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Emerging from the now legendary Sydney artists collective Imperial Slacks along with other newly significant artists such as Shaun Gladwell and Monica Tichacek, the all girl Kingpins have quickly acquired national and international visibility. This being Oz, getting a lot of favourable attention generally means also harvesting a whirlwind of vituperative commentary nourished in the toxic agar of peer group jealousy, miniscule public funding and limited exhibition possibilities: but not in this instance. Rhapsody Happens, which premiered recently at Artspace in Sydney, was the latest instalment in what for The Kingpins has become an extensive taxonomy of pheromone based mega fauna. Now it is the Biker who is espaliered in that immersive format extrapolated from equal parts video set, shallow panoramic space and old time cinema, that the Pins have made entirely their own. Go Girls! In Rhapsody Happens they have evolved beyond the three minute pop video model that characterised their earlier work while retaining not only some of that genre’s challenging disjunction between image and lyric but also its chaotic allegorical flux.
Drag used to mean the wearing by one sex of the vestmentary signifiers of the other, but more recently it has evolved into a way of renouncing the sovereignty of the ‘singular self’ in order to create a new space for a multiplicity of fictionalised personae usually suggested to us as ephemeral and elective identities by a variety of media sources. It is a centuries old romantic prototype—undead like the vampire, feasting preternaturally on a supine sub-cultural body conjured into being by music television, gothic cinema and public role playing, all sources that The Kingpins draw upon for what could be best conceptualised as a