The photo shows Joep van Lieshout, leaning on a self-made 50mm gun on the loading platform of his customized Mercedes pick-up truck. A man of the world, he is sporting a shirt with flags, held together round his stomach by a single button. His hair is long and he is wearing sunglasses. In one hand he is clutching a bottle of bourbon and a cigar. He is surrounded by some of his staff – three men and a woman – who also look like freebooters with their bare torsos, headscarves, sunglasses and dishevelled hair. Some of them are holding self-made machine-guns or bottles of liquor, or both. One of them – standing slightly apart from the rest – is leaning on the open door wearing protective goggles and has a bandage round his hand: people who play with fire get burnt. It is not clear whether they have just come back from some successful mission or whether they are just about to set off, or perhaps the whole thing is just a joke. Whatever, they seem to be enjoying themselves, judging from the huge grins on their faces. It looks like a still from a film or a cheap television series. Someone probably facetiously called them ‚The Good, The Bad and The Ugly‘, referring to Sergio Leone’s famous Spaghetti Western. Maybe that is what they are all laughing about on the photo. „We’ll keep that in“, somebody retorted, and ‚The Good, The Bad and The Ugly‘ became the title of a series of works and shows by Atelier van Lieshout. These turned out to be the preparations for what will end up as a separate autarkic community outside the city.
Cowboys and Samurai.
That is probably more or less how it happened, but of course that title was no accident. Sergio Leone’s film is about three outlaws at the time of the American Civil War. All three are out to get rich, and so a chest full of gold coins buried somewhere figures prominently in the film. By coincidence the three protagonists end up searching for it. And although they are all purely intent on personal profit, during the course of the film they are constantly thrown together in bizarre relationships of interdependence and collaboration, the most famous being the perverse relationship between The Good (Clint Eastwood) and The Ugly (Aldo Giuffre). There is a price on The Ugly’s head, which Clint Eastwood repeatedly collects because he hands him over as a bounty hunter. When The Ugly is finally strung up, The Good – with that mythical precision which is the hallmark of the Western hero – shoots through the rope and they escape together to the next town. Who is on top and who is under is constantly changing as the film proceeds. Or as The Good says at one point: „There are two kinds of people in this world: those with guns and those who dig.“ Although ruthless and often cruel, all three protagonists have a strong sense of morality. They each have their own rules they live by, even The Bad (played by the Dutchman Lee van Cleef). True he kills on commission, but if the character he is hired to murder pays him to kill his client, he will honour the agreement to the letter. These cowboys are modelled on the Samurai that appear in some of Akira Kurosawa’s films, nomadic horsemen whose code of conduct turns them into lonely and tragic figures. The villains‘ individual morality – however questionable it may be – is presented in the film as the madness of a country at war, which forms a permanent backdrop and sweeps everyone along with it. The chest of gold – war gold – that lies in store will permanently free the one who finds it from this madness.
Spaghetti Westerns
The film ‚The Good, The Bad and The Ugly‘ was made in 1966. Sergio Leone, who launched his career in 1948 with a small part in Vittorio de Sica’s socio-realistic drama ‚Ladri di Biciclette‘ and went on to work as assistant to other Italian film directors, set the tone for the Spaghetti Western with ‚For a Fistful of Dollars‘ of 1964. Spaghetti Westerns were originally low-budget Westerns made and financed in Europe. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that they frequently provide a cynical comment on American society, albeit couched in a cryptic ‚film noir‘ style. They were taken up by the sixties American counterculture, by the radical hippies, Vietnam veterans and Hell’s Angles, who strongly identified with them. It takes little effort of the imagination to see Dennis Hopper’s film ‚Easy Rider‘ of 1969 as a contemporary variant of the Spaghetti Western, in which the horses have been replaced by customized motorcycles, beautifully styled choppers that serve to further reinforce the striving for individuality and personal freedom that the main protagonists show in their behaviour. Originally intended for those long, straight American highways, choppers were crudely adapted, Harley Davidson army motorbikes, used by veterans from the Korean and later Vietnam war who no longer wished, or were able, to adapt to everyday life, and who led a nomadic existence as Hell’s Angels.
