Cultural conduits, translations and provocations in the work of Danius Kesminas and collaborators
Danius Kesminas is an artist who likes to tinker with arcane technologies and semiotic orders. His provocative experimentations with these systems function as a kind of critical mass, sparking creative chain reactions amidst an expanding network of collaborators that course out in seemingly inexhaustible manifestations, mutations and iterations. ‘Slave Pianos, Punkasila, Pipeline to Oblivion: 3 Projects by Danius Kesminas and Collaborators’, curated by Monash University Museum of Art’s (MUMA’s) Director, Max Delany, provided a raucous rendition of three of his major projects to date.
Pipeline to Oblivion (2011) serves up an explosive blend of folk art, music, dissident production processes and a DIY mentality, all doused in a good soaking of moonshine liquor. In a distillation of a deliciously preposterous instance of backyard ingenuity, in which a three kilometre pipeline for smuggling moonshine vodka from neighbouring Belarus was discovered by Lithuanian authorities in 2004, Kesminas presents a pipe organ fashioned from PVC water pipes and other repurposed household equipment which also doubles as a fully functioning vodka still. Resembling the Lithuanian folk instrument, the skudučiai, this automated device pumps out the traditional drinking song Gerkit Gerkit, Broliukai (Drink Brothers, Drink) at regular intervals. The high spiritedness of proceedings is hampered somewhat by a cluster of paintings adorning the gallery walls which appropriate 1930s Lithuanian posters promoting abstinence. Nearby, a bust of the Bishop Motiejus Valančius—a teetotaller who led the popular temperance movement in Lithuania in the mid-19th century—watches sombrely over proceedings.
As Boris Kremer evocatively attests, ‘If vodka is culture, and no doubt it is, then Kesminas’s still is the neo-rustic version of the alchemists’ melting pot and the art it spurts out is the panacea... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline