Slave to the rhythm

Simon Maid­ment and Mark Feary talk with Danius Kesminas

Pub­lished in cac inter­viu, issue 9–10 / 2008 spring – summer.

Danius Kesmi­nas is an Australian-Lithuanian artist who reg­u­larly uses musi­cal forms as a process for engag­ing his con­cerns, includ­ing the visual arts indus­try, cri­tiquing its rev­er­ence, seri­ous­ness and earnest­ness. To this end, the musi­cal­ity within Kesmi­nas’ prac­tice is a tac­tic for col­lab­o­ra­tion into uncharted ter­ri­to­ries, rather than an end­point in itself. His prac­tice, often inten­tion­ally provoca­tive, gives rise to dis­cus­sion around author­ship and cul­tural mythologies.

We held an infor­mal dis­cus­sion with Kesmi­nas at West Space (4 April 2008), a con­tem­po­rary art organ­i­sa­tion in Mel­bourne we are both involved with, to tease out some of his strate­gies. Among the projects we dis­cussed was Slave Pianos, a group con­sist­ing of two con­tem­po­rary artists (of which Kesmi­nas is one) and two composers/musicians, who cre­ate ambi­tious events com­bin­ing instal­la­tion, music and per­for­mance. Their sub­ject mat­ter is usu­ally art fig­ures and move­ments in recent (20th Cen­tury) art his­tory. Kesmi­nas also ini­ti­ated an art project and band in Yogyakata with 7 Indone­sian musi­cians in 2006. Their name Punkasila ref­er­ences both the cul­tural move­ment of Punk, and Pan­casila, the offi­cial philo­soph­i­cal doc­trine of the Indone­sian state, as espoused by Pres­i­dent Soekarno in 1945. This art-performance-installation-band is a high energy, anar­chic hybrid that man­i­fests in a unique blend of tra­di­tional Indone­sian crafts, home­made mil­i­tary band out­fits, machine gun gui­tars, and post-disaster rock with lyrics that give voice to the cacoph­ony of acronyms con­sti­tut­ing the Indone­sian body politic. Kesmi­nas is also a founder of the art/music group The Histri­on­ics, which melds the musi­cal­ity of a banal pub-rock cov­ers band with refash­ioned lyrics cri­tiquing the can­nons of twen­ti­eth cen­tury art history.

Mark Feary and Simon Maid­ment, 2008

Simon Maid­ment: By way of intro­duc­tion to your prac­tice Danius, I’d like to begin with the provo­ca­tions and inter­ven­tions that you’ve under­taken, often with artists or the art world as their focus or sub­ject. It seems to me these provo­ca­tions have evolved a good deal, and are tak­ing a par­tic­u­lar form recently in the inter­na­tional col­lab­o­ra­tions you’ve ini­ti­ated in Indone­sia, China and Cam­bo­dia. To give some con­text for that devel­op­ment though, per­haps you’d like to start by giv­ing us an exam­ple of a local inter­ven­tion that you’ve done here in Australia.

Danius Kesmi­nas: Well, one of those was the whole Domenico de Clario episode. [de Clario is a Melbourne-based con­tem­po­rary artist] It was about 1998 when Maudie Palmer curated an exhi­bi­tion called ‘Rema­nence’ at the old Mag­is­trates’ Court, with Dom, Marina Ambramovic, Daniel Buren, Cai Guo-Qiang, Den­nis Oppen­heim, Imants Tillers and oth­ers for the Melbourne

Fes­ti­val. Dom’s show was a grand piano and accou­trements in one of the court­rooms with tiered seat­ing, and he would per­form between 12 noon – 7pm, daily for 2 weeks. Well, Michael Steven­son [a New Zealand born artist, also a mem­ber of Slave Pianos] and I, we were onto it, we thought let’s secretly record it, and make pirate copies, boot­leg it! It was so easy to do, because guess what, Dom’s blind­folded! He can’t see any­thing! We were on shifts, I’m on one day and Michael’s on the next day. A big part of Dom’s prac­tice is endurance, but get this, he’s not there at 12… I’m there at 12, Michael’s there at 12, there’s no Dom! Well he walks in with his café latte about 1:30, and I’m hav­ing to [jumps under table] get down hid­ing under the seats! [laughs] Any­way, we recorded 7 dif­fer­ent days onto cas­sette and pack­aged it as ‘Domenico de Clario; Live at the For­mer Mag­is­trates’ Court’, and made an elab­o­rately pro­duced box set, like we’ve done with Slave Pianos, and we made it avail­able for sale at Read­ings Book Store in Carl­ton! And we put this ridicu­lous price on, like $100, so you know no one’s going to buy it, but it’s on dis­play! Any­way, I just let it go, went over­seas to do some project, and the next thing you know, my old man’s ring­ing up, say­ing, ‘Danius, there’s a let­ter here from a solic­i­tor’. So I’m being sued…

