Joe Average Shows His True Colours
by Guy Babineau
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THE ART OF SURVIVAL
Joe Average Shows His True Colours
by Guy Babineau
A few weeks ago, Joe Average found a soiled sleeping bag. He brought it into his live-work studio in an artist's co-op at the foot of Gore Street north of Chinatown, laundered it, and put it away for safekeeping.
"I didn't think I'd be able to afford this place more than another month," the soft-spoken painter said during a recent interview. Someone had said that on his good days, Average could look like a movie star. He looked like someone in particular. His even-keeled disposition, rumpled charm, and decent-guy likability were contradicted by eyes like two lanterns in the fog, searching for home. Humphrey Bogart.
His studio's large picture window silhouetted his lean frame, which has been stripped of body fat by the medications that combat HIV infection. The interplay of light and shadow seemed an apt metaphor for the stark contrast between the artist's exuberant paintings and cheerful public persona and the rather well kept secret of his life's physical and emotional hardships. He's toughened himself up at the gym, but years spent fighting painful physical indignities and numbing depression caused by drug reactions have left their mark. Average stopped painting some time ago and, for the most part, retreated from the world. He had been taking the so-called cocktail, a potent concoction of industrial-strength drugs that corral HIV and prevent it from proliferating, but it has stopped working. There is now only one alternative left, a brand-new drug. But for it to work, he must first cleanse his body of the old drugs and reinvigorate the virus. His well-being hasn't been helped by a poverty diet of 99-cent Junior Whoppers from Burger King for more than two months.
"It fucks your brain up, all that toxic stuff. There are people out there who think, ‘Hey, I can get [HIV-] positive because there are drugs that can take care of everything now.' But guess what? Your life disappears, and it becomes all about time schedules and restrictions. And what you had is gone." He lit a cigarette, opening the window slightly to let out smoke. "I keep looking at the park," he said quietly. "In the summer I could live there, but the winter would be too cold."
Behind him in the distance, framed by the window, brilliant red, orange, and yellow autumn leaves blazed among the dark evergreens of Stanley Park. Mankind has made death a taboo, but nature celebrates its imminence, and the impermanence of everything except time, in Technicolor. The vivid hues of fall foliage. The brief burst of flowers before they die. The miraculous white sun, blue sky, and brown sand in a seemingly lifeless desert. In the natural world, where life and death are equals, contrasting colours remind us that beauty can be born out of adversity, joy out of pain. Like the masterful paintings of a gifted artist in troubled times.
Average is well-known, and well-liked. He has made sizable contributions to local and international AIDS-related causes, children's art education, and Canadian culture. His (mostly donated) paintings have graced posters and paraphernalia for countless AIDS and arts events. His art has shown up around the world, including the Middle East, where a friend of Average's spied his One World, One Hope image for the 1996 Vancouver- hosted 11th International AIDS Conference embroidered on T-shirts for sale in a market stall. He was once flown to Ottawa as a guest of the Governor General at a sit-down dinner with the late Princess Diana. He's done photo ops with Elizabeth Taylor. The guy has received so many humanitarian awards and citations, he makes Mother Teresa look like a hack. His engaging paintings enliven the swanky households of some pretty important people. So how did he end up in such a tight spot? And isn't he resentful? Just a little?
"I'm a survivor," Average, 45, said with a shrug. "I was diagnosed at 27. At 30, I found myself without a job. The big question was, ‘What do I do now?' The doctors, all they could tell me was, ‘We don't know; five months, six months, one month, two years. We can't tell you.' " He made some big changes to the way he'd been living, which included giving up booze, a habit so out-of-control that a friend had nicknamed him Joe Beverage. Then there was the matter of how to earn a living. "I challenged myself to only live off my art. I refused to take unemployment, welfare, or any disability because, intuitively, I knew it would hone my survival skills. I thought, ‘What's the worst that would happen to me?' If I was lost in the woods, I'd find a way to survive. So just do that in the city; urban camping."
He has camped in the woods out of necessity before. As a boy growing up in Victoria, he built a fort in some scrub overlooking the city and seashore, where he'd run away time after time to escape, or, rather, to test his inattentive family. "They didn't care. They never came looking for me."
One of his paintings, in a style reminiscent of the iconic '60s cartoonist Robert Crumb (Fritz the Cat), is called Baby Joe Average Born in a Tomato Patch. Leave It to Beaver, his life was not. The former Brock Tebbutt spent his earliest years in Sooke-Metchosin, a community southwest of Victoria. His family, which includes three younger siblings, moved to Victoria when he was seven. Their father, an architect, bought fixer-uppers, then renovated and sold them. Average moved from one unfinished home to another. An intuitive sense that he was unwanted became certain years later when his mother told him at the age of 20 that he was illegitimate, that his father wasn't his real father, that he was the result of a one-night stand, and that she'd tried to abort him. Tact, it seems, is not a family trait. In 1998, Average received a Canadian Caring award in a ceremony at Government House in his hometown. "After the ceremony, the first thing my grandmother said to me was, ‘I'm so proud of you for not committing suicide because you're gay.' " (Average is bisexual.)
