With this first monographic exhibition of importance on the French territory since 2003, the Atelier Van Lieshout replies to the Cartel’s invitation in displaying the means of the structural works of its production unit.
Registered for the key dates of Marseille’s capital year, it announces the shape and colour of the Panorama’s XXL stakes. After writing entire chapters of a protean and prolific work – called “Autocrat”, “AVL Ville”, “The Technocrat”, “Slave City” or “Cradle to Cradle” – AVL here unveils, and in preview the latest projects and environments ensued from a trilogy constructed as a “Gesamkunstwerk” : “The New Tribal Labyrinth”, the first part of which is “The Butcher” and is composed of two distinct sections.
Spreading on an exhibition set “Slave City”, a chapter which was elaborated between 2005 and 2008, is presented as the journey through a closed world which goes in a loop around itself. A human, social, economical and spatial organisation keeping drastic distances with
the utopias tested and put into practice in the brief “AVL
Ville” episode, in 2001. Intended to be an experience to live, the project takes the form of a genuine small independent State issuing to its own money and ends in an accelerated strong armed intervention of the rule of Law. If “The Technocrat” in 2003, already lays the foundations for a dystopian world with the first stirrings of a frightening rationalisation, where the quest for auto sufficiency is diverted for the benefit of some rituals striving to maintain the “bourgeois” in a blissful and lifeless state, “Slave City” introduces the notion of recycling the human material itself, always pushing a little further the idea of a post-modern “bondage”. A sanitized narrow social circle, generating the entirety of the social organisations forms, such as Culture and its museums, Health and its hospitals, Knowledge and its universities, Sexuality and its brothels, Energy and its generators, always aiming at more efficiency and productivity in favour of a restricted group of people ignorant of the working perversion in the slave-master relationship.
“The New Tribal Labyrinth” is written as such and
breaking with “Cradle to Cradle”, ghoulish hallucination where the body appears but mutilated, wounded by the insults of the previous episodes taken to the extremes and condensed for a nightmarish and final resultant.
«The New Tribal Labyrinth» is a new big inventing
machine made to imagine society models based on three pillars: Agriculture, Industry and the ritual. « The Butcher » approaches two of its essential elements more precisely: the Panorama is the receptacle for an industrial environment of which we could not truly define the status. Blast furnaces occupy the exhibition space, interconnected by circulations, mezzanines and various piping constituting a raw steel labyrinth; they indicate a
general organisation, not dictated for a functional future of the mega-structure but more like an intuitive layout desired by the artist. Thus an invented space, as well as the potentiality of a shelter for a population seeking heat and Energy, AVL builds a handmade symbiosis combining resources and threats, where the spectacularity
of what is shown doesn’t free one from what can be
perceived between the lines: the warmth of a habitation also made of noises, dust, rust, ugliness and impurities.
“The Butcher” is also putting rituals into practice via the organisation of a spectacular dinner on September 15th and of which the cow is the sacrificed animal just as much as it is the raw material. The principle lies in repeating what has often been performed by the artist in the occurrence of his opening exhibitions, a gustatory friendliness around the work of art but it consists in approaching it via the re activation of ancestral rituals, and to make this time of encounter and exchange swing
onto the side of survival, necessity, of consumption
without waste. By the means of two units, sets of military kitchen utensils, independent in Energy and water supply, and assisted by masters of their profession, AVL offers to create a meal about and from a cow, altogether animal of the great sacrifice just as it is a raw material.
Whether it be apocalyptic ensued from a era of survival or the representation of a new utopia where Industry and Agriculture, pollution and nature, sustainable production and recycling would coexist. This large-scaled project lays the foundations of a universe made in AVL: a new world in which the nations are erased to favour a rearrangement of society into imaginary tribes.