It is close to midnight and the artist Oleg Tansa is ripping through the park blocks of downtown Portland on his mountain bike. He had just launched—or rather, tepidly rolled—a Molotov cocktail brewed from an elixir that he calls “The Pressed Juice of Teen Spirit” from the side of a department store on SW 3rd avenue towards the police around the corner. Tansa’s confusing act, caught on camera by the artist Summer Gueldry, elicits no immediate reaction—usually such projectiles are thrown. To him, however, the act is a success. “Even I would never waste a bottle of Teen Spirit!” he scoffs. The leftover bottles of the spirit will later be served in the impromptu speakeasy Smarmy Bar he had installed in the large room of the Redundant Beach gallery. Though he usually considers himself an artist, tonight he is, in his words, a “usurper. But maybe only for my own ends.” He showed me a drawing on a napkin of a Janus-faced king. Held one way it showed the king wearing a crown. Flipped upside down, it showed a grisly skull, the crown now forming the skull’s lower chin. The piece adapted an artistic motif known as the occult cameo, which was used to great effect by the contemporary artist Seth Price as an emblem for art’s flexibility in the digital age. Tansa, who follows contemporary art closely, had adapted the motif for his own purposes. “The goal,” he proclaimed, pointing to the drawing, “is to kill the king—if only to show how we dead we already are. If are means to live, then the king is born again.”

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