If re is a rebirth of till owl mirror today, it is called Erik van Lieshout. The Dutch art comedian moves through world, naively and in this way elicits people’s candid confessions that expose great mental grievances.
Famous in Germany, it was made by a wooden video box, which he had put 2006 to Berlin Biennale on August street to show his film “Rotterdam-Rostock”. On this shaky cycle tour with love grief in land of Lichtenhagen, he entertains himself with friendly seniors about influence of Jews, with crude pubs acquaintances about Hitler and destruction of Germany by Americans, or participates with Beating heart on physical daily life of a group of Rostock neo-Nazis.
With this owl-fried egg-which still today provides shocking views of a fascist undercurrent in German thinking-van Lieshout welcomes visitors in his first major retrospective in Germany at Kunstverein Hannover. The big video course is called “scapegoat” by amateurished Slat constructions, which are glued with ugly carpet collages. In it, this horror clown treats reassuring conscience with self-experimenting great time mes such as art, love, fascism, cats, sex or racism.
In double work “dog”, for example, he leaves a sympatic young man from Sierra Leone, who enjoys asylum in Holland, in gangster-rap manner boastful monologue about shoot-off of innocent he had operated at home, while on screen beside it Fate of Russian dissident Aleksandr Dolmatov addressed. Due to a computer error, Putin opponent, who felt threatened in Russia, 2013 refused asylum in Holland, whereupon he took his life.
This contrast does not tolerate usual helper morality of poor black and privileged whites. Van Lieshout is about moments of social hypocrisy, which he evokes with a combination of aggressive wit, politically incorrect behavior and ironic commentary.
These are not harmless jokes with winks, in which Van Lieshout himself offers himself as a scapegoat, even if it looks like this at first. The so kindly looking bald head tries rar to drive normal-looking situations in all innocence so far that hidden conflicts appear. He doesn’t even protect his own family. In his video for Biennale in Venice 2014, he confronted parents and siblings, who almost all work in social professions, with unpleasant conscience questions and published sometimes embarrassing scenes relentlessly.
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His work for Manifesta in Saint Petersburg 2014 led him to basement of Hermitage, where countless cats house. In this foul-smelling and low labyrinth, built with heating pipes and or installations, two older ladies look after animal armada, which was once purchased to mouse in museum. Van Lieshout built a cat-friendly climbing and wellness world for torn critters, created a portrait gallery of four-legged inhabitants and clarified m with homemade wall posters about injustice in Putinstaat.
With this “social democratic” reform work for a miserable pet society, Van Lieshout introduces absurdity of a state of law that only acts as a way to improve conditions. That was so scary to Russian censors that y wanted to see whole movie before he was allowed to be shown in Saint Petersburg.
Van Lieshout n transmits hard wit of se video works in drawings or garishly colored collages, which are shown in Hannover parallel to videos. In it appears a faces world of symbolic figures, from models and SpongeBob to Merkel and Trump, from Krishna to Pecken leagues Jungnazis. As caustic caricatures of a world in which it is only about self-portrayal, se images are particularly common. And owl mirror is always in middle. Because his self-staging as a scapegoat for hypocritical peace is, of course, also quite vain. But as a good harlequin, Van Lieshout also laughs at himself, perhaps even loudest.
Erik van Lieshout: Scapegoat. Kunstverein Hannover. to 19 November. Www.kunstverein-hannover.de.
