Haim Steinbach

WE MET HAIM STEINBACK IN PARIS AT THE PALAIS DE TOKIO, DURING THE CELEBRATIONS FOR THE TENTH ILLY COLLECTION PRODUCTION ANNIVERSARY. THROUGH THIS INTERVIEW, FAMOUS ART CRITIC ANGELA VETTESE HELPS US TO BECOME MORE FAMILIAR WITH THE ARTIST AND THE MAN.

It is with slight consternation that one enters Haim Steinbach’s studio. On the identical baby shoes, stuffed owls and yet more masks, carnival prostheses, bells, dolls, cans and boxes of washing powder decorated with commercial graphic designs, fake skulls, containers with unquestionably phallus-shaped handles. A collection of kitsch items, as it were, and yet, at a closer look, that’s not what it is: Steinbach is attracted neither by bad taste nor by common taste. It is the world of objects, shapes, languages through which one speaks without uttering.
As a matter of fact, sometimes he even likes words: YO!, for instance, the slang-like greeting kids exchange in the streets. Or the slogans used in advertising and the new entries in current jargon, idioms raised to the status of objects in our minds: preconstructed vehicles into which we project our identity and by means of which we like to communicate it.
It is also more or less the same thing happening with wallpaper, one of the first elements Steinbach employed to speak to the public: layers of flowery paper which must have touched upon someone’s emotional chords, which families or ladies adopted as outfits for their homes and as a way of connecting to the world.
For this reason, taking a walk in Steinbach’s company is one of the funniest experiences you could ever have: he looks at everything. He stops in front of every single shop window. He is intrigued by a case. In another shop, he studies the cut of a shirt as intently as a tailor wishing to copy it. He analyses the way in which famous brands launch their latest products. He judges advertising campaigns, accepts to be seduced by them, only to move away with an ironic comment that is always there, as is proper for a Jewish New Yorker.
What does he do with this heap of objects which he owns but also only looks at? He normally puts them on shelves. He chooses them according to their shapes and types of relations (in any case, never venture with him into a discussion about the reasons underlying any work: he will cram it with a form of intellectualism which is not naturally his and he knows it). When he cannot place an object on a shelf, because it is a poster or wallpaper, then he will stick it to the wall; if it is women, as in 1996 when he was choreographer for Strenesse’s fashion show, he will make them glide down a runway under a beating rhythm of pouring showers.
In every case, he will always raise what he is exhibiting both as an object and metaphorically. Indeed, he will exalt it, isolating it from its context and proposing it to us as an object deserving attention and not merely an object to be used or idly looked at. He will place the object within a composition that is governed by visual rules of its own but also by operational rules: no object is ever fixed onto a stand, even when the distance required between the objects is accurately measured out. The public may hold what it sees, move it, break it. It may do anything, as long as it looks at it.
As a rule and in his most famous works, Steinbach displays the fruit of his collecting habit, like junk-men on accurately-crafted wooden shelves that a carpenter manufactured for him. They all have the same hanging angle even though they are different in size. They are varnished in one or two colours with maniac precision. After all, equally maniacal is also the booklet containing the assembly instructions one has to follow after removing them from their boxes which are even more beautiful than the objects themselves. The pamphlet reads as follows: point one, wash your hands with soap. Point two, don a pair of white cotton gloves. Point three, make sure you have a firm grip on the object to avoid dropping it while removing it from its box. And so on for at least fifty pages.
The shelves may also be made of glass, supported by Innocenti metal pipes (an unexpectedly elegant combination), or they can be in the form of a proper wardrobe with outfits on hangers inside.
Invited to participate in Kassel’s Documenta in 1992, Steinbach enhanced the round turreted shelf on which he had arranged objects taken from director Jan Hoet’s office – also a collector – by hiding it behind an enormous wooden panel: the visitor’s gaze could penetrate only through a window and the feeling of becoming a voyeur was enough to enhance what you saw, mixed objects which otherwise would have appeared meaningless. At another exhibition in Gent, in 2000, he filled the music school building with metal protrusions: the final result was that the building looked like a surreal, polyphonic organ, while the gas vent pipes, used as flues, looked like a constellation of silvery organ-pipes.
Nothing is meaningless, that’s the whole issue. Every shape we place around us, especially in the whirl of producing objects, images, shapes, characterises the Western world. But never have objects been meaningless: indeed, in an old installation in Naples at the Lia Rumma gallery, Steinbach included various archaeological items. On another occasion, he invented a casing for art jewellery, as if to deny that he is driven solely by the taste for mass culture.
You need to remember more than one of his works, to become familiar with his way of arranging real objects by bestowing upon them a new identity, to witness the calm but strict scenes he puts up to demand the uniform varnishing of a frame, the only proper way to frame a photograph. Only then can we reflect upon the limit between that which lies on his floor in Brooklyn and the reason for its lying there, waiting for an idea of composition and the occasion of an exhibition to retrieve something from the deposit. Everything in there looks sinister, even the newspaper clippings of a banal slogan: waiting for a car to take us back to Manhattan, we feel like we’ve just been at a fetishist’s place. But when we come across those same objects at an exhibition, we realise that they are part of an epic poem: like only few other works of art do, they tell us how much objects speak for us and about the secret code binding them: the desire, memory, pulsation, impulse, history flowing through the days.
This sentence would make him smile and would remain unwritten: Steinbach would mock himself and also us, for we are willing to believe in such things. But then, thinking back to his far from easy life, from his childhood in Tel Aviv to his arrival in the United States, from his difficult self-made career (which not all Americans have experienced) to his success which came quite late, only after the Neo-Expressionist fashion was over, thinking back to his soon sixty years of life and to the pride of having been a master of objectsculpture; then, perhaps, just before correcting us with a sagacious comment, his gaze would curl into mild gratification.