Interview with Antistrot

Antistrot // An Interview with David Elshout, Charlie Dronkers & Johan Kleinjan

By Ben Zoltowski

Angry gorillas, moaning siliconed honeys, masked velociraptors and astronauts sucking on rocketships -- either roleplayers in your weird and disquieting late-night ID excursions, or characters typically found helping to comprise the graphic, shitstorm landscape of an Antistrot mural. With its ever-expanding roster of unabashed comic-book-aping illustrators, painters, performance junkies and bands that would make Gwar proud, Antistrot is currently Rotterdam’s most notorious art collective. Originally born out of a blatant, mutual detest towards one Professor  trot at the Willem de Kooning Academy, the core members vowed to bind together -- and end that unquestioned tyranny that is the strange expectation to imbue art with any kind of morality.

As its roster of players continues to mutate, so does Antistrot’s scope of work. Notebook sketchings and hand-drawn schoolboy fanzines have graduated to full-fledged wallscape paintings exhibited in top galleries worldwide (including 3rd Ward’s). Religious iconography, sexual deviance, apocalyptic warzone mayhem -- none of it sacred and all of it inextricably related (and vital) to some overblown, oversaturated pop culture. The only commandment Antistrot never dare defy is that of a simultaneous creationism -- no one’s their own artist and multiple members must be present when the work goes down. Having recently adopted two Japanese fashion designer sisters (fondly deemed “Goblins”), David Elshout, Charlie Dronkers and Johan Kleinjan of Antistrot sat down with us to talk B-movies, gonzo porn and the Situationist movement of the 1960’s to which they seem (to us, at least) so directly in line with. Val Kilmer inevitably comes up too.

BZ: Is it sort of an Antistrot law that everyone must be present and on time?

CD: (Laughs) No way, that’s impossible. There’s just one person always on time, that’s David.

DE: (Laughs) Do you really think artists show up each time, on the right time? It’s sort of a Utopian idea; at rare times it becomes reality.

BZ: But what happens if you catch Johnny McGee doodling before everyone gets there? Because I think it should be punishment by heart-extraction ala Temple of Doom.

DE: I don’t know who Johnny McGee is.

CD: At this very moment, I’m redefining Love and Peace in my inner-self, so I guess I would just smile at him and say, “All will be fine”... after one of us made a phone call to Bailey, who does a decent job with heavy machinery.

DE: You know, I was talking about this subject just yesterday. A guy where I’m making a mural said, “Ya know, my 6000 Euro watch got swiped today... I think by that cleaning woman.” I say to him, “Ya know, people in Antistrot are looking for a proper scapegoat as well, to blame all their bullshit problems on.” Then it dawned on me: the idea of a scapegoat for the whole city of Rotterdam. Someone you can drive out of town in an angry mob, covered in tar and feathers. Or nail him to a huge cross in Blaak square with rusty 12-inch nails, and hurl rotten eggs at him, shouting, “You asked for it, you bastard!” All persons involved, would feel absolved of sin, carefree, set free, afterwards.

BZ: Hmmm... Have you guys ever been working on a painting, looked over at what someone else is sketching out and thought, “Goddamnit, that’s totally worthless. I hate the direction he’s taking this in,” and actually stopped what you’re doing just to kick his ass? Or is letting it all go vital to the process?

CD: That happens, but it’s not so important. It’s more like letting go. You can’t control the process anyways.

JK: I let it go. David and Silas [Schletterer] are sometimes like that.

DE: It’s hard to see when a guy is doing something on autopilot. When I work on something for two afternoons, and it gets crossed for a large part, that hurts my ego. Ego is certainly not allimportant, but it is the mold that holds the cake, whether I like it or not. You can choose to make a lame pun about it, or have a deep discussion, which sometimes results in not painting for three months. Or, decide that it’s not important, just let go. But then how do you take it to the next level if you’re totally cool about it?

BZ: Good question actually. More importantly though: When you’re all working together, is there one of you that’s more weirdly porn-obsessed than the others? Like the kid in grade school that was always drawing giant cocks and people fucking in their notebooks? Just say yes and tell me who it is.

DE: Yes, I’m the kinky pin-up guy. Bruno [Ferro Xavier da Silva] is the dirty, gritty, funky guy. Johan likes to draw hairy guys with flaccid penises. Bruno and Michiel [Walrave] sometimes pick up on that vibe. Paul [Börchers] is into the Japanese porn, exploding babies and such, and has a long flowing hair fetish.

BZ: Why are they so weird?

DE: Jacked-up sexual tension I guess. Some of them are real-life players, others are even bigger players, in their mind. I don’t know which is weirder. Not weird at all I guess, probably just healthy sex drive, considering the age bracket.

CD: It’s not so much to do with weirdness, but more like mixing everything together. I think there’s not an explicit focus on porn at all.

DE: You know, the Dutch, the majority of Europeans, consider Americans as very prudish. The only place where we had the same kind of problems with explicit content was Poland, which is a deeply conservative Catholic country.

BZ: Well, I’ve heard that in Rotterdam, grade school teachers will slap you in the face with a splintered ruler for drawing all those dirty things in your notebook. That’s true, right?