Counterculture
At the end of the fifties a bond and a friendship emerged between some groups of Hell’s Angels and early beatniks, like Bob Dylan, the poets Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg and the Italian designer Ettore Sottsass. Sottsass relates how they drove around at night visiting other like-minded friends who had rejected the bourgeois consumer society and everything to do with it. They lived in empty rooms with only a mattress on the floor and took their few sticks of furniture from the street or the rubbish dump. If they got a new fridge they would immediately disfigure it by scratching it with a pair of scissors, thereby, as Sottsass put it, turning such objects into a sort of sepulchral monument in the empty space.1) These inspired him to design a furniture series which, as the photos taken in empty rooms show, look like „menhirs in the midst of the remnants of what was once a traditional household life“.2) Although in retrospect Sottsass’s furniture comes across much more stylized and therefore more bourgeois than Van Lieshout’s, there is a striking similarity between the atmosphere of the early sixties described by Sottsass and the lifestyle that Van Lieshout has in mind. An important similarity is their predilection for (over)large beds as the focal point of the domestic space.
Ambivalences
Leaving Sergio Leone’s film aside, ‚good, bad and ugly‘ was always a characteristic of the work produced by Atelier van Lieshout. From the outset Van Lieshout’s work engaged in a discussion with modernity, one which did not regard it as a utopian project, but as something the results of which are there for all to see. This seems to alter or even pervert the meaning of modernity. In previous publications on Atelier van Lieshout’s work I have described the Atelier’s approach as one of ‚active indifference‘, in the same sense as Georges Bataille spoke of Edouard Manet’s work – an approach that aimed to „shatter expectations“. Bataille maintained that it was precisely this that made it possible for Manet to capture the essential characteristics of his time.3) Much of Van Lieshout’s work – from the stacks of beer crates, pavement stones and dustbin bags, to the serially produced furniture and sanitary units, as well as the professionalized business organization of the Atelier – can be seen as a series of attempts to understand the unwritten rules of modern art and design, and to play around with them. This brings to the surface the myriad ambiguities and ambivalences of modernity.
The legacy of the sixties
In a similar way the legacy of the sixties is something that is now surfacing everywhere. The message of the Spaghetti Western, the hippies and the Hell’s Angels has been corrupted in commercial television series like ‚The A-Team‘, where a group of veterans who deserted from Vietnam – all of them distinctive or even bizarre individual characters on the run from court martial – drive round in a customized truck of the type used by shady builders and odd-jobbers. In principle (if we are to take the series seriously) the A-Team, who are driven by a strong personal feeling for justice, come to the rescue of people who have been left in the lurch, or even directly threatened by the corrupt government. On the spot, in no time at all, they spontaneously conjure up an impressive arsenal of weapons with which, at the climax of the programme, as many people as possible are killed and cars blown up, leaving their grateful proteges behind. Colonel Hannibal Hays in the series chews on a cigar just like Clint Eastwood in ‚The Good, The Bad and The Ugly‘. In a different way, the A-Team has also learnt a lesson from ‚Easy Rider‘, namely that it is better to be armed oneself and to shoot than be shot dead by those appalling American farmers. This successful series is still being repeated endlessly today by commercial television stations. In 1984 Joep van Lieshout wrote a scenario for a variant on this genre of film and television series entitled S-TEAM SATAN in which he, of course, plays the main role. The script describes a souped-up truck with Van Lieshout, in his all-American outfit on the loading platform, machine-gun in hand visibly enjoying himself shooting at small fleeing figures; once they are dead he jauntily sets off „in search of another small car or figure“.
But it is not only in the media that the sixties message is perverted. The hippies of that time form today’s establishment. As the Rolling Stones’s bodyguards in 1969, the Hell’s Angels were regular murderers, who at the notorious concert in Altamont simply went around knifing over-obtrusive fans, as George Lucas showed in his film ‚Gimme Shelter‘. In the meantime the Hell’s Angels have developed into an ordinary criminal organization with large-scale dealings in drugs, whose various different clans fight it out with serious weapons. Moreover figures like the UNA-Bomber, a country loner whose strong sense of morality drove him to unleash his lethal explosives on the American university population, have also undermined the hippy movement’s innocent image.
