The mood descends into an apocalyptic, paranoid stoner nightmare (calling on Pineapple Express) and ends on an elegiac, touching note for those lost to Covid and maybe for America itself. Tropes from digital culture, like robotic text-to-speech narration, blur with the surreal intrusions of Trump’s “grab them by the pussy” taunts, while Hillary’s email scandal haunts The Burbs-era Tom Hanks, who’s now an affable Bernie guy. The voice of Alex Jones torments the pristine cul-de-sacs with alt-right conspiracies. Annette Bening’s real-estate agent in American Beauty-the perfect proto-Karen, in retrospect-is now a girlboss Hillary supporter. Made with Soda Jerk’s ongoing UK-based collaborator Sam Smith, the 68-minute work shows recontextualized movie characters-glimpses of Bruce Dern as a Republican and Napoleon Dynamite as, well, himself-reacting to the increasingly hallucinatory vibe of life under despotic, Trumpian rule in an archetypical suburban America. Originally a joint commission between the Adelaide Film Festival and Samstag Museum of Art (there’s that art-film crossroads again), Hello Dankness arrives in the wake of that maelstrom and is reflective of a strangely familiar viewing experience: that of the unbordered, pluralistic mash-up, drawing on multifarious clips from the past to provide a new story for us to follow. Since then, the pair has become notorious for a form of firebrand, amorphous leftist art made from ill-obtained parts, and for being spiky agents of chaos in perpetual media motion. In 2018, Soda Jerk vanquished a small-minded antipodean media uproar, after a commissioning body repudiated their supposedly “un-Australian” work Terror Nullius, which used pirated films and TV to critique the malfeasances of Australian nationhood.
In response to everything from their collaboration with fellow cut-n’-pasters The Avalanches ( The Was, 2016) to their anti-copyright manifesto Hollywood Burn (2006), the arts press has only seemed capable of framing Soda Jerk through hyperbole (as if the pair’s beginnings in Sydney’s squatting and zine scene renders them admirably devious, daring little pirates who download audiovisual matter without permission, tear it to pieces, and construct new art from the detritus).
The early incandescence of gallery works like After the Rainbow (2009)-a deeply affective reflection on stardom, loss of self and Judy Garland’s decline-has given way to longer montages which anarchically cross the threshold from art space to movie theater. Currently based in New York, Soda Jerk consists of siblings Dominique and Dan Angeloro they are major artists in their home country, with serious institutional support and a burgeoning international reputation for experimental image-making from the frontlines of dystopia.
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