always a game? : the scott tallon walker contemporary art lecture

Declan Long

For art and everything in life you have to be serious or extreme or at least to know what you are doing.
Joep van Lieshout

The first Scott Tallon Walker Contemporary Art lecture in November 2000 featured Dutch artist and architect Joep van Lieshout, the key figure behind the controversial design collective Atelier van Lieshout. This event, organized by Temple Bar Gallery and Studios in association with the AAI, set out to highlightt shared concerns within the contemporary discourses of architecture and the visual arts ; as such the double-edge practice of Atelier van Lieshout offered an engaging introduction to this potentially enlivening critical process.

The work of Atelier Van Lieshout has varied radically since their formation in 1995, their practice combining sculptural works and items of furniture with architectural projects and even an ambitious urban planning scheme entitled AVL-ville. Joep van Lieshout introduced this wide-ranging AVL �uvre with a presentation which was as much a goad as a guide, revealing a fascination with extremes and excess as he betrayed a quite evident delight in showing how AVL's ventures blend modular rationality with a spirit of mischief-making and anarchic irrationality. Images of AVL-designed living spaces showed rooms which had no spare space, yet were made to facilitate various other forms of excess. A bedroom for instance provided space for nothing but a giant bed and a huge range of wall-mounted spirit bottles. Other, more extreme, examples were shown from the survivalist city-scheme of AVL-ville � simple, functional structures such as mobile freight containers fitted out for the production of alcohol and drugs or, in one case ,a workshop for terrorists in which guns and bombs are constructed. Images of AVL-built weapons mounted on the backs of converted utility vehicles strikingly suggested the aesthetic and functional paradoxes in their approach to design.

In the AVL Manual, published in 19977, Bart Lootsma notes that van Lieshout 'continually points up the fact that behind modernity� clarity and rationality lurks an implicit twilight realm that contains the real mainsprings of our existence. In this sense all of van Lieshout's work is erotic'. This Bataillean vision of excess, where any transgressive act or urge marks the possibility of an erotic charge, was highlighted throughout the discussion which followed van Lieshout's initial presentation. The interview which followed the lecture, conducted by the critic Caomhin MacGiolla Leith, raised the issue of how van Lieshout's practice has always been transgressive or extreme in a number of ways ; most obviously perhaps in that he has consistently moved beyond traditional definitions of artist or architect. For van Lieshout, such unsettling of familiar categories has been not so much strategic as intuitive, a pattern which has emerged out of his need to couple functional techniques with his irrational instincts. Yet in terms of the erotic potential of his work, van Lieshout keenly acknowledged that his work is 'either about sex or power'.

This collision of libidinous and political economies is pointed to in the AVL Manual which quotes the French thinkers Deleuze and Guattari (cultural theory's pin-ups of post-Marxist radicalism), in a bid to contextualize van Lieshout's practice in terms of their schizophrenic notion of capitalism. For MacGiolla Leith it was equally important to acknowledge van Lieshout's own conceptual split-personality : an amoral will-to-power balanced by pragmatic, democratic tendencies. Van Lieshout has previously remarked that Niccolo Machiavelli's The Prince is the only book he has ever read ( typical quote : 'a prince must have no object or thought except war, its organizationn and its discipline') .Yet AVL-ville functions not through van Lieshout's own despotic tyranny but through collaborative, collective politics.

This contradiction for Mac Giolla Leith, was related to the way in which certain AVL activities are emphatically, self-consciously amoral � celebrations of the activities of the Unabomber, the construction of torture chambers for children within an apparently conventional American home � yet at the same time AVL take on what van Lieshout refers to as good causes. A clear (and yet still controversial) example of these being the abortion ship� a floating clinic which picks up clients in the ports of nations where abortion is illegal and then sails to international waters where the operation can be performed with impunity. Speaking of his role as interior designer on this project van Lieshout seemed at once earnestly concerned about the plight of women dying as a result of back-street abortions and yet also impishly excited about working around or beyond the law. Moreover, his claim that he attempted to give the clinic's interior a womb-like� quality suggests that even at his most socially aware van Lieshout remains anarchically, eccentrically individual.

Among van Lieshout's more high-profile projects has been a collaboration with Rem Koolhaas on the Grand Palais in Lille, a work which has been described in terms of its modular hedonism ; this phrase also offering a pithy summation of the general AVL style. When put to him during the discussion, the notion of modular hedonism prompted van Lieshout to admit that his work is 'always a game'. Given the seriousness of their commitment to schemes such as AVL-ville and with regard to the frequent extremity of their positions and subject matter, the AVL game would seem to be being played for increasingly high stakes.

Declan Long is communications manager at Temple Bar Galleries.