Mark Feary: And you can’t read it because it was writ­ten by a blind­folded solicitor.

DK: It was a shock, because you’d expect some­one to call and say ‘What are you doing dick­head? Knock it off’. The let­ter demanded the return of the tapes and an order to sign a statu­tory dec­la­ra­tion. So I drafted a response using ref­er­ences from ‘Periph­eral Vision’ by Charles Green [Aus­tralian art the­o­rist and critic], which has a large sec­tion on de Clario. I took the text, sub­sti­tuted my name for Dom, and just twisted it a lit­tle bit, to explain what I was doing — because that’s partly what Dom’s about, appro­pri­a­tional strate­gies — and I sent it to his lawyer, say­ing actu­ally, what I’m doing is an art­work! But I didn’t say where I’d derived the text.

MF: And then you got another let­ter, from Charles Green’s solicitor…

DK: [laughs] Well, I was say­ing, I’m just doing what Dom does. It’s ridicu­lous, if you actu­ally apply that stuff, and test it, he wants to sue you… Any­way, they demanded the return of the mas­ter tapes, and I really didn’t want to, but I had to do some­thing. So I unscrewed the cas­ings of the cas­settes, took out the mag­netic tape — seri­ously, there was miles of tape — and just shoved it into a padded bag, just the tape, all tan­gled and com­pletely unus­able, and kept the cases… because that’s my prop­erty, I’ll keep the cas­ings and you can have the tape. Can you imag­ine the lawyers open­ing this pack­age? They’d be going ‘what the fuck is this? Oh Dom, this must be yours!’ Didn’t hear a peep…

MF: Have you seen Dom again?

DK: Yeah, there’s a post­script to the story, because later he moved to West­ern Aus­tralia, head­ing up one of the art schools there. And we did a gig there, The Histri­on­ics, at PICA [the Perth Insti­tute of Con­tem­po­rary Art], and he was in the audi­ence… And he was friendly, he obvi­ously thought, ’oh shit, maybe I should… just be… your friend?!’

MF: Think­ing ‘that way this will never hap­pen to me again’!

DK: And I’m think­ing, good, what­ever, I’m your friend too, it’s not about being your enemy! I don’t know, all that world is just so stu­pidly wound up.

MF: Pre­cious?

DK: Yeah, pre­cious in a way, and that’s exactly what The Histri­on­ics are par­tic­u­larly aller­gic to, pre­cious­ness, to pre­ten­tious­ness, to all that kind of pos­tur­ing. That’s why I love going to Indo [Indone­sia – where Kesmi­nas formed a band called Punkasila in Yogyakarta], you know because… well there just isn’t any of that. Pure eco­nom­ics pre­vent, pre­clude, any of that indul­gence, and the stakes are a great deal higher, the very notion of mak­ing art is pretty fuck­ing pro­found. It’s not some priv­i­leged indul­gence. You go over there and all my lit­tle Dom de Clario stunts, all my Histri­on­ics gags, well, they don’t mean any­thing. They don’t! You just feel like a dick­head, it’s a kind of cri­sis, you’ve got to rethink every­thing. And in the end all my work is about engage­ment, it’s about com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Well, when you go over there, it just doesn’t hold water, to them it’s meaningless.

