Everybody's watching the Atelier van Lieshout, but no one can say if their weapon designs, sex equiptment, and militia compounds are "just art" -- or something more sinister
Metropolis
May 2000
Joep van Lieshout is the ultimate provocateur. In mid-September, when we first e-mailed each other to arrange an interview location, here is what the founder of the controversial Dutch collaborative Atelier van Lieshout (AVL) suggested: "What do you think to do the interview in a military survivalist camp. Or a hippie commune. Or on an ecological farm. Or on a superfast cigar boat."
One week later, van Lieshout is at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) in North Miami, presenting slides of his functional sculptures in conjunction with a show of AVL's work. The first slide the Rotterdam-based artist shows is of himself looking like Rambo. In the photo he stands atop a Mercedes sedan that AVL has transformed into a pick-up truck. He is bare-chested and long-haired and wields a homemade machine gun in the air. While this still-like image flashes, van Lieshout says, "The nice thing about AVL is that you really can't get a description about who we are. Are we artists? Are we architects? Designers? Or just a couple of people having fun?" He laughs and proceeds to show a bewildering assortment of work, ranging from commercial products, like bathtubs and bars, to a massive mobile art lab for the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis called The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. When he presents an Alfa Romeo that's been turned into a chicken coop, the Modular Multi-Woman Bed; and La Bais-ô-Drôme, a furry "love" camper, the audience bursts out laughing. Then he shows sketches for a project the Atelier hopes to complete in the next two years: AVL-ville, a self-sustaining alternative-lifestyle paramilitary compound, complete with organic farms, communal living quarters, and facilities for making weapons and bombs - all run by power generators that use pig dung for fuel. By now the audience is visibly roused. Formerly amused faces seem to say, "Hey, wait a minute."
AVL's outrageous work is exhibited throughout the world, where it has sent the public and critics scrambling to discern art from design, fantasy from reality, good from bad from ugly. A 1998 AVL exhibition in Rabanstens, France, was shut down by the mayor for fear it would "form a catalyst for youth criminality."
By the end of the slide lecture the crowd wonders, Who is Joep van Lieshout? Is he an insightful artist providing us with provocative reflections on post-industrial society? Or is he just plain dangerous?
To start with, Joep van Lieshout is a robust man with an easy smile and a devilish glint in his eyes. At the opening of his exhibition at MoCA, he resembles a Central American drug lord in an off-white guayabera shirt and loose-fitting blue jeans with a naked woman and a machine gun embroidered on the back of one pant leg. He has Fifties rockabilly sideburns that, unlike his work, look hastily constructed, and angular, green-tinted glasses that accentuate the slope of his nose.
Van Lieshout has been called a virtuoso manufacturer, an expert handyman artist and a Libra who has difficulty reconciling his "urge for harmony with the insatiable beast in him." His work contains a desire for the past and a vision for the future. He's extremely intuitive, yet precisely mechanical. He's also a traditionally trained butcher and a race-car driver. "He's not a dictator," says Roy Aerts, former project coordinator and general builder for AVL, "but he's an artist, and artists are nosy and naughty by nature. He's looking for the edge."
AVL is famous for blurring the lines between art, architecture and design: Its members call this "artist as contractor." Although van Lieshout refers to the atelier as his "hobby," the experimental sculptures only make up half of AVL's work. The other half consists of architectural commissions for private clients and cultural institutions, ranging from garden sheds to gallery facades, offices to cafeterias. AVL designed the bussing stations for the Museum of Modern Art café in New York and the bathrooms and bars for the Grand Palais convention center in Lille, France, a collaboration with architect Rem Koolhaas that put the group on the map.
Van Lieshout founded the collaborative in 1995. He was only 31, yet he was fast becoming known for his "multiples" -- crude fiberglass furniture and sanitary facilities that resembled mass-produced items. Critic compared the work to something you might see at IKEA, but van Lieshout doggedly called the products "sculpture," refusing to concede a distinction between his blatantly commercial work and art. His fans wondered if this was a nod to Marcel Duchamp -- a made-to-order toilet rather than a urinal ready made. The confusion caused a stir and ultimately resulted in larger commissions. Furniture led to freestanding structures; bathrooms led to entire interiors. As the workload mounted, van Lieshout began assembling a crew to help with the production. Today, employs 15 artists,designers ("no experience necessary"), fabricators, and administrators.
