Hell is Other People

LONDON—If, like me, you’re a bit of a racist, a bit of a misogynist, a bit of a homophobe; if your reaction to the religious troubles of today is “Kill them all, let God decide”; if you hate humanity and see no future, then you need the drawings, paintings, sculptures, and videos of Erik van Lieshout. He is a satirist, among other things, and, as everyone knows, satirists are positive moralists.

I had lunch with the lovely fellow near the ICA in London, where he was presenting parts one and two of the video trilogy Guantanamo Baywatch (both 2007) in his customary purpose-built screening hut: an uncomfortable, claustrophobic room whose raised hardboard floor is wave shaped, because Baywatch is about surfing. Guantanamo Baywatch documents Van Lieshout and his editor Core’s farce-filled excursion to Los Angeles and the American Southwest, in which they uncover certain unpleasant truths about their subjects and themselves under the official sanction of investigating the USA’s relationship with the war in Iraq. I was not surprised by the polite and friendly personality of this maker of obnoxious art; critics, interviewers, and laypeople often are surprised, because they think that the obnoxiousness in the art is indeed the whole and true expression of the artist’s personality.

My favorite scene from among his many videos is one in the aforementioned Guantanamo Baywatch Part 2, when Erik and Core argue about a shot of a snowy sunset. Erik dismisses Core’s keenness to capture the detail of the clouds as Kitsch; Core protests and presses the button that decreases the contrast to reveal the detail; Erik turns it off to return our view to the bleached version he prefers; and on it goes. This scene beautifully illustrates the way aesthetics have been bullied out of Van Lieshout’s videos to the point of mockery; it burlesques the painterly and nominates film as a much better medium if one’s endeavor is to discuss the human world as it is right now. Too, the sequence forms a microcosm, albeit an innocuous one, of the conflict that dogs Van Lieshout throughout his attempts to communicate with his fellow humans. As an artist, he is obsessed with communication, not only because like all of us he wants to give and receive love but also because his art is driven by an urge to cure ignorance, defuse hate, and promote understanding: satire.

Van Lieshout started out making drawings and paintings, and he still makes them now, churning them out in hotel rooms while on his video-making expeditions and posting them back to his studio like a reporter sending dispatches. Right away his penchant for the “naughty” (as in the title of his exhibition catalogue Naughty by Nature Not Because I Hate You [2002]) was clear. There was a heavy percentage of female nudes, often masturbating, sometimes grotesque, sometimes sexy, sometimes defiled with male heads, including his own. Racialized and even more controversial images appeared: the cartoonlike Untitled (1993), featuring a Negro on a spit, for example, or No Turk (1994), which depicts a flying carpet with a gaping hole through which the pilot has fallen to his doom, nothing but a pair of spectacles left behind. But old-fashioned talk about “offense” is beside the point. The so-called offensive images Van Lieshout sometimes makes are usually about the plight of their subjects: they aren’t aimed at the subject or the subject’s race or religion but at the absurd or downright hostile world that allows the subject’s plight. I asked Erik about painterly considerations like composition, color, and such in his movies. He replied, “No. Flow, flow: the flow: go up and down and up and down, where we go, where we go.” “So it’s all about emotions?” I asked cleverly. “No, no, it’s about the idea.”

Van Lieshout leapt out of the 2-D subjective world of the canvas into the “3-D” “reality” of video so he could insert himself into frightening and intimate social situations. In his 2006 video Rotterdam-Rostock, we see him boinging crazily back and forth on a children’s hobbyhorse in a grim housing estate in a depressed bit of eastern Germany, singing “Contact, contact contact contact; Contact: Contact!” to the tune of what might be a national anthem but is actually an old football chant. It’s a mantra he uses to spur himself on; it’s also his theme song. The contact he makes with humanity is often as desperate as it is enriching and informative; he shows the varying effects it has on his own swinging moods. In Rock (2006), we see his subject reduce him to tears with viciously reactive psychoanalyzing. His own entanglement is key. The honesty of his portrayal of his own responses to the others he portrays gives that description of humanity an invincible authority. It’s like his fellow countryman Vermeer’s The Procuress: we see Vermeer laughing into the camera beside the prostitute, the client, and the procuress, as if to say, “Look at what we’re doing, us humans! Shocking! But look, it’s me, Vermeer. It’s true, I wouldn’t shit you, it’s really happening!”