Whenever a new Instagram post goes up of Peter Drew, shirtless and flexing his muscles, you could be forgiven for wondering if that’s a smirk on his face. For six months, the Adelaide artist has baited his followers, dropping hints about a new project that seems to revolve around his newly pumped physique. He calls it The Narcissist: a self-portrait.
Over one video, he even turned some fans’ incredulous comments into lyrics, sung by a sweet female voice over acoustic guitar: “Does he want art fans to leave?” / “You look terrible” / “By aspiring to some masculine ideal aren’t you just simply supporting it, not really interrogating the phenomenon or making a statement about it?”
At first take, Drew has done a 180. He’s left behind the activist work he’s best known for: the Aussie Posters project, which the former graffiti artist began in 2016 travelling around the country to fly-post colourised archival photographs of non-British migrants, taken during the White Australia policy, overlaid with the word “AUSSIE”. The series, which posited a pluralistic vision of national identity, earned him much praise.
But has Drew really changed tack with his flexing? For a while now he’s been pondering the connection between activism and narcissism, including in his 2019 book, Poster Boy: A Memoir of Art and Politics.
“I want to gently raise the question: do you think this culture of activism has an element of narcissism?” he says to Guardian Australia. “On reflection, what I wanted out of the posters was personal transformation. I wanted to change something about myself I was very uncomfortable with, and I saw these political causes as a vehicle for my personal desire. But I had to hide that as I was doing it.”
Drew found working out to be a useful metaphor for his activism persona. “There’s a generation of people that are marching towards being more political, especially artists, and they don’t see the cost of it,” he says. “You have to become a figurehead of certainty that embodies the audience’s desire. And the longer you stay in that persona, the more stuck you become.”
The Narcissist has two lives: online and in the gallery. Drew has been posting videos of his bodybuilding regime: bulking (putting on muscle) for months, then cutting calories to reveal the definition. In March, he will present an exhibition of the project at Peter Walker Fine Art in Adelaide. He will be displaying a 20kg bronze helmet he made, and large-scale photographs of himself with it. He has also created posters of himself as the Gaddi Torso, a Hellenistic sculpture that dates to the second century BCE but looks as ripped as any raw-meat gnawing, peptide-pimping bro today.
Drew hasn’t been immune to that kind of modern influence. He took notice of internet culture commentator Joshua Citarella, who, for three months in 2021, embarked on an auto-experiment called Hyper-masculinity, “to try every internet folklore male improvement technique and see if it changed my beliefs”. Drew’s Narcissist project also calls to mind Cassils, the transgender artist who transformed into a bodybuilder for a work called CUTS: A Traditional Sculpture (2011-2013), gaining 23 pounds of muscle in 23 weeks – which was itself a nod to Eleanor Antin’s 1972 work Carving: A Traditional Sculpture, in which the artist crash-dieted for 45 days.
There’s also a lineage from Sidney Nolan’s Ned Kelly paintings. “The bronze [helmet] started in part as a reference to that: what is this persona that I’ve adopted, and part of it is this idea of being an outlaw because of the street art being illegal,” Drew says.
Originally, Drew had called his new project Muscle Man, envisaging that it would be a commentary on masculinity. As he details in his memoir, he loved taking risks as a child: entering abandoned buildings, competing with other graffiti artists for notoriety, sometimes rumbling with the men in his family. But then the idea of using the body to explore narcissism aesthetically rose to the fore.
“On some level it’s the biblical thing of the flesh versus the spirit,” he says. “The flesh is suspect and anti-egalitarian in a way. I work out, I get stronger. I’m stronger than you. It’s about individual achievement, whereas on the more collectivist side there’s this real intellectual contempt for the flesh. It’s left over from Puritans and the priesthood, but it carries over now into academics and collectivist thought.”
In a sense, Drew has been beta testing this concept on his Instagram audience, and while that’s something he’s never tried before – up until now he’s enjoyed working completely alone – he’s quite enjoying jousting with his followers and the feeling of “bordering on cringe”.
“Half the point is finding that tension. I’m digging at that and provoking it,” he says. “That’s what it’s all about with any art, that social dynamic. There’s an in-group and there’s an out-group. People feel like they’re included and other people feel like they’re excluded. Some people just don’t get it, because they like my political posters and they see me working out as being the polar opposite – then they don’t really know how to articulate that. Then you get one or two people who are academics, and they do know how to articulate why they dislike what I’m doing. I like engaging with them on that level, because I think about things in that way as well.”
Drew is used to criticism. Not everyone chimed with his Aussie Posters. He had wanted to make one of the subjects, hawker Monga Khan, whose picture was taken in 1916, a folk hero. But writing in the literary journal Overland, Reena Gupta objected to “the assumption that white Australians have the right to ‘direct the traffic’ by assuming a managerial role over their non-white counterparts”.
This time Drew has opted for self-portraiture, though what true transformation will occur through The Narcissist is yet to be seen: “The nature of self-portraiture is that the artist inevitably shows a part of themselves that they’re not really conscious of.”
The only thing he’s certain of is that it’s far harder for an artist with a political body of work to try something new than, say, David Bowie or Madonna, because they can expect less creative freedom.
“With artists entering into activism, they take on this veneer of authenticity,” Drew says. “It’s a trap, in a way, because people expect you to enter into it and all the baggage that comes with it. You have to take on the whole shopping list of political views, and your role is not to be curious. You’re not allowed to play around with it. And then what’s the point of being an artist?”
The Narcissist is on at Peter Walker Fine Art in Adelaide, 13-29 March