For his first solo exhibit, at the Museum Boymans van Beuningen in Rotterdam (1990), van Lieshout presented a 24-foot-long polyester resin restaurant bar, replete with working taps. With its streamlined form, rigid geometry, and gleaming silver fixtures, it resembled nothing more than the archetypal bar -- except that it was really long. "That bar reminded [one art historian] of a bright orange Richard Serra, but a Richard Serra would not be moved into the restaurant to serve as a bar afterwards," van Lieshout explains in the show's catalog. "Mine will. It's been bought and as far as I'm concerned they can charge it to the fixtures and fittings budget. That really interests me: When it is in the restaurant with the beer tap fitted and the refrigeration and stacks of glasses, it no longer be a work of art? And if it is one floor higher in an empty white room, is it then no longer a bar?"
Designers and architects are drawn to AVL's innovative forms and controversial content. Making a small space appear large, considering how a person moves through a room, and producing products in unlimited multiples are activities more often associated with design than fine art. "[He] appropriates the language and tools of design to enact a real design process," says Paola Antonelli, curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. "He designs beautiful objects that really fulfill a function, however new and arbitrary, in a thoughtful and efficient way."
But van Lieshout boasts that his work is not designed, that its inspiration is drawn from the mundane and visceral side of life. "The outhouses and beds are directly related to life -- eating, sleeping, shitting," he says. Then he describes AVL's largest "sensory deprivation chamber," a rambling self-sufficient abode called Tampa Skull, explaining how its jagged blue exoskeleton was completely unplanned, the result of combining the kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom into one ship-like hull. "We reduced the space to a minimum, without caring how it looks," he says."It looks nice, but we didn't design it."
Like an advertising firm or a novelist, van Lieshout is a highly skilled manipulator of symbols. He freely subverts slick commercialism and bourgeois desire to make quasi-Marxist statements -- a sort of visual playon words. The Mercedes sedan that van Lieshout began his lecture with is the ultimate status symbol. When he transformed it into a pick-up truck, he was placing utility on top of luxury or desire. By rigging a 57mm cannon to it, he made the Mercedes into a dangerous war machine. In van Lieshout's hands, such provocative symbols become witty comments on postindustrial life: its banal habits, secret desires, and lurid fetishes. A 6-foot-long brown "study skull" contains only a bed and a desk, because what else is there to do but work and sleep and sleep and work? Tampa Skull is equipped with a single cooking appliance -- a deep fryer. The sink is a mere two inches deep since Americans only eat fast food and seldom wash dishes. These one-liners appear in many of AVL's sculptures, but the work itself is too multilayered to be considered in simplistic terms.
Van Lieshout's incarnation as twisted engineer began long before he studied sculpture at the Rotterdam Academy of Art. He grew up in the picturesque town of Ravenstein, where for play he drew blast furnaces and experimented with converting dog feces into fuel. His father, a welder and machinist, died when the artist was 9, and his influence on van Lieshout was profound. You might say that the artist's respect for highly skilled handicrafts is an homage to a hard-working father who practiced an undervalued trade.
When he was a teenager, van Lieshout discovered a how-to-succeed manual from 1532 that would indelibly shape his life. The book was Machiavelli's The Prince, which espoused an anarchistic individualism that makes Horatio Alger look like Caspar Milquetoast. "Machiavelli thinks that the human being, in his most basic being, is a bad person. He always wants to increase his power and his wealth," van Lieshout explains."You can always count on that. I accept that the world is bad and that you need money and that people do everything for money and power. You can live very well in this world as long as you understand how it works." Although Machiavellism is not the most humane way to structure a society, it's not a bad tool for forging a career as an artist.
Critics get embroiled over whether van Lieshout is a designer or an artist. But they often overlook a more confounding philosophical split in his personality. His worldview is fueled by Machiavelli's notion of anarchistic individualism: l'état c'est moi, so to speak. Yet his sympathies lie with Marx: l'état c'est...ours. When asked how he reconciles these disparate philosophies, he gives a huge smile and a shrug but no answer.
