Erik van Lieshout

The film in the installation,, is about a man from the working-class neighbourhood Rotterdam-Zuid named Janus; the contents of his house were bought by Van Lieshout after his death. Van Lieshout plunges into Janus’s life by filming his family, neighbours and fellow-townsmen. By means of interviews he makes a connection with art-political subjects such as the role of the artist and the reduction on art grants. ‘Does it bother you as well that the art grants are stopping?’, Van Lieshout asks Janus’s neighbour residents in Rotterdam-Zuid. The pictures of Janus’s environment are interlaced with fragments of Van Lieshout’s studio, where a personal interview with actor Marien Jongewaard takes place. Questions such as ‘What is my role as an artist?’ and ‘What do I need?’ return in existential monologues of Van Lieshout, interpreted by Jongewaard. Against the backdrop of the economic crisis Van Lieshout focuses himself at his own self-image as an artist and at what is expected of an artist. In Janus, Van Lieshout buys a collection of bric-a-brac that belonged to a recently deceased man, with the intention of showing it in a museum. He films his discussion with the man's family and neighbours, several of whom are amateur artists. Made at a time when contemporary art was under attack in the Dutch political arena as merely a “left-wing hobby”, the work explores class, social hierarchy and the place accorded to artists, whom Van Lieshout compares to bacteria. For this work, Van Lieshout employed an artist to play him, including in the film his conversations with this actor and the latter's caricatural attempts at imitation. The installation in which this film is projected adopts the dimensions of a large room. Highlighting the questions of taste explored on screen, Van Liesthout papers the walls with images of fashionable living room and kitchen. (This text is an extract from the exhibition brochure of Erik van Liesthout : The Show Must Ego On, Wiels-Centrum voor Hedendaagse Kunst, Brussel, 30.09.2016 - 08.01.2017)