Danius Kesminas, Never Mind the Pollocks - Here's the Histrionics [installation view, 2003]

Danius Kesminas Never Mind the Pollocks - Here's the Histrionics Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney 6 January 2004 - 7 February 2004 ALEX GAWRONSKI Danius Kesminas's latest exhibition at Darren Knight consists of a series of works in which the high art seriousness of modernist movements like abstract expressionism are parodied as the subject for pop music pastiches. The overall tone of the exhibition is joking. In fact beyond the self-consciousness of the artist's puns it is difficult initially to discern any broader intention underlying the works themselves. Instead, they seem to inhabit a hermetic space in which it is enough to light-heartedly conflate the worlds of high modernism and popular music. From another perspective, however, this cross-pollination reveals much about the legacy of seriousness and reverence with which much modern art is still regarded. Furthermore, by undermining the grandiose pretensions of modernist icons like Jackson Pollock, Kesminas reinvigorates contemporary debates about perceptions of high and low cultural forms. For example, if high culture is perpetually open to appropriation, then supposedly low culture is equally capable of transgressing its assumed 'low-brow' limitations by producing otherwise unforseen potentialities of meaning. In this particular exhibition the admixture of high and low culture results in a type of insoluble amalgam of disparate and trans-disciplinary possibilities. This further reminds viewers that in the contemporary absence of clearly delimited definitions of serious and negligible cultural production, the function of art remains ever mutable. The title of Kesminas's exhibition Never Mind the Pollocks is an obvious reminder of the Sex Pistols' seminal punk album Never Mind the Bollocks. In this case Kesminas has created his own version of abstract expressionism using only black and white paint, dripped Pollock-style over black and white photographic images of his band The Histrionics in performance. This monochromatic emphasis also comments upon the contemporary ease with which Pollock's apparently semi-accidental and unrepeatable paint splashes can be reproduced today. Similarly, the aura of genius surrounding Pollock's signature style is suggested to be equally and endlessly reproducible. Additionally, Kesminas conjures the figure of the rock star and the rock band as the most appropriate equivalents for the role of contemporary artists and their networks. Thus an artist like Jackson Pollock becomes a 'classic' and standard by which other artists are judged just as bands like The Beatles have assumed an historical irreproachability as 'classics', regardless of the remaining social resonance of either. Nevertheless, Kesminas also understands the failure of contemporary art to compete with the commercial or popular success of popular music. If there is any true similarity between these, he suggests it is in their respective power to cultivate collective mythologies of individual creativity. To one side of this work is a related video work featuring filmed footage of Jackson Pollock in 'action'. This is interspersed with snippets of conversations about Pollock by heavyweight theorists like the godfather of American modernism, Clement Greenberg. In this case, however, a recording of Kesminas's own version of Devo's 'Whip-It', retitled 'Drip-It', drowns out the weighty verbosity of these documentary fragments. In his version of the Devo song an original lyric like "break your mamma's back" becomes instead "paint the canvas flat" while the chorus "whip it, whip it good!" is transformed into "drip it, drip it good!" At the same time the vaguely and comically sadistic connotations of the original song are overlain with knowledge of Pollock's own masochism and eventual self-sacrifice to the demands of his alcoholic 'genius'. In the adjoining gallery space another series of works extends the implications of the Pollock piece. In this room there are ten prints of records in which the artistic peculiarities of the labels are emphasised. Each record image is likewise an iconic reference to a particularly well-known song. The songs quoted include the Beatles' 'Revolution' which is subtitled in this instance, 'Appropriation'. They also include more homegrown classics like AC/DC's 'TNT' and Slim Dusty's ocker 'I Love to Have A Beer with Duncan'. Here the first song becomes a repetitive invocation of the name of the maverick artist Nam Jun Paik while in the second song the names of original drinking partners have been substituted for the names of local contemporary art identities, curators and artists. Despite the obvious humour and wit of these works, there lurks behind them a curious ambivalence. This ambivalence arises once we begin wondering whether the substituted references to contemporary identities in the local art world, for example, are reverential, sycophantic, affectionate or critical. Actually, this ambiguity extends to Kesminas's exhibition generally, as though each cluster of individual works veiled something more uncompromising and more questioning. Their sense of absurdity and playfulness seems less than fulfilling then, as if a certain restraint had been applied to successfully package the works. The artist's underlying suspicion of the macho heroism of modern art as well as of punk-style anarchism is certainly justified due to the openness of both to easy labelling and commercial appropriation. However, it is somehow disappointing that the unrestrained ludicrousness and genuine anarchy suggested by photographs of Kesminas's band The Histrionics performing live does not translate in this case to the artist's visual output, despite its clever inventiveness.