The following are excerpts from an interview with Mike O’Brien by Beth Fox, for Umelec Magazine, Issue 1 of 2016, published in London, Prague & Berlin:
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‘MIKE O’BRIEN TOUCH(ED) ME’
Im on the tube on the way to work and sitting opposite me there’s this man in a suit eating a Cadbury’s Creme Egg. My mother once said to me “Men in suits shouldn’t eat peanut butter” so it wasn’t off the grass I licked it anyways.
The apple is just lying there under the tree as I’m judging this man who looks like a perfectly respectable man with a nice suit and a tie and a big chunky watch (who needs a watch in this day and age?) with his Blackberry and his cuff links, tonguing out the innards of this little chocolate egg and I think “What the hell has happened to men?”
So I was never going to be a feminist because I’m too much of a misogynist. The world is filled with female misogynists like me. “You’re a fully grown man – put down that creme egg!”. Whatever happened to Fully Grown Men anyways?
When I was a kid I thought; school, university, job, flat, boyfriend, husband, flat-cum-husband, house, other kid, later dog (definitely never cat). Like, don’t get me wrong, this isn’t what I wanted, in the unformed soft child mind you never really think what you want in the long term, only that yes you would like another piece of swissroll now please and maybe it’d be quite nice to go down a slide at some point in the near future, but the idea of linear grown-upness, the going of A to B to C and becoming An Adult seemed like a given.
So maybe this is just a normal growing up kind of thing where you realise that everyone is just a tall child holding a beer and that you will probably never really understand politics (beyond the vague idea of “goodies” and “baddies”) and in actuality everyone is pretending to know what they’re talking about ninety percent of the time.
But that still doesn’t answer the question – Where are all the grown up men? When I mean grown man I’m trying to define a distant half-formed idea of a past man. Back when men were men who drank their liquor straight and ate nothing but red meat and didn’t know what exfoliation was.
Men who wore suits and drove cars and had 9 to 5 jobs and read newspapers at the breakfast table; men whose children were afraid of them. Before it was okay for men to have emotions and cuticles. A time when Nintendos were for children.
So as we as people live longer, are we extending our childhood? Is thirty-five the new twenty-one? (Whereas twenty-one was once the new eighteen?) The world is now populated with fully grown men in short trousers eating Poptarts, smoking marijuana, watching Internet porn and playing Call of Duty. How did this happen??
Of course the current economic climate and the advancement of technology have something to do with this. The classic 9 to 5 job no longer exists for the majority, leaving plenty of space in our lives for video games and cartoons.
Feminism obviously plays a role, the possession of a penis no longer purports footing the bill (and due to the lack of work in most of the western world, men can probably breathe a sigh of relief over that one).
I wonder if maybe it’s just me. As an art graduate I’m not inclined to associate with Real Adults, male or female. With our Masters degrees in finger painting hanging like albatrosses around our necks, did we really expect to become fully functioning grown ups?
If I learnt anything from my extraordinarily enjoyable and profoundly expensive art education it’s that one of the most important roles of the artist is to hold up a mirror to society.
And it is this generation of men-children that is so well portrayed in the work of Mike O’Brien.
Mike O’Brien makes funny little drawings on bits of paper torn from waiters’ notepads complete with annotations that range from the sick and the gross to the just plain odd.
Mike draws cocks and boobs and school boys and couples making out, he draws fathers and mothers and wives and taxi drivers and sexy teachers with low cut tops.
His drawings are good drawings and the bits of text are laden with a potent sense of dark humour, absurdity and irony.
Trained as a fine artist at the Limerick School of Art & Design (Ireland’s “second best art college”) O’Brien’s crude graphic style gives his work an immediate and accessible appeal, while simultaneously offering observant and insightful commentary on the absurdities of human relationships and modern life.
I recently had a chance to sit down with Mike and have a chat with him about his work.
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YOUR RECENT EXHIBITION AT DIVUS LONDON WAS TITLED ‘TOUCH ME’, CAN YOU EXPLAIN THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE SHOW’S TITLE?
It’s an aspect of my work to play upon the degrees of separation people create in their lives to others and our conception of separation in the first place.
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YOUR PICTURES ARE FUNNY. IS IT IMPORTANT THAT THEY’RE FUNNY?
I think it’s important that they’re true, that they came from a process natural to me. I didn’t make a plan to be funny, but I would instinctively find myself laughing uncontrollably with the sort of content that would come so fluidly to me as I drew the human form.
I would just let it happen. I’m making new work now that isn’t funny in nature and I don’t mind at all, in fact I’m really enjoying finding new ways of surprising myself. It’s nice to have a variation.
What I like about the humour is that I can see it arise naturally without trying to prove some point or fulfil an idea or limitation. I think the real power in art & creativity is not in pedagogy but in genuine engagements that challenge the evolution of your consciousness. I think that’s the underlying importance.
Strictly in aesthetic and relational terms I think that translates as the importance of creating ‘a substantial amount of activity in the viewer’s mind or heart’, a reference point to what makes ‘great art’, that always stuck with me (though I can’t remember who said it).
I think this can only come about when the artist can first achieve this evocation in themselves.
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DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA WHERE ALL THE GROWN UP MEN HAVE GONE?
They’re all living amazing lives that don’t involve being on Facebook or doing the same crap as everyone else. They’re hiding all over the place wearing Superman costumes and secretly living together in caves on the coast. They mate with fish and sleep in a giant protective cocoon called the fuck off. People are changing for sure.