Periphery and autocracy
Atelier van Lieshout operates on the fringe of society and sponges off its left-overs, as did the beatniks and hippies in the sixties. Literally, too, the Atelier is located on the periphery, in an old factory building in one of the most run-down industrial zones of Rotterdam harbour. Opposite there is an old gasometer which has been converted into a transit shed. The sheds around house countless indeterminate small enterprises, artists, builders merchants and second-hand car dealers. The Atelier looks out onto an authorized zone for street prostitution set-up by the council. It is hardly surprising then that this area breeds ideas for a form of society that could be entirely autarkic, preferably even further outside the city.
This longing for autarchy first explicitly manifested itself in the mobile home, the ‚Autocrat‘, which Atelier van Lieshout built in 1997. Before that the Atelier had built a number of caravans and campers, but those were more like luxury products. Although the Autocrat is exceptionally spartan, it is equipped with a kitchen and slaughtering facilities, which means that in principle it is possible to live self-sufficiently far from civilization. This same period saw Atelier van Lieshout slaughtering their own animals for which they made the necessary equipment. Somewhat later they started distilling their own alcohol to make spirits and medicines, as well as producing weapons. As Van Lieshout puts it: „They’re simply something you’ve got to have.“ Over the last year Atelier Van Lieshout has been working on plans for building a new commune or camp-style settlement. Drawings and models have been made, various locations explored, the Atelier is being vetted to see whether it is practicable for the staff to live together, and the economic viability is being rigorously examined. It is all these activities that are currently being showcased in various exhibitions and in different constellations under the title ‚The Good, The Bad and The Ugly‘.
The Devil’s advocate
Alongside admiration, Atelier van Lieshout is also attracting increasing opposition. This opposition is sometimes of a purely formal nature, such as when weapons are impounded, at others it is emotional, as when the show ‚The Good, The Bad and The Ugly‘ was closed down in Rabastens in France in the summer of 1998. Strictly speaking Atelier van Lieshout’s work transgressed boundaries from the very outset. We see this already in the stacks, the furniture and the sanitary units; these transgressed the boundaries between design and visual art. At first sight this would appear to be an academic debate, yet some members of the editorial board of the Dutch design magazine ‚Items‘, which featured the work, became extremely worked up about the matter.4) It even occasioned a full-scale row within the board which prompted several editors to resign.
With his architectonic proposals Van Lieshout side-steps and transgresses architectural mores and regulations. Up to a point this passes unnoticed because his constructions are classed as art, viewed as temporary, or because his mobile homes have wheels and thus, according to Dutch law, do not come under the category of buildings or living contingent. But with the refurbishment of the facade of the Galerie Fons Welters in Amsterdam, the Atelier fell foul of the Building Inspectorate and the Design Review Committee because planning permission had not be applied for. Regulations apart, Van Lieshout also transgresses the mores of architecture because he is purely out to please his individual clients with his constructions, whereas what is singular about his architecture is that it seeks to find a balance between the desires of the client and the needs of society. With his slaughtering, distilling, polygamy and the production of weapons, however, Van Lieshout is increasingly falling foul of the law. Sometimes he pleads his position as an artist, sometimes he conforms by applying for the necessary permit, sometimes works are removed from shows or impounded. The transgressions are becoming less and less academic, although Van Lieshout as an artist still seems to occupy a privileged position. Art, film and perhaps also literature appear to be the last remaining free places for these kind of experiments, albeit that this freedom appears increasingly less guaranteed.
With this new series of works the role of Atelier van Lieshout is starting to look more and more like that of the Devil’s Advocate. We need him in the same way as the FBI agent Clarice Starling, played by Jody Foster in the film ‚The Silence of the Lambs‘, needed the advice of the disturbed psychiatrist and serial murderer Hannibal Lecter in order to be able to empathize with another perverse serial murderer and track him down. This last hippie lived entirely unnoticed in a respectable house in a small American town. He lured his victims under the pretext of needing their help to move house, using a similar pick-up truck as that used by the A-Team and the S-Team. In a secret cellar under his house he carefully skins his victims, using their skin to take on another identity. In the process Clarice Starling comes to understand herself, and realizes that she did not become an agent to serve the law or because it is what her dead father did, but to save innocent people. Hannibal Lecter scoffs at her. That is the most important theme of ‚The Silence of the Lambs‘, and it is no accident that the film takes its title from the crucial moment in that process of self-realization.
