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REVIEWS BOOKS
At nearly 350 pages, this super-size monograph
still only presents a greatest hits of the thousand or
so products produced by the Atelier Van Lieshout
company since it was established in 1995 by bad-
boy Dutch artist Joep van Lieshout. Somewhere
between an IKEA catalogue, an anarchist’s survival
manual and a town-planner’s sketchpad, the creating a continuous state of exception to the
AVL range runs right the way up from compost law, comparable to a state of emergency in which
toilets and home gyms to self-assembly farms all laws are suspended. But anarchism comes
for the lone ecologist and full-scale blueprints for with its darker side; as Van Lieshout bluntly puts
masterplanning new cities. it, you might be shot. So while total freedom of
A slightly bitchy comment by Aaron expression was written into AVL-Ville’s basic
Betsky compares Van Lieshout’s proliferation to constitution, the city was well equipped with an
Bill Gates’s greed. And indeed, like Microsoft, arsenal of working weaponry.
Van Lieshout likes to coat his megalomania in AVL’s latest project pushes the perverse
the latest politically correct jargon; everything is logic of the exceptional state to its extreme.
organic, eco-friendly and self-sustainable. The SlaveCity (2005) takes its inspiration from
book’s ten-step dummy’s guide to AVL names concentration camps, where inmates were
modularity, transportability and reusability as its stripped of citizenship, and therefore protection
core design philosophy; products can be endlessly under national law, prior to entering. Lieshout’s
recombined, transport crates double as outhouses, chilling plan equates Nazi efficiency, with its
and most products can be scaled up or down from maximum-capacity living units and obsessive
S to M to XL (XS doesn’t exist, not in the penis, logbooks, with the maximum-profit drive of global
AVL’s favourite design shape, and not anywhere telesales. When AVL’s slaves are not working
else). Unlike Bill Gates, AVL actively promotes in the city’s call-centre they follow a relentless
its Dutch attitude to sexual tolerance, with multi- routine of training and agricultural labour, sleep
woman beds, sadomasochistic equipment and a in scaffolding bunk beds and eat a minimally
lot of fisting and faecal sex. nutritious sludge supplemented by home brew
AVL was set up as a means of safeguarding to keep them happy. In a sinister twenty-first-
Van Lieshout’s freedom to carry out his projects century twist, everything is recycled, from human
on the margins of legality. Sociologist Rudi excrement to the organs of those disposed of
Laermans ironically idealises the studio as a form as unfit to work. Already tested on a smaller
of ‘production communism’, particularly in relation ‘iPod’ scale, and precisely calculated (200,000
to AVL’s short-lived commune, the self-declared ‘participants’, zero energy, annual profit of €7.8
independent state of AVL-Ville (2001) that existed billion), SlaveCity is waiting to become reality. In
on Rotterdam’s waterfront until closed down his essay, Wouter Vanstiphout warns that AVL
by increasingly paranoid Dutch authorities. Van has come, literally, to a dead end, stripping itself
Lieshout prefers the phrase ‘make it exceptional’: of the utopian possibilities of earlier projects to
make a pact with totalitarianism. Van Lieshout
would probably reply there’s worse, much worse,
to come. Jennifer Thatcher
ATELIER VAN LIESHOUT
By Jennifer Allen, Aaron Betsky, Rudi Laermans & Wouter Vanstiphout
NAi Publishers, €35/$55 (paperback)
ARTREVIEW one.linsix.linfour.lin
p162-165 Reviews AR Jun07.indd 4 9/5/07 02:47:37
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