SM: Because it has been a trend with both The Histri­on­ics and Slave Pianos that you use those music forms, whether it’s rock or the com­posed orches­tral, oper­atic works, as a foil to inter­ro­gate art and art history…

DK: I’m glad you both appre­ci­ate the con­nec­tion between those projects, because many peo­ple are com­pletely con­fused by the fact that they’re util­is­ing dif­fer­ent musi­cal gen­res, so they think they’re not related, but they are and obvi­ously so. The Histri­on­ics is often mis­un­der­stood as being a neg­a­tive project. There is an ele­ment of par­ody there, but there’s a great deal which is homage, bloody oath! How else could you be so obsessed about doing all this stuff! [waves at the Slave Pianos tran­scrip­tions and Histri­on­ics lyric sheets with their pages of footnotes]

MF: Well, that’s what we were dis­cussing this morn­ing, how not just with The Histri­on­ics, but with the other projects as well, there’s that homage, while at the same time there’s an attempt to kind of break down the influ­ence that work has over you…

DK: Yeah, it’s not about killing the father, but it’s not about being an orphan either! [laughs] That seems self-evident… you know what it is? It’s ‘value adding’… [laughs]

SM: And you’ve turned your atten­tion to a whole range of artists through the Slave Pianos project, tell us more about that undertaking.

DK: The whole Slave Pianos thing started in estab­lish­ing a vast, but always expand­ing, archive of visual artists’ sound works. There’s always been this tra­jec­tory with artists mak­ing music. Some of this mate­r­ial is really obscure, I mean, basi­cally it all is, a lot of it is on vinyl and cas­sette, so find­ing this stuff can be dif­fi­cult, you’ve really got to dig deep, foren­si­cally. Except we’re not really fans, we don’t lis­ten to it recre­ation­ally! [laughs] That’s for sure, it’s not for recre­ational pur­poses! So we take this sound, or noise, or even just the audio track of a video piece, and we tran­scribe it as musi­cal nota­tion, and pre­pare it for an auto­mated piano performance.

SM: So any­one can ‘learn to be the artist’, become the artist through the learn­ing the sheet music, like all those gui­tar magazines!

DK: Exactly.

SM: Tell us about what’s involved in the tran­scrip­tion of a piece.

DK: The process was devised by the two musi­cians in Slave Pianos, Neil Kelly and Rohan Drape. Rohan’s writ­ten a com­puter pro­gram to import any sound source and gen­er­ate musi­cal nota­tion. He then tweaks it to make it musi­cally coher­ent. It’s just notes, but he’ll shape it while lis­ten­ing back to the orig­i­nal. So it’s always faith­ful to the source.

Why the piano? Num­ber one, it’s a play on Peter Tyndall’s ‘Slave Gui­tars’. And the piano, because there’s a vast his­tory of artists using the piano right back through the cen­tury. I mean the vio­lin is a far older instru­ment, and the gui­tar prob­a­bly is too, but the piano, is like a cru­cible of… seriousness.

MF: It’s such a class-based sym­bol of refine­ment, rather than the gui­tar, which is asso­ci­ated far more with a rebel­lion against those kinds of systems.

DK: That’s the point, what we are doing with Slave Pianos is play­ing with the avant garde, and return­ing it to the con­ser­va­to­rium. It’s a supremely rad­i­cal ges­ture, right, but couched in this really kind of con­ser­v­a­tive aca­d­e­mic process. That’s what really dis­turbs some artists.

SM: How did Punkasila come about?

