EN / nl

Lieshout, Erik van

Erik Van Lieshout’s keine Kohle kein Holz (no coal no wood) weaves together a personal story and a key moment in the history of cinema related to coal mining. The artist was, at the time, preoccupied with what he perceived as contemporary art’s moral and financial crises when his video editor became severely ill, sparking an additional, personal crisis and inspiring the production of this work. The result is a multi-layered, mixed media installation that combines architectural elements and sculpture in Van Lieshout’s signature rough, impromptu, do-it-yourself style. The work includes several elements, including the re-construction of the editor’s hospital bed, furniture inspired by the Dutch modernist architect Rietveld, and bold, expressionistic drawings in black. The focal point of the installation, however, is a video animation which pays tribute to Joris Ivens’s and Henri Storck’s classic political documentary, Misère au Borinage (1933). Van Lieshout recreates the film as a piece of puppet theatre, using highly abstracted wooden figures that perform on a small revolving stage (included in the installation as a sculpture entitled Edit Suite), and words recalling workers protest banners on paper interspersed in between. Underlying the whole project is a fragmented narrative related to the problem of ‘crisis:’ both personal as well as social and economic, then as well as now. The notion of sickness, both of the human body as well as of the capitalist system, is metaphorically related to the plight of the proletarian class and their struggles, which have been most literally inscribed on the working body of the miner, in particular. KG