JK: Yes. (Speaking in Dutch) On gristelijke and reformatorische scholen met den bijbel.

DE: (Laughing, hands over a crudely drawn cartoon on notebook paper.) Check out this drawing. She says “Yes!, Deeper!” The guy says, “Okay, what you want.” It was snatched from a school kid by Bruno’s ex. We used it for our Cyberstort magazine in 2004. At the Antistrot studio, we have a whole collection of handwritten death threat letters, letters saying, “You’ll never see your kids again!,” homemade porn Polaroids made by junkies and drunkards. But the prize of it all is a wonderful, handwritten junkie diary. It’s about a guy’s obsessive love for “Chrissy.” It starts with phrases like, “Yesterday we wanted to visit Chrissy’s mother, but the goddamned smack tied us down all day.” Later on it’s like, “Chrissy went to visit this guy yesterday. She came back with 150 Euro. The good thing is, she said she had to do nothing to get it.” And it ends with sentences like, “Now I’m going to make my final big score, as to finally make Chrissy my wife.” The diary ends there, which sort of is an exciting, eerie, unresolved end of this story.

BZ: Sounds like a goldmine for Found Magazine. So personally, I’m always looking for some sonic equivalent to visual art. For me, the cut-up, sugary chaos of Black Dice’s music always springs to mind when looking at your stuff. I don’t really care if I’m wrong. Aside from the music Antistrot creates, who – or what – is the auditory counterpart to your visual work?

CD: A sonic equivalent… Times Square… a hundred screaming babies… some V2 rocket engines… crashing Formula-1 cars… and afterwards a huge Greek wedding thing where they smash plates and stuff at the end.

DE: Well, personally, I’d say Funkadelic/Parliament on their “Mothership Connection” tour.

BZ: Why hasn’t Val Kilmer been incorporated into any of your paintings?

CD: ‘Cause he’s a pussy.

JK: I don’t know him. Maybe because I grew up without a TV.

DE: We like Charles Bronson, Clint Eastwood, James Brown, Michael Jackson, AA Bronson, porn stars, true American icons. To me, Val Kilmer has a very plain face, and a totally uninteresting personality. Hope I’m not dissing your own personal favorite fetish.

BZ: Well, were you guys aware that Val claims that if he plays an imprisoned murderer in a movie, that he knows more about being a murderer than a person who’s actually killed someone in real life?

DE: (laughs) He is your fetish! I don’t know. That sounds like the most pompous quote a guy could make. I guess he should direct and headline all his movies. He could even make a biopic about Antistrot, like the Schnabel movie about Basquiat. Do you think there’s a link between Val Kilmer, Basquiat and Julian Schnabel?

BZ: Mmmaybe...

DE: The combination of Val Kilmer, Basquiat and Julian Schabel would be typical Antistrot stuff.

BZ: So are you going to incorporate Kilmer or not?

CD: I see a vision of Val Kilmer in the Batman suit, being raped by Basquiat, and Schnabel dressed up as carrots.

BZ: A-ha. Okay. So. When half of you survive after the Antistrot learjet crashes into the Andes, and the survivors are starving, who’s the first of the collective to be eaten?

CD: (shrugs) Um… I guess the first one who dies.

DE: Ahhhh… my favorite fantasy when I was 20-years old. I even thought about it last week. In my fantasy I do extremely well. In reality, I’d probably slip off a slippery ledge within 20 minutes, missing the whole climax. (fantasizing) Tumbling down the abyss, I cast a final glance upwards. My eyes are misty by the draft.  Vaguely I see two indistinct silhouettes: one of them is raising a rock to cave in the head of the other. Is that Paul or Johan? I can’t really see… Splat!

BZ: Perfect. So culturally, is there any hope for redemption? Or have we degraded as despicably as Guy Debord and the Situationists predicted in the 60’s?

CD: Remarkable you’re noticing, because I think the link between Antistrot and the Situationists is incredibly strong. Although they themselves wouldn’t see it that way. At this moment it may look to some people as a huge “copy-paste” idea, but the way Antistrot approaches everything, and the results that we end up with, are very now-reflecting and a good visual representation of our more and more visually-derived culture. Not only in our paintings, but also in our 3D stuff and performances.

DE: People will tire of all the superficial bullshit and focus on inherent value instead. Until the next hype-boom comes along.

BZ: When is Antistrot going to ditch Rotterdam and move into Williamsburg’s luxury condos with the rest of us boundary-pushing, starving NYC artists?

DE: (laughing) Everybody seems to think, especially in Rotterdam, that we’re in the money nowadays because we did a few U.S. shows. The opposite is true. We’ve never been more broke. In Rotterdam, if necessary, you can get by with 400 Euro a month. The whole Antistrot thing is based on this luxury. But nine people? $2000 rent? No health plan? We’d be butting in each other’s heads for real within a month. Antistrot is very anarchic, democratic, spoiled and European. We’re not business-like at all. It would be every man fend for himself, ruining the whole base of the Antistrot philosophy.

BZ: C’mon, just do it. I’ll give you a tour next time you’ve got an opening here. Speaking of which: When is the next NYC Antistrot debacle going down?

DE: When 3rd Ward invites us again!

CD: Bring it on. We’ll start sharpening our spears.