Individualization
Individualization has become one of the most important phenomena of Western society over the last few decades. In the West individualization is often equated with Americanization and capitalism because in American culture individual freedom is glorified to the hilt. (European) sociologists like Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens see individualization as a logical extension of globalization, the hugely increased affluence, mobility, communications and independence. They see individualization as a necessary transitional phase towards new forms of society in the second phase of modernity. Whereas the classic industrial society embraced a direct correlation between class, family, sexual role-patterns, division of labour between men and women, marriage and architectonic and urban planning typologies, today increasing numbers of people have the opportunity to exchange the standard biography for a biography of their choice: a ‚do it yourself‘ biography as Ronald Hitzler calls it, or as Giddens puts it a ‚reflexive‘ biography. According to Ulrich Beck, individualization implies „first, the disembedding and, second, the reembedding of industrial society ways of life by new ones. In which the individuals must produce, stage and cobble their biographies themselves.“ Beck sees the reflexive element in the cobbling together of a personal biography specifically in terms of the confrontation with another. And that is something that will inevitably play an increasingly important role at the point where society condenses and the assertiveness and fighting instinct of the individual rises up. This sets up a „chaotic world of conflicts, power games, instruments and arenas which belong to two different epochs, that of ‚unambiguous‘ and that of ‚ambivalent‘ modernity. On the one hand, a political vacuity of the institutions is evolving and, on the other hand, a non-institutional renaissance of the political.“ According to Beck the subject is in the end thrown back on the institutions of society.5) The flight or voluntary banishment to the periphery or the country is of course also a solution – although possibly a temporary one – and that appears to be the option that Atelier Van Lieshout has chosen for the moment, since they are investigating the possibility of setting up a totally autarkic commune with its own rules for living.
Hold on and let go
Atelier van Lieshout sees the striving for autonomy as a universal striving, as does the sociologist Anthony Giddens. It is already present in the growing child, who gains increasing control over his body and other faculties, such as speech. All that is an expansion of autonomy. It is also a right, says Giddens: „Each individual has the right – varying in content in manifold ways in different contexts – to maintain a distance from others by preserving bodily privacy and integrity of self.“ But expanding autonomy must be brought into relation with others with whom the individual engages socially. Giddens connects this conflict between autonomy and engagement also with the pleasure zones of the body: „Holding on and letting go are the behavioural correlates of the main polarity on which this stage (in the development of the child, B.L.) is centred, autonomy versus doubt or shame. As with the prior phase, with which it can stand in a relation of generalized tension, the polarity can be resolved in a relatively benign or more disruptive way. To hold on as a greedy mode of retention can represent a cruel self-absorbtion or can be a pattern of care expressing autonomy. Letting go can similarly be a hostile expression of aggressive impulses or a more relaxed attitude to ‚letting things pass‘.“ 6) In previous articles I have already pointed out that both attitudes are represented side by side in Van Lieshout’s work. On the one hand there are the interiors, the Skulls and the Orgone Helmets, which represent the longing for withdrawal. And on the other there are the phalluses, weapons and (racing)cars, about which Van Lieshout once said that they are „the things that he can’t do without“. Referring to Deleuze and Guattari I made a comparison with their concept of the pulsating wish-machine of the schizophrenic. In Deleuze and Guattari’s view, a schizophrenic is not so much someone who has problems with his parents but with the endlessly changing couplings of capitalist society.7) This relates back to the problem of individualization, as formulated by Giddens and Beck, as the necessity to cobble together for oneself a reflexive biography, one that takes other(s) into consideration. In modern Western society that other is not just a physical presence, but also the ‚absent other‘ (Giddens), as represented by ‚abstract systems‘ of laws and regulations, standardization and areas of scientifically acquired expertise.8) Thus Giddens would formulate the problematic discourse with the other not so much as something generated by capitalist society, but as a conflict with democracy. „Democracy (…) implies not just the right to free and equal self-development, but also the constitutional limitation of (distributive) power. The ‚liberty of the strong‘ must be restrained, but this is not a denial of all authority – or it only becomes so in the case of anarchism.“9
Free zones
For the time being Atelier van Lieshout appears to be oblivious of all that. The do-it-yourself ethos has been elevated to a guiding rule for life. What they intend is not simply an autarkic enclave within society, but an enclave dominated by an autocracy, with Joep van Lieshout as the undisputed leader. They demand nothing from society, seeking only to live by their own rules and to cobble together their own biographies into one, large, living artwork. They are taking the preparations very seriously. The entire Atelier has been vetted by management consultants and every member of staff has been psychologically tested, evaluated, characterized and assigned a possible role in the undertaking, to ascertain whether they will be able to stick it out together. The results of the report read like character sketches for the casting director of a film.
