The award of 2018: Joep van Lieshout

This year, the Piket Kunstprijzen are celebrating an anniversary, so we decided to add some excitement. Who better to ask than Van Lieshout, who, since 1995 with his studio, has made handmade processes and conceptual, visual, and applied art his life’s work. Think of towering, sometimes outright provocative sculptures such as Big Funnelman by the A27 near Breda, the biogas installation The Technocrat, and the Domestikator, which was initially rejected by the Louvre but later embraced by the Centre Pompidou.

In the office of his studio, in a warehouse in the Rotterdam port, he shows a video of the demolition of a car engine. This took place during a manifestation of his solo show Ferrotopia, earlier this year on the grounds of the NDSM shipyard in Amsterdam. With a self-built demolition machine, he ‘created’ the raw materials for the award. Building the machine took three months, and demolishing various goods took a week, he says with gleaming eyes. “That’s my passion. Besides, I don’t believe there are machines like this. And my machines look better, they’re more violent, more theatrical. It influences the way I work.”

Van Lieshout notes that destruction, violence, and revolution appeal to him. “I don’t build all these machines to save aluminum; that would be totally hypocritical. I make these machines to destroy something, to speed up the process, to tilt the world, to invite an apocalypse.” In short: a lot of work went into the posts.

‘Piketpost is a stepping stone’

At first glance, the 2018 Piket Kunstprijzen awards may look like painted wood, but appearances are deceiving: although the shape is carved wood, they are made of bronze and aluminum. In a self-made furnace, the artist melts wood and coal to melt the bronze and aluminum, which are then poured into molds of the posts. For this, he placed the mold in a tray of sand mixed with special oil to make it strong enough to pour the molten metals into. “You can stamp down that sand, and it thickens. Then you put talcum powder on it, place another tray on top, and stamp it down with more sand. Then you make vent holes,” he explains the process.

Watch the pouring process in the video made by Atelier van Lieshout:

Van Lieshout has already received many awards, from encouragement awards (the Charlotte Köhler Award in 1991 and the Prix de Rome Basic Award in 1992) to more specific movement prizes (the Harrie Tillie Prize in 2015). According to him, the form of the award is symbolic. “It’s also a post that you put in a boundary area to mark something. For many of these young artists, the prize is a stepping stone, encouragement to keep going, the next milestone. I’d still like to get other awards, but I don’t get them anymore, I’m too old,” he chuckles.

Business and Art

The origin of Van Lieshout’s work lies in the conceptual, the radical, and the minimalist, he says. “The time of beer crates, toilets, and tables and chairs; to undermine the myth of being an artist.” The fact that he also made kitchens or furniture was for him “very logical, to earn money.” Making art does not provide enough to keep such a large organization as his studio, with over twenty employees, running. He also likes to make objects that play a role in “the everyday world of people,” such as the spacious, square chairs made of bright blue leather that are in his office. “With those, you can also broaden your field of view and work area.”

‘Blow people away with your work’

Van Lieshout was an entrepreneurial character from an early age: even at the art academy, he had a VAT number. If you make a lot and sell little, that’s smart, he explains, because your material costs drop by a high percentage. “That was a pragmatic choice back then. Imagine: 1980, it was a very different time. Now they talk about a crisis or whatever, but back then it was the punk era, hard, and everything was ugly. Entrepreneurship was a necessity.” But he also warns young artists: “There’s only one thing that matters, and that’s making good art.” And if you’re bad at entrepreneurial tasks, find others to help you. But don’t think you can study management or marketing for your art and think you’ve made it. “You can make a career, but not one that you can be proud of artistically. You have only one goal: to blow people away with the quality of your work.”

‘Dig your own well and do what you can’t stop doing’

Van Lieshout advises young artists to seek complexity. He knows from experience that it can lead to creativity. “I always make it difficult for myself, I always want more than I can do or than the financial or technical possibilities allow. I’m constantly in a crisis, but it’s good to be confronted with that: always keep thinking, searching, struggling.” Dig your own well. “That’s your creative drive. Be happy if you have a well. It’s not about the goal, but about the journey.”

To the Piket artists who will soon receive his posts, he says they should follow their instinct. “Even if all the signs are against it: do it anyway. Art is about intuition and translating that into a product. When I started making furniture in the late ’80s, people said, ‘this is a dead end, this is not art, it doesn’t make sense, and what will you make after this?’ I did it anyway, and in the end, it became a very important thing. Don’t follow trends, you’ll be too late! Do the opposite! That’s what I did: rebel.”

Text: Judith Laanen