In his work you'll find further contradictions, namely an attraction to and a repulsion from mass culture. His mobile homes, for instance, embrace icons like the open highway and the Rambo-like vigilante who lives outside of the law. Yet the skulls and sensory-deprivation helmets convey a desire to retreat from the world and all its crass commercialism. America's wholesale freedom from tradition is seductive, but at what cost? As cities like Rotterdam become more immersed in a service economy, AVL reacts to what it calls the culture of "time is money," which is willing to forgo complicated handicrafts for bottom-line profit.
AVL's art is also a response to a world that values convenience over self-sufficiency. Van Lieshout's mantra is "Do it yourself." To demonstrate how far society has come from simple basics such as producing one's own shelter, furnishings, and food, van Lieshout once had traditional butchers teach him how to slaughter and prepare a pig. He published the techniques in Atelier van Lieshout: A Manual. In 1997, when the artist showed a mobile home, an information kiosk, and a modular building system at Museum Boymans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam and Kölnischer Kunstverein in Cologne, he convinced both museums to publish this do-it-yourself guidebook in lieu of the standard catalog. He filled it with detailed step-by-step plans for working with fiberglass, lumber and other materials so that "the skilled handyman who can't afford a genuine van Lieshout" could now construct his own - a notion that is in direct opposition to art as a precious, one-of-a-kind object.
As one museum director has noted, AVL's work may be too big for the world-let alone a small venue like Miami's MoCA. Aside from three tumor-like sensory deprivation helmets that hang from the ceiling for visitors to try on, most of the show's sculptures are located on the lawn behind the museum and at a separate gallery in Miami's Design District. Trudging through wet grass on a dark, rainy night to reach AVL Hospital seems appropriate, and not only because van Lieshout boasts that his artwork is waterproof. More importantly, the piece has been placed outside the walls of a museum, where its potential to function seems real.
AVL Hospital is a full-scale medical suite with a waiting room, bathroom, nurses station, operating room and recovery room all condensed into a 40-foot shipping container. Strewn about the container are antique medical instruments: an oxygen mask, forceps, restraints used to hold down a human body during surgery-implements that doctors in a shoddy army field hospital might use. "Who knows," van Lieshout says with relish, "could be a doctor in there or maybe it's a pervert." Visitors are supposed to feel queasy; the the operating table, for example, is too close to the toilet to be sanitary. On this night, the "practitioner" stands near the operating table, chatting with a local reporter while museumgoers mutter remarks about Waco and Oklahoma City.
AVL Hospital is one of the more daring sculptures at the Miami exhibit because it represents a realized component of AVL-ville, the commune-like utopia that is the present focus of the Atelier. The idea for AVL-ville arose when the collective was commissioned to render a city plan for a new development in Almere, Flevoland, a large province in the center of Holland. Instead of presenting blueprints for subdivisions, AVL suggested building a mobile-home factory that would produce 30,000 trailers. Residents who buy one of these cheap, self-sufficient vehicles could live anywhere in the province or move around freely like nomads. And of course, unlike other planners, AVL threw in a new economy and said residents would be free to make their own alcohol, drugs, and weapons. Furthermore, they'd only have to work one day a week-in AVL's factory. The city rejected AVL's plan as too extreme, to which van Lieshout's responded, "Why don't we do it ourselves? As he later told his slide-show audience, "It's nice to have our own free state, our own village where we can do our own stuff."
So AVL began building a village container by container. Many of the containers evoke grisly subcultures and survivalists who live on the fringes of society. The Workshop for Alcohol and Medicines is outfitted with stills, for distilling moonshine, and herbs for mixing tonics. ("The medicine is actually very good," van Lieshout says. "It's really very powerful to have for stress and sleeplessness and overweight.") The Workshop for Weapons and Bombs contains a lathe, mills, welding machines and a laboratory for making explosives from soap, fertilizer, sugar, aspirin,alcohol, aluminum powder and urine. The AVL Canteen is a mobile mess hall. And the Autocrat is a survival-unit mobile home affixed with a trough for collecting rainwater and an exterior kitchen for slaughtering large animals. While Autocrat was almost entirely forged by hand, AVL's soon-to-be-finished "sex containers" (with different designs for men and women) will use high-tech robotics-such as a blowjob machine -- to wryly mimic the real thing.
