It’s a bit like meeting a landmine that’s about to detonate. In his first solo show at Anton Kern, Erik van Lieshout explodes into our consciousness as a wild-child provocateur, a Pac-Man Expressionist running rampant 24/7, videotaping everything in his life, while making art out of every piece of paper, chunk of wood, sentence, gesture, fragment of material, conflict, situation, and mess that constitutes his—the contemporary artist’s—everyday life. Provocation and agitation are his calling cards: two feet into the gallery’s threshold, the viewer is confronted with a looming, life-size tunnel hastily put together out of plywood and carpet, designed to mimic the basement of the St. Petersburg’s Hermitage where, for Manifesta 10 (in the summer of 2014) the artist and his team performed a two-month make-over for the museum’s 70 cats. (Since Empress Elizaveta Petrovna, the daughter of Peter the great, who ruled over Russia in the mid-eighteenth century, cats have lived in the basement of the museum in various states of care in order to rid the impeccable, imperial treasure house of mice and rats.) The tunnel leads to a cozy screening room where the 80-minute WORK (2015) is playing. Footage from Workers (2013) is fused and re-edited with footage …