In elementary school, he found it hard to read the words in books and on blackboards, so every year he would make sure he got the closest desk to the teacher and charmed his way into being teacher's pet. That way, the teacher would happily explain everything to him. Meanwhile, he found refuge in the sanctuary of childhood imagination. He started to draw. He instinctively compensated for his reading difficulties, becoming fluent instead in the language of colour. In high school, the challenge of keeping up proved too difficult, so at 16 he dropped out and moved to Vancouver.
It was 1973. The Western Front had opened up, becoming one of Canada's first artist-run centres, a home to an explosion of contemporary art. Average hung around when he wasn't working in a hotel where, though underage, he served drinks at conferences.
"All of my heroes at Western Front had aliases—Lady Brute, Flakey Rose Hip, Mr. Peanut—and I wanted one too. But I was the little kid who didn't fit in. I didn't feel that bohemian. Flakey Rose Hip wasn't for me."
About a year later, back in Victoria, he and a friend were flipping through some old '50s and '60s magazines he'd found. "I kept running across clip- art images of the guy who was always the fireman, the milkman, you know, an average Joe. ‘Oh, look, there's that Joe average guy again!' I said to my friend." The serendipitous quip gave him a moniker that has had immense publicity value, something he didn't anticipate at the time.
"My dyslexia is a constant source of humour to me," Average said. His reading problem—swimming words and letters—was finally diagnosed as dyslexia around the same time he was diagnosed with HIV in 1984. He also found out that he had other perception anomalies caused by hearing and sight impairments in his right ear and eye. "I used to go for coffee across from this beauty parlour, and it had this weird sign that said Colour Sperm Tests. Of course, it was Colour Perms Sets. And I used to always see this car advertisement on a billboard with a caption that said The Clam Before the Storm. I thought, ‘Who'd pay someone to come up with that? And what does it mean?' Anyhow, I ended up doing a painting of this little clam peeking out of its shell, with big storm clouds rolling in, and it was the first painting to sell at a show I had. It took me a while to figure out that it was calm, not clam." He won't undergo therapy for his dyslexia, fearing it would affect his art.
Average has something in common with that little clam. Instead of a shell, he has a paintbrush and palette. Paintings such as This Is the Little Critter That Lives Inside Me and Protects Me From AIDS are a way of defusing fear of the very real dangers in his life and, subsequently, the fears of his audience. Many of us lose touch with the imagination of childhood and its ability to resolve conflict or build courage by shifting perception. In person, just like with his paintings, Average inspires a reconnection with the power of pretending. One can imagine him bunking beneath the stars in the park, his paintings hung up on the Douglas firs. Suddenly, a flock of cartoon bluebirds settles on a branch while a make-believe deer nuzzles his shoulder. A chorus of creatures from Dr. Seuss kick-lines through the ferns, accompanied by an orchestra of squirrels and bunnies with Betty Boop eyes, wearing rainbow-striped platform shoes and playing music from The Beatles' Yellow Submarine. There is a horrendous roar, and everyone scatters except Average. He's too busy signing prints for a fundraiser to notice. Breathing fire through its snout, the dreaded Jabberwock approaches Average and is just about to pounce when— splat!—a gigantic Monty Python foot descends from the sky and kills it.
Average is an artist of the Lost in Space generation, those of us who were born at the tail end of the baby boom, before the cutoff date for Generation X, between the launch of sputnik in 1957 and the assassination of JFK in 1963. While Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down, troops stormed Vietnam, Mao Tse-tung persecuted artists and intellectuals, and nuclear bombs were being tested all over the place, on our brand-new colour TVs we watched shows about talking horses and cars, families who were either witches or monsters, or flew around in outer space, and Martians living in the suburbs. We were dazzled by the colourful graphics of Warhol, Lichtenstein, Peter Max, and Heinz Edelmann's art direction of Yellow Submarine. On July 20, 1969, Average and I were both 11 when a hush fell over the world as we watched Neil Armstrong dip the first human toe in lunar dust. Back then, we believed that by now people from the suburbs would be living on Mars.
"I always felt out of place on the planet. I guess that's why I related to every alien persona David Bowie ever did," said Average, who became a fan of the musician when he discovered The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars as a gender-bending teenager. "One Christmas when I was four or five, I remember so clearly asking my mother: ‘Do you think that maybe a kid from another planet got a chemistry set, and that maybe he had an accident and put a few things together that weren't supposed to be put together, and then that created us?' We're the only species on the planet that doesn't have a clue how to be who we are. Why am I here? What's the meaning of life? We have this constant fascination with what's up there."
To talk about Joe Average's art only in terms of pop culture, or solely within the context of his highly public role as everyone's favourite AIDS action hero, is to diminish its importance. Most of what's written or said about him and his work focuses on what a nice guy he is, putting his generosity and egalitarianism on a pedestal and leaving his art somewhere below. "His paintings make you smile," some say, leaving it at that. Sometimes people bring him colour swatches or cushion covers and ask him if he's got anything that matches. His art deserves better than playing second fiddle to a sofa. This is, after all, his profession, his reason for living.
