SP REVIEWS: Lionel Maunz at Bureau Gallery, by Adam Lehrer

In restitution for a slowing down in content, Adam will review new things in real time, you're welcome

The last time Lionel Maunz had an exhibition at Bureau gallery was 2022, and I remember both the show and the night that it opened as well. The show, Where The Body Ends, was fantastic. Massive, grotesquely detailed figurative sculptures alluding to violence, death and destruction. Rotting corpses, rotting horses. Black and white drawings of malice and lust. Upset, but invigorated all the same by the work, I went home to find that my now wife, who I was still three months away from marrying, was having a pop wow with the woman who was meant to be her maid of honor. It had always taken some effort by me to not buck heads with this girl, an aggressive DSA leftist who barely masked her hatred for me and what I represented and her disappointment with my wife for loving me. I was trying to mind my own business on my laptop while I heard in the background the maid of honor discussing her work in DSA seeking to defund the police. For some reason, I couldn’t help myself.

“You genuinely believe a society riddled with crime is one that can afford to have a weak police force?”

“There are better ways to deal with crime than by punishing people!” she shrieked back at me.

"OK,” I said, “Such as…”

"Something less cruel!”

"Rapists and killers deserve kindness?”

”You’re a fucking SCUMBAG!”

After some back and forth where I remained calm, she finally said to my wife in a shriek feminine howl, “How can you marry this man? He’s sick!” She then cried, played victim and left. Days later, she sent my wife a multiple page email not only relinquishing her role as maid of honor, but severing their friendship entirely. Obviously, my wife was mad for a time, but eventually had to realize that those kinds of friendships are untenable.

At the time, I didn’t know what came over me and why I couldn’t just keep a sock in my mouth. Now, however, I realize that it was Lionel’s art that emboldened me. His work imbues in you evocations of power. I wanted to wield my power, over the woman’s feeble intellect and her naivety, with the brute force of my cold, realistic, and dispassionately reactionary insight. I’ll forever associate Lionel with my final decision to put this manipulative radical chic socialist feminist in her place.

Three years later, Lionel has a new show. It too deals in power and the abuse of it. It’s called Obedience, which feels like a pertinent title in the aftermath of 2020 and the Biden administration, when we were compelled by the state to accept and adhere to an increasingly nonsensical set of mandates and culturally inculcated rules. Wear the mask. Take the vax. Don’t talk about the vax and the ways in which it fucked up your body or lose your platform and livelihood. Worship black people and cheer on the incarceration of innocent men like Kyle Rittenhouse and Daniel Penny. Don’t notice your hundreds of thousands of new Haitian neighbors, their bad behavior, and the ways in which your city has rapidly devolved into third world conditions. YOU MUST OBEY the liberal consensus, even as it advocates extreme left wing positions on trans children or violent rioting in the name of social justice, perpetually backed by an extensive matrix of dark money pipelines and insidious NGOs. We are all pigs, blindly following the deranged will of maniacal overlords.

Lionel doesn’t advocate for a political position in his work, but one can can glean from the work where he stands. He seems to have an innate repulsion towards weakness, victimhood and entitlement. For one, his art is of an elitist paradigm. His sculptures require an exceptional level of craftsmanship and precision; so much so, that they present a direct challenge to an art world that is so willing to make stars out of artists with vague minority status who can barely draw a straight line and much less conceive of an original thought. For me, it’s Lionel’s maniacal work ethic and supreme commitment to making art as difficult for him as possible that is ultimately more transgressive than the violent content and imagery that he trades in.

Obedience is a bit more streamlined than Where the Body Ends. The 2022 exhibition was sprawling, a crowded Garden of Earthly Delights with each piece living its own contained universe. Obedience, on the other hand, is Lionel’s attempt at drawing a narrative line between his recent works, like there’s some linearity from piece to piece. Each sculpture whispers the ghost of the same sad, brutal story.

Three years ago, Lionel challenged my assertion that Antonin Artaud was insane.

That both dismisses and qualifies him in the wrong ways. He was working with the absolute limits of body and language. That level of engagement, refusal and antagonistic desperation read maybe as insane only because he set himself to the impossible, denying the inadequacies of words and images, denying all stabilizing referent. The last and only thing he could do, ravaged by narcotics and literally fulminating psychiatry sure, but absolutely coherent and intentioned.

Indeed, the limits of body AND language are at play in Obedience. The artist cites three key figures as inspirations for the body of work: the aktionist artist and Friedrichshof commune leader Otto Muehl, primate researcher Harry Harlow, head psychiatrist at the Oak Ridge Asylum for the criminally insane and R.D. Laing student Elliot Barker.

