Philippe Vergne.
Curator, Visual Arts,
Walker Art Center

THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY or ONCE UPON A TIME IN MINNESOTA

Just imagine for a minute that someone coming from somewhere in Europe lands in the Twin Cities airport, after an endless flight from, let's say Rotterdam or Amsterdam. Arriving in the Midwest, the first thing this person should think about is finding a way to be mobile. It is, as you can guess, quite difficult to have a good sense of the Midwest without a car. One needs to have a sense of space. The easy solution would be to rent a car at the airport. Then the journey can start.

The first thing to do would be to take highway 35W to Minneapolis, the same route taken by the two ugly characters from the Coen brother's movie Fargo. The beauty of this moment in Fargo occurs when one of the shameless killers gives a very detailed architectural description of the Minneapolis skyline, speaking with tears in his eyes about the IDS building as one example of progressive, modern architecture in the Midwest. The love of architecture was one likable trait of an otherwise unsympathetic character. As an artist coming from Rotterdam interested in both mobility (he was a car racer) and architecture (he is collaborating on a project with architect Rem Koolhaas) Joep Van Lieshout would not miss an architectural road trip through Minnesota.

Joep van Lieshout was invited by the Walker Art Center to do a project for the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden this year. Coming to Minneapolis for the first time, he wanted to travel around in order to understand--historically, visually, socially, and economically--the context in which his work would be built.

He was willing to relocate his experience in order to relocate his practice. In his journey, Joep van Lieshout encountered the architecture of Philip Johnson and Frank Gehry in Minneapolis. He visited the Lustron house built after World War II for the veterans, as well as the Frank Lloyd Wright gas station (Philips 66), the only one of its kind in the world, in Cloquet. This was the modernist part. He also sought out a kind of upper-Midwest vernacular which was perhaps more influential.

One of the unavoidable sights is Laura Ingalls Wilder's log cabin in Pepin, Wisconsin, made a cultural icon through the television show Little House on The Prairie. A model of early wooden architecture, it is also an example of shelter architecture, a place built out of necessity which now stands now as a monument to pioneer times; such a place is not the kind of monument that modern and contemporary art museums are displaying, but the kind of monuments displayed by Murphy's Landing, a reconstruction of a 19th century farming community, in Shakopee, Minnesota. These structures represent a time when social organization was synonymous with self-sufficiency when a community fed, housed and protected itself. Joep van Lieshout also went to North Minneapolis to visit a gun show, a very disturbing representation of self-sufficiency and self protection. Joep's interest in the gun show raised issues of safety, violence, social responsibility and the use and possession of weapons, and furthered his fascination with the bad, dark side of the world.

In order to have a complete image of this project, one should keep in mind the needs of the Walker Art Center when commissioning the Atelier van Lieshout, as well as the philosophy of the Joep van Lieshout enterprise. The Walker Art Center approached Joep van Lieshout to build an "art lab on wheels" --a space that would travel around the city of Minneapolis to parks and schools, where a variety of activities, from performance, exhibitions, film screenings and computer work shops to tax assistance, could be held.

As an artist, Joep van Lieshout decided few years ago to work as a collective named Atelier van Lieshout. Where this title can be read as a reconsideration of the notion of authorship, the decision to adopt this name also came out of the necessity, the changing nature of the work, and the economy that such collective work would generate.

Developing work increasingly related to architecture, Joep organizes his studio as an architectural agency dealing with art and non-art clients, working on projects within and outside of institutions, without concern if his work is art, architecture, or design. Atelier van Lieshout creates quality spaces for quality time, and connects with traditions of movements as diverse as Arts and Crafts and Bauhaus. Changing the context of an experience can definitely affect the quality of the same experience.

Joep van Lieshout is not only developing "architectural systems." Everything related to life, every detail of life, is to be embraced by the artist and the collective--from making guns for slaughtering, to brewing his own alcohol and medication. One can think he is merging art and life , but I would rather say that he is using art as a tool to build a way of living matching his ideals. He is not introducing the "real" into the art, he is dealing with reality.

By establishing and running his company as a creative activity, Joep redefines the understanding of the art process, building a system economically self-sufficient from, though not in opposition to (as could have been the case with an historical "avant-garde" modernist attitude), the art world. The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly is what the artist Rirkrit Tiravanija would call a "parallel space"--not against, not isolated, just parallel.

In this perspective, one of the projects Joep is planning is the appropriation of a piece of free land, a free zone, in the Rotterdam harbor, to install his mobile units, and to live there with the community of people sharing his dreams. As harbor land, this land is free of national regulations and laws.

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly that Atelier Van Lieshout created for the Walker Art Center and the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden reflect, to a certain extent, Joep's preoccupation with the world and its complexity, and raises issues related to the way we are living.

The project has two parts. The aluminum and fiberglass trailer, the Art Lab on wheels, which is modern, progressive and technologically advanced. As a space, it is as neutral and flexible as possible. It will allow the users to make it their own space, far from the artist or the institution's dictate. One could say that the trailer is the pure execution of the commission for the client, the Walker Art Center.

The black wooden house would be his fantasy, an addition useful for residencies, workshops that stays fixed in the garden. This house could be seen as coming from both the tradition of the pioneer shelter, as well as a kind of mythic movie architecture-- a place built out of necessity by a group of friends. The house, like the trailer, is real. It is wired and furnished. Joep van Lieshout modeled the bed, chairs, table and shelves, after Shaker furniture design. The house has secret places, dark corners and in a way is like the killer's house in Jonathan Demme's Silence of the Lambs. This would be the "bad and ugly" part of the project. The trailer would be the good part.

Joep van Lieshout deals with the paradoxes of our world and our society-- a society where a twelve-year-old kid can visit a gun show in a suburban area, but will be told he cannot watch a movie, or see an exhibition containing nudity, a society where 12-year-old kids shoot each other or their teachers and cry after the fact. He is dealing with the idea of violence; he is raising flags, signs to make us think about the way we are structuring our lives, and how education is structured. He is not judging, not schooling us, not dictating morals; rather he is putting his cards on the table with a work which questions the notions of "art making" and the "recognisability' of an art work.

By relocating his work, Joep van Lieshout is also inducing a relocation of the art institution activities, geographically and aesthetically. He is doing so through conversation between culture, history and community, reconsidering both our sense of the "space" of the art work and the categories of the aesthetic, in order to shrink the distance between art and its audience.