Text by Charles Avery
October 2020
Erik van Lieshout, Beer, 2019
Video. 35 min 33 sec
Courtesy the artist and Maureen Paley
I first encountered a film of Erik’s at the 2003 Venice Biennale, wandering around the pavilions of The Giardini during the ponderous installation period, probably in search of a screwdriver.
I can’t remember when I first met Erik himself, which is strange because he’s such a charismatic guy, in life just as he is in front of the camera. We became firm friends when we swapped some drawings, and when I stayed in his apartment in Rotterdam and we drank some vodka and he showed me the rest of his collection.
Erik loves drawing, he’s always doing it, which makes sense when you look at his films. I can’t bring myself to call any of it work, nor can I do so with my own drawings. Not that it’s easy, it’s very difficult, but to call these emissions ‘works’ or ‘pieces’ implies a stasis which belies their nature, which is fluid, unresolved, questioning, failing and vital.
I could have chosen any one of Erik’s films: the same quality runs through all of them. All centre on him as narrator, interviewer and protagonist. I chose Beer, 2019, for several reasons. It’s extremely relevant, it’s substantial, it pays tribute to the essential, close production relationship with his wife Suzanne, whilst bearing all the hallmarks of vintage Erik: humour, vulnerability, honesty, dishonesty, cheek, accessibility.
The film explores, amongst other artistic crises, his dilemma of having been nominated for the €100,000 Heineken Prize for Art, whilst becoming aware of alleged immoral practices of the company in Africa and his eventual acceptance of the prize.
Erik’s strategy when making a film is generally to embed himself in a place, situation or community and, with great economy of means, use anything that happens to come his way, material or mental, to weave a story. In Beer he refers to the ignobility and discomfort of accepting the prize, weighing up the dilemma in the style of a disgraced Jewish NY comedian (but then there’s the money) and thus he performs alchemy with the most repugnant trait: hypocrisy. Ultimately, he settles on his wife’s — who is also producer of his films — initiative: a Robin Hood style manoeuvre of funding a pharmacy in Africa with the prize money.
I admire Erik firstly because he is so exotic. He is a person I could never be, or even imagine being, yet intrinsically feel connected to through the qualities I see in what he does, and which I try to stay close to within my own project: commonality (the ability to be available to people, beyond the gatekeepers, conventions and signifiers of the ‘Art code’), humour (I disclose that I regard comedy as the highest art form), improvisation, failure, the reflection and synthesis of worldly experience, and the sense that it is never done, always provisional, conversational, therapeutic and wrought from inadequacy.
— Charles Avery