DK: Well, I got an Asialink [Aus­tralian cul­tural fund­ing organ­i­sa­tion] four month stu­dio res­i­dency in Yogyakarta, Indone­sia. By the way, there’s no actual stu­dio! [laughs] And our notion of con­tem­po­rary art doesn’t really exist! There’s a lot of activ­ity there, fuck­ing hell, it’s flour­ish­ing! But it’s not about the art world, it’s the oppo­site to the pre­cious­ness we were talk­ing about before. And these guys are doing stuff in a way that’s not about ambi­tion, or career, it’s just pure. I’ve never seen any­thing like it, I was blown away. For the first few weeks, I was just soak­ing up the depth of the cul­ture, the peo­ple, the food, all that. And I wanted to respond, to make some­thing, to do some­thing. But every stu­pid idea I’d come up with, I’d just look out the win­dow and go well [snorts] I’m just a fool, I give up, because look at that, that’s just amaz­ing. Like I say, it was sort of a cri­sis, it wasn’t that I was depressed, I was inspired but it was just a ques­tion­ing of well, all my tricks are mean­ing­less here? So I had this trans­la­tor guy, and he would take me out every night to see bands, because there’s a really vibrant music scene over there. I was think­ing ‘how good are these guys! Imag­ine what you could do with them!’. Also I didn’t know any­thing about Indone­sia, pretty much still don’t, but I was read­ing a book by Damien Kings­bury, ‘The Pol­i­tics of Indone­sia’, really inten­sively, and check­ing this other stuff out in par­al­lel. As I’m read­ing I’m con­stantly refer­ring back to the index, because every page is just imbed­ded with acronyms, and it’s like 400 odd pages. And by the time I’d got­ten to page 399, I’ve gone ‘eureka!’ – acronyms, a project about acronyms. Well, how do I do that? Then I thought about these artist guys play­ing in bands… Basi­cally I just approached the dudes and said hey, let’s form a band, and I hand­picked every­one, I said I want Hahan from that band, I want Rudy Atjeh from that band, I want Iyok from that group, Janu from that band. It was like an Indone­sian super group! It was all friendly, they all knew one another, and sup­port each other, and their default set­ting, like mine, is just to say ‘yes – we’ll do that, I’m into that’. I’m like twenty years older than them, and I’m white, non-muslim and the co-lead singer – that’s hilar­i­ous! [laughs] And then I said, look, this is the con­cept — acronym wars! And they’re going ‘well, that’s a good con­cept, what­ever that is… What’s the music?’. Ah, that’s a good point… So we went into the stu­dio, and I just stole a bunch of stuff to first get it going, I pulled out a Black Sab­bath riff, a Lobby Lloyd riff, which is like [sar­cas­ti­cally] ‘I’m edu­cat­ing them in Oz Rock’ [laughs]. And they’re going ‘What?’ but once they cracked the code, they were like ‘we can write this’ and off they went, it was great. And so then I was like — let’s

make batik [tra­di­tional Indone­sian screen­print­ing] cam­ou­flage cos­tumes, let’s make machine gun gui­tars! Well, when they got the idea, they went crazy on it!

SM: Tell us a lit­tle bit about the reac­tion to the project.

DK: Well when Asialink found out of what we were doing, they wrote me a let­ter say­ing, ‘you’re outta here!’. Not quite, but they were con­cerned. Then Geoff Thomp­son, who’s an Aus­tralian jour­nal­ist based in Jakarta work­ing for the For­eign Cor­re­spon­dent pro­gram on ABC Tele­vi­sion, also got wind of it. Because we did cause quite a stir… I’m mak­ing it out to be a bed of roses, but in actual fact, we could not get the CD pressed in Indone­sia, no way. All the song titles are Indone­sian acronyms, and they’re all mil­i­tary, polit­i­cal, bureau­cratic and cul­tural insti­tu­tions. Well the press­ing plants have just gone ‘ooh we don’t want to know any­thing about this!’, I’m say­ing ‘no, no, no, wait, you don’t under­stand’. Nope, they wouldn’t do it, I could not get it pressed in Indone­sia. I guess what I’m try­ing to say is that it is real cur­rency, it is still kind of volatile. And even on the For­eign Cor­re­spon­dent TV dis­patch on Punkasila, Wimo, the key­board player, says ‘if we play this music in the wrong place, at the wrong time, to the wrong peo­ple, we would be killed… but you know… we don’t do that!’.

MF: Did it feel like that though?

DK: No, no, because I trusted the boys and they know the lim­its. I’m there encour­ag­ing and pro­vok­ing them, and what­ever, but never to the extent where I put these guys under any pres­sure or danger.

SM: It strikes me that both Punkasila and The Happy End­ings [a Shang­hai based all-girl noise band formed by Kesmi­nas], gives voice to these con­cerns that the peo­ple in these places can’t them­selves be seen to give voice to…

DK: Yes! I take the heat and sud­denly they’re empow­ered, because right now in Indone­sia it’s a post-reformasi [post-reformation], post-Soeharto envi­ron­ment, and there is a new moment of opti­mism. But the mil­i­tary is still very influ­en­tial – you don’t want to get involved with them. When we started play­ing gigs, peo­ple thought it was hilar­i­ous, they’d call out to me, ‘bule!’ which means ‘hand­some per­son’ but it can also mean ‘for­eign fuck­wit’. [laughs] My assis­tant once labelled me ‘manic white trash lost in the third world with a bunch of ideas’.