The crown of digestion – Weekend – Kommersant
[ad_1]
Everything in the name of man, for the good of man – in essence, all masters of art and design should subscribe to the Soviet party slogan. Atelier Van Lieshout (AVL), working in the border zone between the one and the other, also appreciates and loves a person very much. Especially the taste.
Man is the highest value among all the values of the world – few people today are ready to fully and unconditionally agree with the postulates of old-fashioned humanism, as does Joop Van Lieshout, a Dutch artist, designer and architect who has been working under the brand name Atelier Van Lieshout since 1995 ( so that everyone thinks that a whole team is working in AVL, and not a single creator, a kind of Renaissance demiurge and romantic genius). Of course, the highest. And when this highest value destroys the rest of the values of the world, having gobbled up everything and everyone in the environment, it will draw energy and food from itself – after all, a person can be used for spare parts, that is, for organs, blood, sperm, for meat, for biogas, after all, you can make soap out of a person (there are precedents in history). Sustainable development, conscious consumption, waste-free production, renewable energy, environmental friendliness, ergonomics and other bright ideas are cruelly ridiculed in the most famous work of AVL – “City of Slaves”. At the same time, it ridicules the entire history of art, from primitive times to the present day. The self-sufficient concentration camp of the “City of Slaves” as a whole, with all its plans, maps, graphs, diagrams and layouts explaining the structure of an ideal closed system in which the best devour the worst, is reminiscent of Ilya Kabakov’s total installation projects – communist and capitalist dystopias are surprisingly similar. Fiberglass figurines of citizens, especially those who were culled according to the laws of socio-biological Darwinism, refer to the classics of modernist plasticity, to Wilhelm Lembruk, Alberto Giacometti or Henry Moore. And separate scenes – say, slaughterhouses, where little men put into non-waste consumption are disassembled into useful components, parody the “shops” of the cheerful Flemings with Frans Snyders at the head (the meat industry is Joop van Lieshout’s favorite plot).
Man is the measure of all things for both art and design, and Joop Van Lieshout, sculptor-designer, happily combines these two seemingly opposite professions. He is generally a master at uniting struggling opposites. For example, the organic and constructivist lines in modernism, the subject of its endless provocations and sabotage. Who would have thought that the spermatozoa companions of the “Last Supper” and the cast-iron-beamed guardian of “Utopia”, the first are the children of Constantin Brancusi and Hans Arp, the second is a descendant of Jacob Epstein, were made by the same hand in the same 2020 from of the same material (branded Lieshout fiberglass). The same heterogeneous form-creating principles are found in furniture, lamps and water closets, for the design of which waste-free AVL has a special passion: on the left – Gerrit Rietveld, on the right – Philippe Starck. No, this is not postmodern omnivorousness – this is postmodern irony, bringing modernist intentions to the limit.
The organic line rests on “BarRectum”: the AVL mobile bar looks like a huge poop – the metonymic resemblance to feces is obviously implied, but in fact, the structure and appearance accurately reproduces the human gastrointestinal tract, from the tongue to the anus, in which the emergency exit is located , except that the segment of the colon, contrary to anatomy, is enlarged, since it houses a bar room. Biomorphism is the favorite toy of the AVL, it is implicitly present even in the constructivist in spirit and strictly geometric in form “Domestikator”, removed from the Tuileries at the request of the director of the Louvre as “a work of an overtly sexual nature.” “Domestikator” is a hybrid of sculpture and building: inside it is a house with exhibition and living quarters, outside – a sculptural group in the form of a biped merged with a quadruped in zoophilic sexual intercourse. The work, explains Joop Van Lieshout, speaks of a man who conquered nature, put animal husbandry on an industrial footing and conducts it with not too humane methods, but for some reason bestiality remains one of the last human taboos. As for constructivism – not so much a specific direction, but the general spirit of the avant-garde, striving to improve the universe – then all the anti-utopian projects of AVL, the City of Slaves, the New Tribalist Labyrinth and Cryptofuturism, bring its ambitious claims to their logical conclusion.
And yet, AVL should not be written down in the ranks of cynic postmodernists who scoff at the naivety of modernism and equate avant-garde and totalitarianism (although the alliance of futurism and fascism is one of Joop van Lieshout’s favorite topics). In the postmodern 1990s, the creator of AVL was more than serious in his activist endeavors. It is now AVL that custom-makes home, hotel and office furnishings (the funny thing is that such mockingly biomorphic furniture is damn comfortable), as well as decorating museum cafes and toilets in its signature fecal-genital style (the fate of any avant-garde revolution is to rest in a museum). Early on, Joep Van Lieshout dreamed of reforming medical furniture to domesticate and humanize the hospital, and became famous for the A-Portable project, a mobile abortion clinic commissioned by Dutch human rights activist and gynecologist Rebecca Gompertz and her activist non-profit organization Women On Waves, which allows women to countries where abortion is prohibited, terminate a pregnancy in a floating clinic drifting in neutral waters. Over time, the medical utopia AVL degenerated into a “Hospital Bed” in the style of the “Dutch poor”, where a plywood couch a la Rietveld is hung with antediluvian canisters, bottles and tin buckets.
In general, Atelier Van Lieshout began with a utopia of escapism – desperate attempts to escape from the capitalist world. Joop Van Lieshout designed mobile homes, self-contained mobile living systems for today’s Robinsons, who want to escape from an imperfect society wherever they look. Escape to the ends of the world, of course, did not work out – one of the first AVL mobile homes, Modular House Mobile, drove to Milan and parked at the Prada Foundation. Joep Van Lieshout set out to build his ideal autonomous city in the abandoned warehouses of the port of Rotterdam – the police closed the AVL-Ville commune a year later. This art, in essence, is very soiled: Holland as the birthplace of capitalism and fashionable Dutch design as the highest manifestation of this indestructible capitalist spirit, probably, should have given rise to such enfant-terrible. Autonomous houses for hermits in case of depletion of all natural resources, AVL is still developing – in the current realities, when thoughts about nuclear winter have moved from the pages of science fiction books to the pages of newspapers, these semi-joking developments take on an ominous meaning. As you know, the vanitas genre reached its peak in the art of the Netherlands on the eve of and after the world’s first bourgeois revolution – with the help of this old Dutch AVL instrument, it is still responding to the challenges of accelerationism today. “A healthy mind in a healthy body,” reminds Joop Van Lieshout, introducing his “Wellness Skull” to the public: the spa facilities are enclosed in a sculpture house in the form of a giant skull – when the sauna is on, steam pours out of the eye sockets. One of AVL’s latest design inventions is the “Back to the Future” watch: from time to time, the high-precision device goes crazy, its hands start to dance or spin wildly in the opposite direction of historical progress.
Subscribe to Weekend channel in Telegram
[ad_2]
Source link