Despite the uneasy content, the most challenging aspect of the village components isn't that they suggest the Unabomber, a mad doctor, or a pervert, but that they exist outside of the conventional environments for art. In a typical art installation, the white walls of a gallery anchor the viewer to safety, reminding him that this is all performance. Van Lieshout pushes it one step further. In an emergency you could probably use AVL Hospital-but would you want to?
AVL is part of a small but influential movement of artists who create functional art; think of Andrea Zittel or Jorge Pardo. "It's happening globally," says Jade Dellinger, co-curator of the MoCA exhibit. "Art of the late 20th century brings together art and life. Much of the art of the moment is indistinguishable from reality or how it functions in the world."
"About 15 to 20 artists out there are doing this cross-functional thing," says Jack Tilton, whose Soho gallery was the first American gallery to show van Lieshout's work. "It's in the air to mix science with art, the real world with art. Joep was ahead of the curve." On a rainy September morning, Tilton is flipping through the AVL Manual. He's in the cluttered basement of the gallery, which van Lieshout tore down and rebuilt in a single week for a show in 1993.
"He's an amazingly hard worker. He works two to three times harder than everyone else works," Tilton says, gesturing upstairs to the gallery where workers are watering the new cement floor. "These guys tore up our floors in a day. Joep is even stronger. He can build an entire house in a day, not including fixtures. He works with speed and efficiency. He's very hands-on. He rebuilds cars. He races cars. He comes up with an idea and decides to make a better one," he says. "He's always into this machinery stuff -- machine guns, an organ-like instrument, making sausages. The functional sort of Bauhaus work is always in there. The stills and meat-packing and guns combine the real world -- the functional world -- with art."
The first time van Lieshout approached Tilton was in 1988, with a sculpture that stacked beer crates and pavement tiles into a standardized system. Tilton says he didn't initially relate to the work. But four years later in Amsterdam, Tilton visited a gallery dealer's loft, where he was completely taken by a van Lieshout piece: a fiberglass unit that combined a kitchen, a bathroom, and bookshelves. "I was amazed at how much was going on within that little space, and there was still room in the apartment," he recalls.
Tilton flips to another page of the AVL manual, a photo of a bed in a corrugated metal box. "He actually sleeps in that thing," he says. "It's hard to believe! He's an obsessive, hard-living guy."
The box, which hung suspended over the AVL studio for years, was the first of what AVL calls its "slave units," alcove-sized rooms that have a specific function, almost as if they were pieces of furniture. These small units are interchangeable; they can snap off and onto different locations of a house or "master unit." The kitchen can be switched with the bathroom, the bedroom with the study, and so on, creating infinite variations and a flexible layout. It is only natural that one who is to be free from the law -- as in AVL-ville -- should first be master of his home. Put the home on wheels and Buckminster Fuller meets Easy Rider.
The 1995 Mobile Home for the Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, the Netherlands, contains a master unit and four slave units: a bulbous sleeping alcove reminiscent of the sensory-deprivation helmets; a streamlined bathroom that from the outside looks like a porta-potty; a study resembling a clapboard house; and a kitchen about the size and shape of a turnpike tollbooth. When the Central Museum in Utrecht commissioned AVL to design a new office, the collective bolted a slave unit to a third-story window of an otherwise traditional brick building. This anachronistic add-on now juts out of the building's classical exterior like a gigantic viewfinder. Likewise the Walker Art Center's semi-tractor-trailer-turned-artmobile, is the largest of AVL's master-slave units. When it isn't coursing through Minneapolis, it's parked in the museum's sculpture garden, plugged into a black clapboard shack.
