The present ecological crisis seems to demand a paradigm shift in
patterns of consumption and the methods by which we handle the mess
we’ve made. But how uncompromising should our strategies be? The Dutch
artist Joep van Lieshout, working under the name Atelier van Lieshout,
asks this question by proposing numerous solutions – some more realistic
than others, but almost all of them unsettling. Cannibalizing the
bloodless logic of design and urban planning, his work affects the
marriage of best intentions and unsavory methods. Curator Nadim Samman
visited van Lieshout in his Rotterdam studio to talk about his recent
work and decidedly provocative approach.
Your work frequently sets the themes of sustainability,
recycling, and efficiency within a disturbing, dystopian frame. It can
seem as though you are suggesting that the technical pursuit of these
goals can engender some exceedingly unsustainable ethical positions. How
should one read a series like Cradle to Cradle, for instance – a vision
of a closed loop of production and reuse in which humans are raw
material?
The goal is to create awareness. People are easily fixated upon things
that can seem important while ignoring more significant issues. For
example, everyone is currently super-obsessed by carbon dioxide but
there are bigger problems to think about, like over-consumption and the
death of privacy. Before our world will flood and the ice bears go
extinct the human race may already be wiped out. What I try to do is to
disturb regular thinking. Naomi Klein tells an interesting story in No
Logo: She says something like ‘when we were at university everyone was
thinking, talking and taking action for gender related issues, while
behind our backs something momentous was happening – industry was
globalized, with production outsourced to far away countries.’ She said,
‘we didn’t know it at the time, we didn’t see it, because we were
totally focused on our concerns.’ Similar general failures of perception
obtain now. My work turns around this understanding.
To go back to recycling – are you saying that it is not a good thing?
Our society has become hyper rational, with many decisions made on the
basis of Excel sheet outcomes and calculations. I have a love-hate
relationship with rationality. On the one hand it’s good to improve life
for humans and the world, at the same time it can be very dangerous. In
the universe of Cradle to Cradle I have completely hyper-rationalized
all decisions, leaving no ethics, only financial and sometimes crazily
instrumental decisions. The series is a warning about our society’s
rationalization.
What does your current series, New Tribal Labyrinth, bring to this thinking?
My works have more than one layer of meaning. That said, one agenda in
New Tribal Labyrinth is to recreate appreciation for raw materials and
simple products. Nowadays the whole world is obsessed and preoccupied by
merchandise, by consumption, by material goods that can be bought,
sold, and discarded for something new and better. There is little
awareness of products and where they come from; little appreciation for
raw material. Materials and products are cheap; labour is extremely
expensive. This is not a sustainable system. Here in the West we are all
in the service industry. There is hardly agriculture, hardly
production; basically everyone is in sales or marketing. We have to ask
ourselves how long this can continue. What I want to do is re-invent
real industry, to re-invent how to make steel, how to make textiles, and
bring a new spirit to these materials. If you make your own steel then
this material is much more important to you. If you make something
yourself it is for life.
In your New Tribal Labyrinth rituals are important…
Yes, in a way the series is a comment on religion, which seems to be
very far away from daily life today. Food or environment is the new
religion. I talk about worshipping nature, worshipping industrial
products, new rituals. At the same time I pervert religion because my
new rituals are a little cruel, or have to do with cannibalism –
breaking taboos.
Speaking of taboos – A lot of your works that have taken up the
theme of recycling have revolved around faeces and, to put it bluntly,
eating shit. In New Tribal Labyrinth the citizens of this world are
engaged in farming insects for food. Why are you drawn to the
unpalatable, the alimentary, when making works that take on a
social/economic issues?
Good question. I think it is curiousity. Maybe it is also a comment
against hypocrisy. Human beings tend to be hypocrites and forget a lot
of things.
Where does hypocrisy figure in the ideology of recycling?
It’s very clear – the biggest producer of carbon dioxide is the human
being. If you want to do something about carbon dioxide then start
killing people. Kill them and then they won’t pollute so much. The best
thing would actually be to sterilize people at birth. People don’t
realize that. They blame the car, they don’t blame themselves.
You’re being provocative but is this really your position?
