During the opening of the Berlin Biennial in March, when I ran into Erik van Lieshout in the Auguststrasse, he told me he was exhausted. It was late by the time he had finished installing his work, and meeting the deadlines to get it finished on time had taken its toll. It is logical enough – the artist who works like a man possessed in order to produce as good a work as possible for an important biennial.
But, Erik added, that was not all. The work was about him – as in his case, it always is. And he had had a run-in with himself during the filming of Rotterdam-Rostock, a video work that the public was able to view in a renovated container halfway down the Auguststrasse. Later that day, after I had seen his diary-like review of his bicycle trip through Germany, I realized that for Erik van Lieshout, presenting a new work was more than just another creative undertaking. Invariably, it is an exposé of his naked self.
‘Real life’ has slowly come to dominate the work of Erik van Lieshout. This development has run parallel to the increasing importance of the video camera in his artistic practice. His first video work, EMMDM, made in 1999, still had strong references to ‘low culture’ visual vocabulary (in this case, Hip Hop and MTV), and at the same time could easily be explained in the context of his drawing, painting and sculpture, in which raw energy and provocations against decorum and respectability came together in clear images. The role played by the artist in EMMDM was a projection of existing ideas from black popular culture, inspired by the burgeoning hegemony of Hip Hop as a worldwide language for young people.
Years before the term ‘bling bling’ had established itself, this video, in which two white men, made up as blacks, steal a car from two black men, was a comment on the materialistic hedonism of youth culture. The role of the artist here was a confusing one, toying with racial and cultural identities, creating a caricature of our complex relationship to ‘the other’, even though it is never quite clear exactly what moral statement is being made. The main protagonists are brought-to-life cartoon characters from some politically incorrect no-man's-land, somewhere in between the famous Dutch series, Sjors & Sjimmie and Beavis & Butt-Head – grotesque exaggerations and interminably flat, as though they had walked straight out of one of Van Lieshout’s paintings. With the video works that succeeded Lariam, made in 2001 and the first after EMMDM, the artist had found a way of giving that flatness a real form: he introduced real life. And he introduced himself, artist Erik van Lieshout, as protagonist, reporter, exhibitionist and patient all rolled into one.
To talk about his work, I met Erik in his real life, which was happening – momentarily at least – somewhere in Brabant. He was working on a commission for a private collector who had given him carte blanche to produce a new work. Van Lieshout immediately knew that this new work had to be about the collector himself. Just like the Moroccan youth in Respect, the Chinese in Fantasy Me and the Germans in Rotterdam-Rostock, here, as a social category, ‘nouveau riche’ is surrounded by the distinct clichés with which Van Lieshout likes to work. At the time of this writing, he has been filming for a month, totally committed, surrendered and submerged in his native region of Brabant. His client had lent him a fast Porsche n expensive sports car, and for as long as he was working on this project, he was living in an apartment in Eindhoven, so he could be as close as possible to the wealthy family.
‘A film like Up! (completed in 2005, in which Van Lieshout focussed on his difficult relationship with his mother. XK), bothers me, too. Do all those people really need to sit for a quarter of an hour watching an artist cry? But then I look at it again and think, yes, it works, it grabs you! It is about more than just that personal therapy – which is very important, by the way. I show things about life in a way that resembles life, but isn’t quite, because of the artificiality that comes with making a video work.
My objective is not to make the audience sit for 15 minutes watching an artist cry, but to stake out the lines from there that run through different domains: social, political and cultural. If you judge the work from within a frame of reference of art, it is hard not to think of Bas Jan Ader when you see the crying scenes. That is an art historical reference that evolved very naturally in the work. At the same time, I want the viewer to look at life in a different way, on a more socio-political level.
What does it mean for an individual to have to satisfy all kinds of conditions imposed on him from outside, by society? What are the norms that are required in our behaviour, and how anomalous or aberrant are you when you go beyond the limits, or when you set alternative norms for your own existence? How can you bend the existing rules in order to come closer to ‘real life’? That fascinates me. The films that I made together with my brother, Bart (Respect and Happiness, both from 2003), confronted me with those questions. He is someone who, on his own, just by being different, found alternatives for the realities of our society. Today, he runs a kind of “garden for the senses” for children in Rotterdam.’‘I am in search of moments of liberation for myself. Then I can just as well use those moments to drag the viewer with me into that vortex. I get something back for breaking those emotional barriers, something great. That is also where the power of a successful video comes from. You try to seek out the moment when the film is stronger than real life, without actually leaving real life behind. This is an interesting field of tension, because reality is always far stronger, much harder than art. You also see this in someone like Elke Krystufek, whom I think is very good. There is also the same kind of intensification of reality in her work. She is not afraid to involve herself and tries to break through social role patterns, or to expose them in a way that crosses the line. I find that extreme approach – not excluding yourself – very interesting.
Extreme behaviour is no new thing in art, but it often has to do with performance, with the execution of a task within a fixed framework. What I find interesting is taking on everyday life with that extreme attitude, which is now a part of me. The artist comes together with his work. In fact, I do not like wild painting at all, but if you are like me and you decide to paint, it is wild painting that comes out. I can’t do anything about that. I would really like to have made Sarah Morris’s video, Los Angeles, but I couldn’t, because I do not have that detachment in me.’‘Everything: the editing, the rhythm, the aesthetics of the imagery. The editing is truly fantastic. It is hair-fine. It is so thin that you can almost hear the DVD spinning, but at the same time, it has depth, because it says a great deal about the way we look at the world – in this case, at Los Angeles, as an artificial place with that whole celebrity circus. It is impossible not to be seduced by the aesthetic of the video. I also find it a very political work, in the same way that I would like to make my own work political. Politics without explicitly talking about politics, but exposing the structures of human behaviour and the consequences they have for the world. In a certain way, like Sarah Morris, I also try to create my own science fiction. It looks like real life, but it is in fact a very strange representation of it.
‘Editing plays a major role in that. During the editing, by introducing changes in camera movement or with certain formal repetitions, for example, of the architecture in the background, or with spoken text, I try to make my work more enigmatic. During the filming, and later in the editing, I try to seek out image combinations that transcend reality and offer something extra. In this sense, it goes beyond documentary. Core van der Hoeven, my permanent editor, plays a very important role in that process. In the editing sessions, we are often at a stand-off. It is a process that is confrontational, full of conflict, but also very organic. He forces me to take a stand, and gives me ideas that I would not otherwise have. I want to tell a story, but so does he, and in the end, a film comes out of it that is right – but at the same time, it is not right. That twist is very important.’
Opening
