Danius Kesminas Hughbris Darren Knight Gallery, May 7 - June 1

In a society to which art is peripheral, it is unsurprising that many artists will choose to negate art's capacity to address concerns of basic human interest, in favour of playing formalist games. A relatively new development is that the art world itself has come to constitute the form with which some artists work. Hughbris, an exhibition by Danias Kesminas, was a recent example.

Kesminas is a conceptual artist. In Hughbris, he turned his attention to art critic Robert Hughes's recent and notorious car accident in Western Australia. Almost in the manner of a forensic investigation, Kesminas had presented a clutch of newspaper reports on the crash and ensuing court case, and displayed page after page of court transcript around the gallery walls. This dry, unmediated material was set against more mischievous artefacts, whose authenticity was open to question. A compacted cube of steel, once a red, W.A.-registered Nissan, rested on a plinth as the show's centrepiece. This, we were assured, was the actual car in which Hughes crashed; the newspaper reports confirmed that Kesminas had bought it at a scrapyard for the price of three slabs of beer. Its transformation into a $20,000 sculpture did entail some work, for the paperback copy of The Fatal Shore poking out between folds of metal was surely a cheeky addition of the artist, setting up the recurring theme of Hughes's egotism. (Who but an egotist would have at hand, at every moment, their critically acclaimed bestseller?) Hung near the car-sculpture, a framed replica of an enormous fish alluded to the prize catch apparently retrieved from the wreck, complete with gold-lettered inscription boasting of the art critic's fishing prowess.

Aside from poking fun at Hughes's perceived pomposity, Kesminas's intention did not seem to be to pass comment on the incident. The artefacts had been assembled less as illustrations of an argument than as the agents of a conceptual turnaround. The exhibition returned Hughes's art-meets-life controversy (know-it-all critic who defines Australia from afar literally crashes back to reality) to the realm of art. Here, though, a prickly question arose: what insight or enjoyment did Kesminas's exhibition offer that could not have been gleaned from the event itself and its media coverage? There may have been a glimmer of imagination in the works purporting to be x-rays from Hughes's medical examination, which revealed the critic's anatomy to be inhabited by figures from the paintings of his beloved Goya. There was some ghoulish intrigue in seeing the car in which Hughes crashed, now scrap metal. Yet apart from these fairly cheap thrills, all Hughbris delivered to its art-world audience was the smug satisfaction of being in on the joke, an artistic achievement whose shallowness was probably equaled by much of that audience's eagerness to lap it up. Kesminas's work embodied much that is wrong with conceptual art in its current incarnations: its exclusive appeal to an audience of art-initiates, the frequent failure of the artist to make their source material add up to more than the sum of its parts, a banal aesthetic (demonstrating the hollow triumph of concept over form) and the retreat into a completely self-defined practice of art, as an alternative to the considerably greater challenge of relating positively to a tradition.

-Ernest Foster

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