Another blood-encrusted Underground jewel recovered from the Last Gasp treasure chest!
Menacing Reagan-Thatcher era queer dystopian punk comix from Down Under! Welcome to the freakish future via Aussie comics creator Toby Zoates! Crude art and heavy-handed politics vomited up in a punk rock frenzy. Printed in 1980.
From the author: "I created my moniker, Toby Zoates, in 1978 as a punk satire on consumer capitalism and bourgeois art, ripping off the famous Australian porridge makers [Toby's Oats], getting my name promulgated every 3 seconds in TV commercial breaks, sowing my wild oats with images of teenagers swallowing phallic meusli bars, their gobs dripping with creamy porridge sludge. With a tag like that I was never going to make it in the above-ground art world. If you look up my 'nom de guerre' on Google you'll find one notice, among many, that states I was a punk cartoonist of the seventies and eighties, and then apparently dropped dead. I have, in the '90s and 21st century, carried on drawing subversive satires of the world I'm floundering in, only I got killed off 'spiritually', I can't get a showing, or published, or distributed, except for my ongoing self-engendered flyers, posters, cards and comic-strips.
I got buried in the Underground and this 'ranting' is my bitching scream of anguish as I try to claw my way out of the muck. The Internet may give me a democratic space, not only thru blogging, but maybe my artwork will get promulgated in some arcane sites, ongoing graphics that put the finger to this fame-whoring, money grubbing, war-mongering, scumbag-ruling world. In these post post-modernist times, ART is a syphilitic whore that careerist status-worshippers and money-suckers have fucked into vacuous imbecility, that is, ubiquitous abstract expressionism, indulgent 'cult of the celebrity' portraiture and gut churning conceptual diahorrea. Who gives a shit when millions starve or are bombed to oblivion, ART farts and will return to the dust along with all the rest of us.
What's my problem? Why the chip on my shoulder? Why do I have to eternally stick the finger to the System, the Beast, Consumer Capitalism? (Again I'm a walking contradiction, my art is possibly just another product to be consumed!) First, because as a cheesy smiling sacred cow white-washing exploitation, pollution and destruction the Beast cries out for satirisation, and, secondly, because I got fucked, twisted, stunted on the journey to here and I can't Get Over It. Toby Zoates is my 'fuck you' to the Beast."
