The CryptoFuturist and The New Tribal Labyrinth

I always say I’m a primitivist at heart, but technological progress, as much as it’s wrought our planet’s ruin, remains inextricably tied to culture with a capital C—something I can’t imagine living without. When I try to imagine my over-developed brain being sated by the kind of tribal, low-tech existence that primitivism implies, it seems impossible. Yet I wonder if there’s even a choice; if it isn’t our destiny as a species to die out, and become part of the mass extinction we’ve initiated. Or does our future lie in the utopian possibilities of technology, and an embrace of transhumanism—an evolutionary phase many argue we’re already entered?

These are questions the artist-designer Joep van Lieshout, and Atelier Van Lieshout (AVL), have grappled with for decades. From van Lieshout’s ambitious, if short-lived “free state”, AVL Ville, created in 2001 along Rotterdam’s harbor, which had its own currency, farm, water-purification system, and field hospital, to the more ominous SlaveCity (2005-2008), a fictional metropolis based on the model of concentration camps, and designed around principles of efficiency and profit, AVL’s experiments in idyllic self-sufficiency manifest a perpetual ambivalence. Given the former vision failed, and the latter suspiciously resembled contemporary urban life (work fourteen hours, sleep seven hours, and spend the three hours between in brothels, museums and shopping centers), we might assume the overall conclusion is we’re doomed. But as van Lieshout’s recent exhibition at Pioneer Works, The CryptoFuturist and The New Tribal Labyrinth reveals, the quest to limn an alternately quixotic and apocalyptic future may be humanity’s only response to an anthropocene era that’s already historicized our fate.

The exhibition’s title referred to two bodies of work that are seemingly at odds with one another, ideologically at least. As the press release stated, “The New Tribal Labyrinth series offers a paean to a preindustrial return to tribalism, while the CryptoFuturism series employs the vanguards of science and technology to telegraph warning.” Both are ongoing series, the former begun in 2013, the latter in 2015, that were represented by a heady mix of objects—symbolic and functional—that conceptualized these contrary worlds. Related examples from earlier projects were interspersed throughout, and ranged from the mid-1980s to the present.

Van Lieshout’s signature mechanical and performative sculptures; furniture and architectural hybrids merging human and machine; and egg, sperm, and helmut motifs, were all in evidence. So too was his trademark collision of the visionary and sardonic, which imbued the exhibition with its paradoxical sense of the utopian and apocalyptic. Sited within the nearly 10,000 square-foot space that constitutes Pioneer Works’ massive main hall, the presence of several large-scale works hulking over smaller ones added to the overall tension between the generative and violent.