The Brag

Passout
The Art Of Getting Wasted
By Alasdair Duncan

“They’ve just pulled over three people in a Lincoln Town Car!” Jesse Willesee is telling me, a note of genuine excitement in his voice. “One of them has a great Hawaiian shirt on, and he’s kinda fat, and his friend has a ponytail, moustache and a baseball cap with flames on it. They’re riding around with a girl who looks like Eminem’s mother, they have a bunch of Xanax and codeine with them, and the girl, for some reason, has cocaine all over her.” When I called Willesee for our interview, he was midway through watching an episode of COPS. The long-running reality show is an ongoing obsession of his, and he’s attempting to explain the appeal. “People think that it’s just crappy reality TV, but I think it’s exactly what TV is supposed to be.”

Much like COPS, Willesee’s art is grounded in the real and the seedy, and his upcoming art show pushes these themes to their limits. Passout: The Art Of Getting Fall-down Drunk is all about people at their lowest. Part installation, part fashion show, Willesee will pack Pott’s Point venue The Backroom with models in passed-out poses, then invite guests to ogle them, photograph them, and interact with them in any ways they damned well please. “I’ve done shows before with models posed around a space, but I wanted to take that to a new level,” he says. “I searched Google for pictures of passed-out people, for inspiration, and found a huge number of images – way more than I was expecting. They were great images to borrow from: I guess that was really the seed of this exhibition.”

Photos like these are a frequent feature of Facebook’s news feed – preserved forever as reminders of weekend excess – and Willesee’s show draws on this recent phenomenon of documenting debauchery. Though some argue that the current generation is more hedonistic and liable to risk-taking than those who came before, he argues that there are just more people around to take photos now. “I hear stories about my dad and his brother and the things they would get up to, and it’s not all that different from now,” he says. “I mean, I think part of that is to do with the fact that we’re Australians as well. People are always fighting and getting thrown through windows. Australians have always been pretty wild. That’s a sign of the culture, to be able to party hard.”

The show is inspired by the real-life drinking culture of King’s Cross, a subject that’s been frequenting the news lately, thanks to violence in the area and the proposed tightening of licensing laws. But Willesee insists that any relationship between his show and the current situation is coincidental. “The controversy around the show has mostly come out of timing because [the issue] has been in the news,” he says. “We ended up on the cover of MX the other day, in light of all the law reforms. The show was never intentionally designed to draw on that, it just happens to coincide with it. I feel like, as an artist, it’s my job to reflect on the times.”

Willesee’s last show, 22 Girls Smoking Weed, was shut down by police, although he tells me he’s fairly confident that that won’t happen this time. “It’s not like these people are actually passed out,” he says. “It’s art, it’s a performance. It’s not real life. I’m sure the police will come, through – as they often seem to – just to check it out.”

What: Passout: The Art Of Getting Fall-down Drunk
Where: The Backroom, Pott’s Point
When: Thursday September 13, from 8–10pm
Also: Performances by Buzz Kull and New Brutalists from 10pm