HAIM STEINBACH
ONCE AGAIN THE WORLD IS FLAT
Kunsthalle Zürich
Limmatstrasse 270 - Zürich
23/5/2014 - 17/8/2014
This expansive exhibition at Kunsthalle Zürich presents the work of Haim
Steinbach (born in Israel in 1944, lives and works in New York) from the early
1970s to the present day. The show focuses on Haim Steinbach’s contextual work
with objects. Beginning with the square frame of the paintings of the early
1970s, the work moves on to encompass architectural settings. Having
incorporated objects from local collections in his exhibitions at the Center for
Curatorial Studies Bard Hessel Museum in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, in 2013,
with which the Kunsthalle Zürich is collaborating for this exhibition, and at
the Serpentine Galleries in London in Spring 2014, Haim Steinbach also
integrates specific objects and art- works from Zürich art collections into his
“Displays.”
In a conversation between the curators of the exhibition and
the artist, Haim Steinbach states:
"Our perception of reality, objects
included, changes with every period, time and context. We speak of a
generational shift, or a generation gap. But the perception of objects also has
to do with how we project our desires and ideological prejudices and beliefs
onto them.“
Around 1975 Haim Steinbach came upon the idea of the shelf
as a space for the play of objects. This led to the concept of “Display,” namely
engaging the object and its context. In 1979, Display #7 was shown at Artists
Space in New York. The shelf surrounds us in our everyday lives; at home, in
shops, in the workplace. Wherever something material is stored or presented, the
shelf structures the space – and becomes invisible itself in the process. Also
no cultural and social institution devot- ed to the collection and presentation
of objects can work without it.
"The wall became the primary place for
me to present physical, already existing objects. And in that sense it would be
a shelf that would be put on the wall and then the objects arranged on it. But
if the objects are arranged on the shelf on the wall, then the question is: What
is a wall? What is a shelf? What culture does it come from? How do cultures
differentiate be- tween walls?”
Beyond its ordinary function, for
Steinbach the shelf is a concept that registers the structure of objects. Like
the level or the measuring stick, it is a device. It evolves from the minimal,
standard, DIY-store board to the handmade shelf as it relates to different
cultural traditions of vernacular and craft, and to historical periods and
styles. And yet we always view it from different perspectives: as a sort of
stage and prop for personal narratives and as an exhibition frame on the wall.
It becomes the element of a bigger arrangement, integrating the walls and floors
of the space, as well as the viewer.
Haim Steinbach’s art plays a major
role in the contemporary artistic discourse on the object. Start- ing with the
practices of Minimalism and Pop Art, as well as Performance and Conceptual Art,
Steinbach’s ideas evolve towards the formation of a new paradigm for the object
and its place. It links important elements of these art forms and sets new focal
points between art and the every- day, production and consumption, and the
relationships between image, object and space. Engag- ing the architectural and
cultural features of the exhibition space, Steinbach develops specific
presentation formats. These formats incorporate existing, borrowed, or purchased
objects of every- day use. And the inclusion of objects and artworks from
private, public, art-historical, and everyday collections in the exhibition is
central to Steinbach’s artistic practice. It relates rituals of collecting and
collections with questions of collectivizing and collectivity and thus affirms
the recent para- digm shift for art and its interdisciplinary frames of
reference. While the objects themselves are presented unchanged, it is the
arrangement and presentation that confirms their reality and hence points to
their special histories and making, from the mass-produced object to the unique
flea mar- ket find.“What’s most important is that all of these objects are part
of our world; they are part of our language. And they overlap. And you may have
a mass-produced object next to something that your child just made out of wood
in first grade or second grade. Or you could have a mass-produced object next to
a bowl of olives, which repeat, which are the same. Nature re- peats itself. And
all these things are beginning to relate.”
Our perception of the world has
fundamentally changed. In a kind of reversal of the Copernican Revolution – the
breakthrough of a spatial planetary model – the digital circulation of
information, images, words and signs puts us into a new state of flatness.
“In the beginning, painters painted on the walls of their cave, and
later on they painted the walls of the cathedral. Even later they painted with
oil paint on canvas, the painting was like a wall that could be removed and
placed someplace else. So it’s about the projection of imagination into the
social, cultural and architectural space.”
It is no coincidence that
painting provides a key reference here: by the early 1970s with Minimalist
paintings, Steinbach tested the boundaries and codes of an abstract visual
idiom. He envisioned a direct relationship between the calculated placement of
coloured bars around monochrome squares and the everyday world of objects – from
board games to floor coverings. This is so, just as the object is the actual
raison d’être of the shelf, and just as background and foreground always inter-
act. If painting can be understood as the extension of a wall, what is its
status as an object? And if the shelf has a mediating function in the
presentation of things as an arrangement in space, what consequences does it
have for our understanding and appreciation of the play of objects? „It’s
fascinating how an object is registered in our memory, how it becomes a
‘gestalt’, an image, or now digitalized in our brain. How do we see things,
really? Didn’t Beethoven compose the 9th symphony when he was deaf? The screen
is in fact an extension of our gut and brain. The object and the screen, the
body and the pill, ‘strawberry fields.’“
A catalogue to accompany the
exhibition will be published in collaboration with the Center for Curatorial
Studies Bard Hessel Museum in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, and the Serpentine
Galleries, London. The catalogue includes contributions by Johanna Burton and
Germano Celant, and a conversation between the artist, Tom Eccles, Hans Ulrich
Obrist and Beatrix Ruf.
