Three Sculptors Discuss the Art of ‘OBJECTives’ : Art: A panel of artists who are exhibiting at the Newport Harbor Art Museum try to give some insight to their conceptual offerings.

“The thing that I’m preoccupied with is the whole idea of change and the issue of ambivalence,” said artist Haim Steinbach. “You know that song by the Rolling Stones, ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’? Well, I think that’s about ambivalence. There are so many options that you find you can’t make a decision. So in a sense, you have fewer options.

“(We have a) ‘hover-culture.’ Something is hovering over us, which has to do with this fear that everything’s going to fall apart. There are sudden explosions of this, like the Ayatollah in Iran. Or the history of what happened (under Nazi rule) in Germany, in the middle of Western culture. . . . There’s this desire to crawl back into your shell and just be happy in your home, but you turn on the TV and you’re invaded. You won’t be able to live in your own little world and be protected.”

Steinbach, the most articulate of the three artists in a Sunday afternoon panel discussion at Newport Harbor Art Museum, was talking about some of the ideas that underlie his work in “OBJECTives: The New Sculpture.” The exhibit, through June 24, showcases the work of eight American and European conceptual artists who are concerned with the psychological, sociological, perceptual and intellectual roles of objects in contemporary society.

Working with objects drawn from many contexts--from mass-produced items to one-of-a-kind crafts pieces--Steinbach organizes them in ways that suggest new points of reference. His piece in the show, “Untitled (daybed, coffin),” is a massive, two-sided box that contains a folk art coffin with a papier-mache skeleton on one side and a sleek daybed by modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe on the other.

Moderator Paul Schimmel, the museum’s chief curator and organizer of the exhibit, asked how it happened that three-dimensional conceptual work came to occupy such a prominent position in today’s art world, as opposed to the glory days of painting during the early ‘80s.

“It has to do with a place, it has to do with a way of thinking, it has to do with a particular culture and the way things change,” Steinbach said. “It’s like the advent of computers--where were they in the ‘70s? Or jet planes--where were they in the ‘50s?

“There was a kind of ‘cover-up’--I’m being playful when I say ‘cover-up’--in terms of the market, in terms of the media, in terms of really active promotion of a kind of art that (actually) was going on (in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s). There is work being done right now by artists who are just not seen. A project (happens) because you come to certain conclusions. It doesn’t necessarily go along with what anybody else is looking at.”

What Steinbach was looking at a decade ago was the strange fact that conceptual artists were fiercely interested in connections between art and life, yet they weren’t using objects from the real world in their art.

“Does the art experience only reside in work made by an author, an artist who uses his hands?” he asked rhetorically. “Or can one have this incredible (impression) left by objects arranged in an unusual way?

“I’m trying to find out something about them. We take for granted that we understand them. What interests me is that there are cultural situations that cause things to be the way they are: this microphone, this pen, this pad, this plastic cup. What does it mean that in a home, there’s an arrangement of objects? I want to stop and reexamine that relationship.”

“Originally, I thought the exhibition had a lot to do with distance and coolness,” Schimmel said. “I was wrong. Some very human issues are being addressed in the work, like a pervasive theme of death. . . . I’ve ended up organizing an exhibition that deals with realism.”

“I think abstract art has become realistic,” Steinbach said. “One of the big debates in ‘80s in art is about representation. It’s (a) much bigger (field) than the, quote, traditional representational image. . . . There’s abstract thinking, and it could be applied to all kinds of representation.”

Asked by a man in the audience how a realist painting could be an abstraction, Steinbach gave as an example the paintings by Ronald Jones: attractive geometrical designs that are in fact reproductions--done to scale and reduced--of the plans of buildings in Berlin where the Nazis tortured their captives.

Schimmel asked whether the panelists felt their work had a specifically nationalistic character.

“Being an artist had to do with being sensitive to your environment, your experience,” Steinbach said. “It’s not easy. It’s easier to fall into a pattern of mimicry, to have role models for approval, then to respond to your immediate situation--what’s happening in front of your nose. . . .

“Yes, you have your sense of place and experience. But (thanks to the media) you know every place where someone is being brutally murdered or where the latest advance in technology is going on. That’s an international effect changing the whole notion of an artist with a national identity.”

It wasn’t until the question-and-answer session, after Steinbach left to catch a plane back to New York, that the other two panelists--Spanish artist Juan Munoz and British artist Grenville Davey--came into their own. The topic that enthralled them, with a certain bizarre logic, was the lobby of the Marriott Hotel in Newport Beach.

Munoz’s piece in the show features an optically distorting, patterned floor, guarded by two demons on pedestals. As the viewer walks across the floor, it seems to change slightly.

But with a straight face, he claimed to find the hotel lobby “a far superior artwork” to his own. “It’s about a mile walk, really well done. People will feel desolated. There are completely unnecessary turnings. The (designs on the) carpets change directions. There is Mozart (playing) in the background, making you feel as though you’re in a movie.

“I have the deepest admiration for it. I wish I could do a long corridor. Haim and I could spend the next two days without finding the elevator.”