs wide open between the North and South Heads.
Charles Waterstreet
September, 2017
View the trailer for the documentary HAVE YOU SEEN THE LISTERS?- screened last month at the Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF). "From award-winning filmmaker Eddie Martin comes an up-to-the-minute snapshot of the life and creative processes of outspoken ‘visual freedom fighter’ Anthony Lister, Australia’s most renowned street artist." MIFF