I don’t know if it is really my position but I am challenged by the
idea. For example, people who are very old and sick can be kept alive
for a long time. Nowadays it is possible to live to a hundred. This
costs a lot of money, though, which has to be paid by someone. It also
pollutes a lot. Why don’t we give people an option at the age of
seventy: “you can choose to keep on living for the next thirty years and
we’ll take care of you, or you can commit suicide voluntarily and
you’ll get a rebate or money for your children.” Perhaps you get five
years on a Caribbean island and then you step out. Why not? This kind of
thinking is an edge or tripping point in my work, having to do with
morality or ethics and non-ethics. On the one-hand I propose to make new
factories for ethical reasons. On the other hand I propose that people
can kill themselves and get tax rebates. This whole question about the
relationship between rationality and ethics is one of my key concerns.
Power too, it seems. Your work is very concerned with autarky,
and it seems to invoke fascism. How do you go from making icons of brute
control – which one presumes are critical – to producing commissions
for corporate offices and government spaces? How do you convince theme
to take on the world of AVL?
One of the reasons that I made Slave City was because I was very much
interested in the holocaust. It was pursued in a completely rational
manner. We’re living now in extremely rational times and, as this
example demonstrates, rationality is dangerous.
Yes, but i’m talking about design commissions. In your art you
make works about naked power, and yet you find it easy to make furniture
for the corporate sector. How do these two aspects of your practice
come together? If I was working for a corporation and wanted a new
furniture setup I might get scared off by your other interests!
I’m a good designer, so that helps. And by doing this I can use the
money that I earn to produce things that no one wants to have. I rarely
have clients who say “the other work has too much deviant stuff in it so
we won’t buy your chair”. The thing with my work is that you never ever
know if it is serious or not, if it is good or bad.
When you produce a design commission for a corporate office do
you try to smuggle in a critical element? Or do you ever try to offer
the client a piece that might make their office feel a little more
sinister? What I mean to say is, do you consider yourself a secret agent
when producing these commissions?
Yes, I always try to do something but I’m not interested in provocation
as such. It’s too stupid on its own. I’m more interested in bringing in
some kind of imbalance. That’s one of my aims. Pure provocation –
confronting people with very sexual or fanatical stuff – is not.
Work that might seem unprovocative in Holland may be quite the
opposite elsewhere. Your sperm is about to go on five year display in a
central public space in Rotterdam. Does the Netherlands have a uniquely
open-minded approach to what public art can address or look like?
Dutch people are extremely pragmatic. The original commission was to
design public furniture for the square. It’s a huge square and not a
very cosy one, all asphalt, and there were little funds available. I
told them that with a little bit of money one can make something, but
not really the kind of work that the space deserves. I said “don’t buy a
bad work- rent a good one.” This way we have a big piece which makes
sense. They agreed. For the amount of money with which we could have had
some stupid tables and chairs we now have an artwork for five years.
It’s great for me because I get the piece back!
And there was no problem with the fact that this is a sperm?
That piece is about Darwinism, which is very much related to Fascism and
other dictatorial systems. On the other hand, it’s about nature and how
humans evolve. There’s a thin line between the good and bad things
about natural selection. That’s the whole piece. If you say it has to do
with sex then I say “sorry I don’t understand.” The work is about
nature and fascism.
So you can say to the local government commissioner in Rotterdam
that you want to put up a public sculpture about nature and fascisim
instead of picnic table and they’re say “great, no problem?”
I tell them it’s a tadpole.
There are images of totalizing systems throughout your work. Now
we’re in your studio, but it’s not just a studio it’s AVL Mundo. You’re
spreading out into the garden next door, and your studio manager tells
me you have designs on numerous buildings in the neighbourhood. What is
your agenda for this area? Why do you feel that you need to work in this
part of Rotterdam.
I make sculptures, I do design, architecture, and create
gesamtkunstwerks in which numberous individual pieces function together.
What I want is to create new worlds. I’m happy to sell a work but I’m
also very happy not to sell, so I can keep it and eventually build a
kind of universe in exhibition form. It’s one of my dreams that I would
like to accomplish. To do this I need a lot of works, I need some money
and I need a huge building. There are a lot of empty ones around here, I
just need to take one. This is a neighbourhood that will be developed
in the next ten/twenty years. Although it’s not completely in the centre
it is still very central, it’s near the subway, close to neihbourhoods,
and in between two towns that will grow together – making this a new
centre in twenty or thirty years time. My idea is to make something that
is publically accessible, something which has an ideological frame. Of
course I will make this thing for the public. The vision is something
between ideology, selfishness an messianism.
