HIGH PRICE TAG Art and Absolution in Have You Seen the Listers?
‘I got this guy making a film that’s going to expose me for what I really am,’ Australian artist Anthony Lister said, in a 2016 interview. ‘He’s the guy that made that documentary, All This Mayhem.’
And so it has come to pass. Australian documentarian Eddie Martin, the ‘guy’ in question, follows up 2014’s All This Mayhem – the wild tale of the Pappas brothers, Greek-Australian kids from rough-as-guts western Melbourne who, in the 1990s, became skateboarding superstars – with a film of similar narrative and twin spirit. Have You Seen the Listers? (2017) is another chronicle of a local street-culture superstar whose colourful life finds wild international success, a playful sense of recklessness, copious amounts of drugs, trouble with the law and, finally, a sense of redemption achieved through the process of making the documentary itself.
Martin’s first ever film, Jisoe (2005), hung out with local graffiti artist Justin Hughes, and Lister’s 2009 exhibition No Win Sitch – staged in the infamous Sydney red-light district of Kings Cross, in a disused strip club – took its title from a line in Jisoe. Lister himself doesn’t come from a background of graffing (‘Because he isn’t really a graffiti artist he tends to get a lot of hate from that scene,’ Martin says, ‘but since he isn’t a fine artist he also gets a lot of hate from that scene’ ), the filmmaker approaching him as a figure more like ‘Keith Haring or