One morning toward the end of his stay in Miami, van Lieshout is looking at photos of his 1996 road trip in the fur-lined Modular Mobile House, his first camper, which he drove from New York City to California via Winnipeg. On that trip he visited several trailer parks and a mobile-home factory, gathering inspiration. (He was also stopped by Canadian customs officials who had no trouble discerning art from reality. They detained the artist for five hours, ransacked his van, and confiscated his Pistolet Poignee Americane, a hybrid between brass knuckles and a small functional pistol that he designed to be worn as a ring.) After flipping through the snapshots, we climb into his rental car and go touring. A tape of Bachata music from Santa Domingo is playing and van Lieshout, who wears a crisp peach guayabera and mustard-brown linen pants, drums a steady rhythm with his hands as he drives. "It's my favorite music. Very beautiful, very sensitive, very pure. I wish I could put this type of sensitivity into my work," he says without a hint of irony.
We drive along Biscayne Boulevard, once the primary highway of the area, now a fraying road lined with strip malls. We don't pass any military survivalist camps, so we decide to scout out North Miami Trailer Park, a down-and-out neighborhood crowded with ancient mobile homes in various states of decay. Cardboard boxes line windows still taped for the last hurricane. Peeling metal awnings link trailer to trailer. It reminds van Lieshout of the shantytowns of Sao Paulo, Brazil. "I could live in a place like this," he says, pausing, no longer the provocateur."But I'd like it a little nicer." He wanders the dirt roads of the trailer park, he notices simple expressions of life everywhere, as people with limited resources and confined spaces extend their homes onto their small front lawns. Among the trailers sit refrigerators, washing machines, tool sheds, sofas, and -- jutting out of more than one window -- homespun slave units. This self-made ingenuity inspires van Lieshout. "I like architecture that grows organically," he says. "It starts as a shed and every time they have a child it grows. They go and find some garbage, some boards and bricks, and build a room for the child. So you have this whole city, a shantytown -- more like animal houses -- and they grow and start to look like medieval cities. The people who live there are proud that they have built their own homes."
Those offended by AVL's antiestablishment ethos are often unaware that the studio operates like a conventional architecture firm, except that it builds the structures it designs. The crew members (including a part-time bookkeeper) go through a standard job-interview process and are hired for 40-hour-per-week contracts. Van Lieshout pays his team's wages, health-insurance coverage, and sick leave. The workday starts at 8:30 a.m. and ends at 5:30 p.m., stopping for a half-hour communal lunch. "Committing to the work is something one does on a voluntary basis," says Aerts, AVL's former project coordinator and general builder. "But if one doesn't, he'll find that AVL is for him not the place to stay."
Ever since working on the AVL exhibit at Miami MOCA, Kevin Arrow, the museum's registrar, has been troubled. On the one hand, Arrows says, van Lieshout and his band of merry builders were among the most cooperative artists he had worked with. In fact, AVL ingeniously designed the exhibit so that all 32 pieces, including two huge skulls, fit inside the two largest container-sculptures, which can then be transported by freighter, train, or truck. But Arrow says he was still troubled. "We already have an anarchistic utopia in Colombia where there are slaves in compounds making bombs and cocaine," he told Aerts at the time. "It's AVL-ville for real, but it's scary. How is AVL-ville different from this?" According to Arrow, Aerts responded, "What we are doing is art."
And herein lies the crux of the present confusion-is AVL-ville potentially real or is this an art installation gone awry? Van Lieshout has often said that self-sufficiency is not only unrealistic but uninteresting; that weapons are no more than a conceptual part of his so-called "unconceptual" work, symbolizing the willingness to die for one's values; that he would never want to live in a claustrophobic skull.
In the end, each person has to decide where to draw the line. No easy answers will be provided by AVL. However, the fact that the sculptures evoke and provoke means that they are doing what art has always done and what art is supposed to do: challenge you to think. "Whatever you think of it, the work awakens your curiosity, it stimulates the imagination," van Lieshout once said.
And now, during the slide presentation, several people have already drawn the line. One woman, upset about the subversive content, storms out of the museum, demanding her money back. An art critic in the audience claims that this isn't art at all because it functions. As the audience grows more amused and confused by the collective's outlandish work, van Lieshout's grin turns into a wide, wide smile.
© 2000 Melissa Milgrom
Back to Articles Page