The first notable piece one will find his attention drawn towards here is the mega sculpture '“The Pig”. Lionel said that the starting point was the use of wrestling in Muehl’s aktion performances, but the two figures scrapping in his sculpture are not human, but pigs. Muehl and other aktionists used animals in their work in ways that would offend basically everyone now, as we are all innately repulsed by the person who delights in the misery of creatures who cannot defend themselves. One can also connect the image to Harlow, who placed baby monkeys in total isolation to study the impacts of solitude on primates with zero concern for their well-being. Lionel, however, never uses art to evoke sympathy. Instead, he wants to instill in us a brazen joy in the abuse of power. The human figure who stands before the wrestling pigs is likely a stand-in for Muehl himself, ecstatic in his disregard for suffering at the expense of his creations. Of course, this becomes a parable for the extreme sexual and ideological power that Muehl exercised over his communard followers within his cult. Lionel isn’t repelled by this, he’s fascinated by it, seeing the absolute control of living beings as the purest embodiment of the artist’s will to power. The cult leader, the dictator, the madman. They are the truest artists. Perhaps Lionel even identifies with this figure, to a degree. After all, he says that sculpture is the closest artistic medium to “biological reality” and the closest to “death”, “Sculpture is the most finite, constrained.” He is pleased with the power he wields over life itself, and the form with which he renders death.

Elliot Barker’s unique psychiatric methods are of interest to Lionel for obvious reasons. The Oak Ridge facility “treated” some of the worst psychopaths of the 20th Century — from Peter Woodcock, who had been convicted of murdering three children in Toronto in the late 1950s, to David Lariviere, a reputed mafia hitman who'd also killed a woman with a wine bottle as she lay sleeping beside him — but, here’s the kicker, Barker also deputized the criminals to be “patient-therapists”. Barker, quite literally, allowed them to read one another.

”I think I was more idealistic then than I am now,” said Barker in an interview in 1993. Well, that’s one way of interpreting his lunacy.

The prisoner-patients at Oak Ridge could order drug treatments for each other, including LSD, methamphetamine and truth serums. Alcohol treatments were another favourite. The men, some of them severe alcoholics, have said they would be forced to drink large quantities of high-proof alcohol. The goal wasn't to treat their mental illness, but to weaken their defences and force them to examine their own evil. Obviously, it didn’t work. The weaker inmates were beaten and raped. The more vicious amongst them delighted in a free for all of drugs, sadism and violence.

Laing, Barker’s teacher, came to be associated with the anti-psychiatry movement and believe that in a theoretical utopian future that our attempts now to treat psychosis amounted to little more than efforts to darken the small glimmers of light that present true enlightenment. Barker’s Oak Ridge treatment experiments allowed psychosis to flourish, fulfilling his mentor’s prophecies in a contained, clinical setting. He said he wanted to treat it, but maybe he wanted to free it, just so he could see what would happen. A judge called the program “outrageous”, but the broader psychiatric public interestingly called it “avant-garde”. Now, we see what Maunz is doing here. Oak Ridge is, like both the actions and communards of Muehl, a performance piece taken to its sadistic endpoints. “The Performance” depicts an assortment of disembodied human parts, “bodies without organs” if you catch my drift, freeing themselves from straight jackets as they writhe in violence and tear each other apart. The illustration of Barker’s completely fucking deranged clinical and artistic mind.

“The Furnace”, however, is perhaps the most disturbing piece in the show. It is, as its title suggests, a construction of an old-style furnace with a figurative sculpture reclining within it. Perhaps it triggered my own ancestral trauma. Keeping with the themes of the show, could it be that the final solution too was the maximally violent climax of Hitler’s evil performance concept? He outlined his vision in text, after all, and the exhibition indeed takes an interest in conceptual art and the ways in which the artist will go to extreme ends to see their concept brought to life. In broader interpretation however, the furnace is where the artist goes to rid himself of the evidence of a performance concept gone too far. It’s the final solution. The cover-up. Muehl burning the journals of his communards after the Friedrichshof Commune was raided as he was about to be convicted of sex crimes in the early 1990s. The furnace is our disgrace, where we are sent when we have allowed ourselves to OBEY the deranged mandates of men with power over us.

Indeed, I see in Obedience a theory of anarchism. In an anarchic reality where normal laws and rules have disintegrated, the engineer, unburdened by normative conscience, can exercise power and turn us all into his pigs or his monkeys. But it is not our suffering that Lionel is sympathizing with, instead he is drawn to the one who can exercise that power to realize such macabre visions within the pandemonium. “I wanted a larger, more complete sense of cataclysm.” We all crave power, only some have the vision and fortitude to take it.

ILLUSTRATIONS (All works by Lionel Maunz)
1. “The Pig”
2. “The Furnace”
3. “The Performance”