When the six band members of the Histrionics don their Jackson Pollock-inspired "drip" suits for a performance at Melbourne's Australian Centre for the Moving Image this week, there's sure to be an art student or two in the house. And they'll feel quite at home as these self-proclaimed kings of "Concept-Art-Heritage-Rock-Covers" move swiftly through their set. With their razor-witted reinterpretations, AC/DC's '70s classic
T.N.T. becomes
Nam June Paik, named after the grandfather of video art; Devo's
Whip It barely misses a beat as an anthem to Abstract Expressionism,
Drip It; while Joan Jett's
I Love Rock 'N' Roll has even more attitude as
I Shot Andy Warhol ("I'm Valerie Solanas, I'm a no hoax, baby"). But art students beware one of the final tracks. In this, the Histrionics transform Steppenwolf's
Born to be Wild into a tirade against the timidity of art education: "Did a bit of writin' / Gonna be a DJ / Read a bit of Nietzsche... Taught to be mild."
A graduate of Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology's sculpture school, the Histrionics' live-wired lead singer, Danius Kesminas, is anything but mild. "A lot of people think what we do is so awful—it's like Weird Al Yankovic," he says. "They sort of cringe, 'This is not art.'" The police who closed down a noisy Histrionics gig in Dresden's Kunsthaus in 2003 obviously didn't think so. But having bitten the hand that feeds him enough times on stage, and on two CDs (Never Mind the Pollocks—Here's the Histrionics and Museum Fatigue), Kesminas, 40, has become the art world's unofficial court jester. Early next month, the band will help launch the Australian artists at the Venice Biennale, and on June 15, they'll play before Dutch royalty at the opening of a survey of sculpture from Australia and the Netherlands in the Hague. "I liked the witty comments and a sort of devilish charm and provocative fun of not taking art too seriously," says Marie Jeanne de Rooij, curator of "De Overkant/Down Under." But like all good court jesters, Kesminas tells salient truths while poking fun—whether at art's over-reliance on theory in Paranoid (courtesy Black Sabbath), at the self-indulgence of Tracey Emin (to the tune of the Police's
Roxanne) or at the preciousness of the German art scene (Children of Berlin, by way of Dire Straits'
Sultans of Swing.) Says Kesminas, "The art world is really so small when it comes down to it."
Proving his point, the good-humored artist was in Sydney last week to open his latest exhibition, which shows that there is indeed a world beyond art fairs and biennales. As his indonesian holden rider society T shirt indicated, Kesminas has been spending time with Australia's northern neighbors, and while on a residency at Yogyakarta's Indonesian Art Institute in 2005, the artist hooked up with some like-minded students to form the garage band Punkasila. Their name is a punk play on founding President Sukarno's five pillars of nationhood, Pancasila; just as playfully, the band like to riff on the names of the institutions that dominate post-reformasi Indonesian society, from TNI (Indonesian National Military) to KOPASSUS (Special Force Command).
Employing traditional plesetan wordplay, Punkasila speculate, often quite subversively, on other meanings for these acronyms: Tikyan Ning Idab-Idabi (Poor but Adorable) and Komando Pasukan Suka Susu (Milk Lovers' Force Command). For an exercise in semantics, the resulting CD, Acronym Wars, is ear-splittingly entertaining. And as presented at Darren Knight Gallery alongside military-style musical memorabilia, it's an intriguing cultural artifact. Elsewhere in the show, machine-gun-shaped guitars carved from mahogany stand sentinel alongside bespoke batik military fatigues, which Kesminas says are key "because in a way the project is all about camouflage." All sorts of things are "hiding behind the acronyms."
Mobilizing an army of artisans, from comic-strip illustrators to traditional wayang puppet makers, the show "Embedded with Punkasila" both tests the limits of Indonesian free speech and challenges Australian notions that its neighbor is a hotbed of Islamic fundamentalism. With fun and flair, Kesminas shows that much is permissible. "It's the perfect time," he says, "and in all honesty, five years ago you'd probably be put in jail for doing this." The artist nearly was, though not in Indonesia. While lugging back one of his machine-gun guitars from Yogyakarta last year, Kesminas was detained for five hours at Melbourne Airport. "You could say that I was asking for it, and I am," he says. "The project does straddle that fault line, and for me that's the interesting spot to be."
It's not the first cultural fault line he's straddled. In 2002, he made it into the New York Times for exhibiting the compacted car wreck of expatriate art critic Robert Hughes, who'd narrowly survived a collision in Western Australia. For Post-Traumatic Origami, Kesminas placed 68 kg of crushed metal in a plastic vitrine with a beer can and fishing reel, among other objects. He still laughs at the memory: "Robert Hughes is really the champion of Modernism. Here he is in a cube. It's perfect." Nor was it much of a leap from his court-jestering with the Histrionics. Smashed Nissan or song by the Knack—Kesminas sees both as found objects for him to "sculpt." He's now composing a ditty to the tune of Led Zeppelin's
Rock and Roll, though he keeps getting stuck on the lyric, "I spent my whole life being pigeon-holed." He needn't worry. He is too clever a cultural contortionist for that.
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