This quest for a free zone is not an isolated event in the Netherlands. This country is currently undergoing a process of deregulation, while at the same time becoming ever more densely populated and built-up. It fits in with a series of large and small-scale proposals, such as the proposal for a ‚de-zoning plan‘ that NL Architects recently presented in Gouda; Carel Weeber’s plea for ‚Wild Living‘; Adriaan Geuze and West 8’s proposals for national free zones for Innovation and Acceleration (with its own personal Ministry) and Rem Koolhaas, OMA and NYFER’s MAA$VLAKTE (note the dollar sign instead of an S!!) project for Rotterdam harbour.10) These are all proposals for zones where individual freedom, private initiative and market forces are expanded by by-passing local regulations. These plans reveal remarkable and perverse parallels with the areas of polder-land that were returned to nature in the seventies and eighties under pressure from hippy ecologists and have since been designated nature reserves, but equally with the tax-free zones at international airports.
The difference is that Atelier van Lieshout seems prepared, if necessary, to undertake this itself (on a relatively small scale) and thus, suitably armed, to defend their values: like a ‚Wild Bunch‘, to quote another famous Spaghetti Western. The question is how will society react to this? Will they really take it seriously? Will they ask themselves what the difference is between this and every other venture with its own security service? Will they turn a blind eye to it as an artistic experiment? Or will they simply tolerate it as they have motorbike clubs, squatters, prostitutes, drug users and gypsy camps? Unlike many other countries, there are numerous precedents in the Netherlands for this type of ‚policy of tolerance‘. The mayor of Rabastens, however, already felt so seriously threatened during the presentation of the preparations that he closed the exhibition ‚The Good, The Bad and The Ugly‘ down after only a moment’s hesitation. This provoked a storm of protest. The real test will come if Atelier van Lieshout really does establish itself somewhere communally.
Notes
1)Ettore Sottsass, notes for a lecture, as quoted by Penny Sparke in : Penny Sparke, Ettore Sottsass Jr., London, 1982.
2)Andrea Branzi, The Hot House, London, 1984.
3)Bart Lootsma, Bataille, in: Hein Eberson et al. (ed.), Atelier van Lieshout, A Manual/Ein Handbuch, Cologne, Rotterdam, Ostfildern, 1997; second impression, Rotterdam, 1998.
4)Bart Lootsma, Joep van Lieshout, objecten, beelden of gewoon meubels? Items 37, volume 10, April 1991. Partly as a result of this article several members of the editorial board resigned.
5)Ulrich Beck, The Reinvention of Politics: Towards a Theory of Reflexive Modernization, in: Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, Scott Lash, Reflexive Modernization, Politics, tradition and aesthetics in the modern social order, Cambridge/Oxford, 1994.
6)Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society, Berkely and Los Angeles, 1984.
7)Bart Lootsma, Skulls, Urges I, Thanathos, in: Atelier van Lieshout, A Manual/Ein Handbuch, see note 3.
8)Anthony Giddens, Living in a Post-Traditional Society, see note 5.
9)Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy, Cambridge, 1992.
10)NL Architects, De Intraferie, in: Hans Venhuizen (ed), De Kunst van het Vestigen; Bernard Hulsman, Het Wilde Wonen, Carel Weeber wil af van het rijtjeshuis, in: NRC Handelsblad, 04-04-1997, Cultural Supplement, page 1; Adriaan Geuze/West 8 Landscape Architects, 90.000 pakjes margarine, 100 meter vooruit! West 8 over landschap in acceleratie, exhibition catalogue Groninger Museum, Groningen, 1997; Office for Metropolitan Architecture/NYFER, MAA$VLAKTE, The Hague, 1997.