At first glance, most of his paintings seem whimsical, as though painted with a wink and a nudge. In some, cartoonish, anthropomorphic figures in flower-power colours practically leap from the canvas as they flirt with the viewer. Others are like stained glass, colours cut like crystal, in the same rich tones. Yet others compact the essence of a still life into primary—and primal—colours. Their simplicity is misleading. If the aim of art is to reduce the sauce to its absolute essence, then Average is a master chef. His sense of colour and composition is extraordinarily sophisticated. His vision and style are unique. As well as the main figures of '60s pop art, his influences extend to Marc Chagall, Joan Miró, Vincent Van Gogh, and the art of B.C.'s First Nations, among others. When he saw the recent Ed Harris film about Jackson Pollock, Average strongly identified with the artist's inability to connect with other people or to separate art from life. Many critics have favourably compared him to the late Keith Haring, who died of AIDS in 1990. A fellow Canadian talent with whom he shares sensibilities is Robert Flack, a multimedia artist who passed away in 1993 just as his career was taking off, with shows in Toronto, New York, and Paris. Inspired by a trek through India just before he was diagnosed with HIV, Flack fused Hindu symbolism and computer-aided design to produce sumptuous visual statements reflecting his relationship with mortality.
Flack and Haring are among many artists who will be remembered fondly, and sadly, on December 1, World AIDS Day, which is also A Day Without Art, honouring the memory of the writers, visual artists, musicians, film and video makers, dancers, designers, actors, and theatre directors we've lost. Here at home, provincial cutbacks to health care, welfare, and disability have been particularly hard on PWAs, but even though many essential drugs and alternative treatments have been "delisted", applying for benefits would still offset some of Average's medical expenditures. But he won't. As admirable as his tough-guy attitude is—urban camping and all that—it seems fanciful at this stage, and impractical, given the state of his health in recent months. And it belies the breaking heart of a 10-year-old boy when no one came looking.
If Average did try to slink off into the woodland night, though, loads of people would come looking for him. Stanley Park would shimmer with flashlights, like a disco. And, in a way, that's just what happened. On November 3, friends organized a benefit at a downtown nightclub. (He had to be talked into it; generous people can be very stubborn.) They raised $9,000, and Mayor Philip Owen proclaimed it Joe Average Day.
But how, with his celebrity and philanthropy, could someone like Average be living on the edge of poverty and nobody know? Is it because he has HIV? Is it because he's an artist? And what about all the people who don't have his fame? If Average was languishing undetected, surely there are many more suffering, or dying, incognito. The 63 women missing from downtown's East Side come to mind. Has inattention become a societal affliction? If so, we need Average's experienced eye and heart more than ever.
The $9,000 will only go so far. Average is an artist who puts just as much time and effort and skill into his career as any first-rate doctor, lawyer, or other professional. But not enough people buy his paintings. This is partly due to his attitude on the subject of commercial galleries. He finds them elitist, calling their owners "pimps and whores". Surely not all of them. And artists aren't all angels either. Perhaps the real issue is a widespread lack of awareness of the arts, the feeling that art is a frill rather than essential to a healthy, functioning society. This indifference is fortified by the dismantling of arts programs in our schools, a process Average has tried to counteract with volunteer work when his health permits. He visits classrooms and introduces children to their own creative abilities.
"It's just a huge crime," he said, those lantern eyes narrowing. "The world is going to pay for it. Art is a universal way for our children to express themselves. If you don't learn to express yourself, then you're not connected to your intuition, all the intelligence you were born with. If you take away nurturing that intelligence, you're left with a bunch of androids that are frightened and scared and kill each other."
Children like his mischievous sense of humour. So do adults. A colourful painting of an exotic fish is called Tom of Finland, named after a series of gay porno illustrations. His impishness came into play at the last Vancouver AIDS Walk in September. Average was sitting at a table signing T-shirts. "I looked up and there was [Premier] Gordon Campbell and Lorne Mayencourt [Liberal MLA for Vancouver-Burrard], both wearing my T-shirt and coming toward me with all these reporters and TV cameras following. They arrived at the table and asked me to sign their shirts, you know, for the press. I didn't want to, but what could I do? So I signed Lorne's. Campbell turned around so that I could sign the back of his T-shirt. And while everyone looked, I wrote: Please take care of us." Then the premier walked away, oblivious.
On November 29, in a ceremony at the Coal Harbour Community Centre, the artist will be awarded Her Majesty's Golden Jubilee Medal, honouring his outstanding community service. His life is his art, and that is a truly remarkable thing. "Joe Average!" a friend exclaimed when he heard about this article. "He's a legend!" No, he's something better. He's human.
You can jump off your pedestal. There are plenty of people ready to catch you. And if you wind up having to use that sleeping bag, then we will have failed you, a shameful thing to happen to a person who has consistently put the welfare of others ahead of his own. You have said, in so many words, that you don't want to be a burden. You are loved, as an artist and as a man. The burden would be your absence.
Originally published in The Georgia Straight, Canada's largest independent weekly. © Guy Babineau 2003/04
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