Things on a Shelf: New Meanings, Relationships : Objects Can Change, Depending on Context, Artist Steinbach Says of His Conceptual Work

Polishing off a late breakfast in the dining room of a Newport Beach hotel, New York artist Haim Steinbach gazes at a trio of small white porcelain objects with floral-relief designs that are clustered on the tablecloth.

“I don’t quite understand what this salt and pepper shaker are doing next to this little vase with a carnation in it,” he says. “It’s totally absurd and strange. Of course, I know what they’re supposed to do. But this combination! And they’re made in the same style, as if they were preordained to be that way. To me, that’s interesting and complex in terms of the whole history of a particular society.”

Steinbach, 46, a compact, low-key man with a probing manner and a renegade smile, is the wry elder statesman of the eight young American and European artists in the exhibition “OBJECTives: The New Sculpture” at Newport Harbor Art Museum. Other samplings of his work were seen in Los Angeles last year in a one-man show at Margo Leavin Gallery and in “A Forest of Signs: Art in the Crisis of Representation,” at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

Steinbach is a conceptual artist who reveals metaphorical relationships among manufactured and handmade objects that he chooses and arranges in particular formats. Pieces in his signature style, which have been exhibited widely in the United States and Europe, consist of standardized shelves on which he places real objects selected from diverse contexts: ethnic artifacts, middlebrow heirlooms, pop culture do-dads, cultural icons, mass-produced items, historical relics.

He first became fascinated with the phenomenon of personal taste during his childhood in Tel Aviv. “New York is a melting pot, but Israel is even more of a melting pot,” he says. “You had all these Jews who were coming in from Europe and different countries, speaking different languages and having different cultural backgrounds. As a child, I was really fascinated by the dramatic difference between the cultural milieu of one household and another.”

His own family went in for Scandinavian-modern decor, but a Persian friend’s home contained very little “except a lot of carpets and some old cushions. It was a radical cultural difference, and it made a strong impression on me.”

At 13, he emigrated to New York with his family--a radical upheaval. “It was a completely new world, with people I didn’t know, didn’t relate to. I had to find my way, communicate with them.”

A graduate of Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, Steinbach started out as a minimal painter. But partly as a result of his deep feelings of rootlessness, he experienced “claustrophobia” in the confines of the studio. At the same time, he perceived an unsettling disparity between late-20th-Century art and late-20th-Century life.

“You had minimal art, and this was so reductive, and then you had conceptual art, and there was a lot of discussion about context. But one thing that was absent from that art was a sense of the clashing of cultures.”

Teaching at Cornell University and Middlebury College (where one of his students was artist Robert Gober, whose work is also in the Newport Harbor exhibit) during the ‘70s, Steinbach didn’t make much art. “Most of my energy went into challenging my students and myself a lot. I discussed a lot of the issues of (art) history and the breaks from those movements. And always was the question, what is vital now?”

It struck him that, although numerous artists were investigating the relationship between art and life, no one was working with everyday objects--objects that had not been transformed by the hand of the artist. No one seemed to be investigating the way such objects change their meaning depending on their context or the way they are used. In the mid-’70s, he began noodling around with the idea.

“The first thing I did, being a painter, was to take (a panel of) linoleum from the floor and make a ‘painting.’ It was my way of dealing with context. What does it mean to displace a square of linoleum from the floor and subject it to a new kind of reading?”

In daily life, Steinbach says, “we neutralize (objects). You see things in a certain way and (arrange) them in a way that no one else would. But we come from a specialist culture. So we focus in on things. We get into close-ups all the time.

“If you go to a house that’s in bad taste, you don’t go around saying, ‘Oh, I can’t stand it, I gotta get outta here.’ You focus in on the things you like and you reassemble the house, in a sense. . . . But the person whose house you’re in, he likes all these things! That’s his world, his language.”

Organizing and presenting objects on shelves is Steinbach’s way of reading between the lines, of pointing out relationships that our own culturally conditioned “close-ups” allow us to overlook.

Unlike Marcel Duchamp--who exhibited an upended porcelain urinal as an art object, drawing attention to the process of aesthetic transformation--Steinbach focuses attention on the everyday identity of objects. Instead of plucking a single object from the mass of everyday things and thereby making it into “art,” he treats objects as members of a large community of inanimate things that have their own peculiar life.

During the early ‘80s, his work consisted of idiosyncratic, handmade shelves holding single objects. In “shelf with Ajax,” a can of cleanser sits on a platform made of scrap wood, rustic-looking tree branches and a piece of shower curtain with a floral design. Steinbach says the piece is “a way of referring to a tradition of rustic furniture.”

A few years later, he redesigned the shelves as simple wood wedges covered with color-coordinated Formica laminate. (“It was a means of making a minimal object, almost like a paradigmatical platform on which to arrange objects.”) And he began stocking these severe, perfect shelves with seductively displayed mass-produced objects whose colors played off the colors of the Formica. In “supremely black,” for example, a trio of precisely positioned red-and-black boxes of Bold detergent and two teapots with black enamel sit on a red-and-black shelf.

The slick look of much of this work suggested to some commentators that this was “consumer” art--a cynical reflection of a culture willing to shop till it dropped in pursuit of the perfect object. But Steinbach says he was misunderstood.

“When you go to people’s houses, very often you see shelves with a formal display. Sometimes it looks as though it might be a display in a store window. But people don’t say, ‘Ah, a consumer family! Consumer art! Consumer shelf!’ They (view) it more personally.”

In a broad sense, Steinbach says, his work is “about intercultural communication,” a phenomenon which is “not any more alienated than the bazaar has been for centuries. It’s a mishmash kind of melting-pot place where the language is different because people speak a language that’s mixed with other languages.”

Neither criticizing this cross-cultural free-for-all nor celebrating it, Steinbach operates more or less as if he were creating his own branch of anthropology. Some of his pieces are even completely researched and assembled “in the field,” as it were--in private homes.

Initially working on a limited budget, Steinbach was obliged to use inexpensive or secondhand objects--unless he borrowed the components of his pieces from friends or found collectors willing to commission pieces.

“I did a work for Bill Erlich, a pretty well known collector in New York. His whole house is a sort of showcase, extremely minimal. There’s nothing around; it’s almost impersonal except for the (contemporary) art. So I said, ‘Let me see some of the household objects, what you’ve got.’ So we went into his kitchen and opened his closets.

“He had an Art Deco vase that had belonged to his great-grandmother and he had some of those black or white modern ceramic coffee pots he bought in Italy--very reductive objects. And he had some things that belonged to his parents--two candlesticks made of metal (ornamented with the image of) a cobra. I just began to pick objects, and I made a piece that had the objects of his taste and the objects that belonged to his family that he would never have put (on display).

“I asked him to tell me about the objects and he said, ‘Well, there are four generations here.’ I called the piece ‘four generations.’ It’s hanging in his house and he has to live with it now. He could replace (the objects), of course, because it’s his, and that’s his prerogative, but I don’t think he would. He could take the piece down. But he hasn’t, and he’s had it for a while.”

Most recently, Steinbach has been working on free-standing, two-sided constructions. His piece in the Newport Harbor show, “Untitled (daybed, coffin),” incorporates a chaise designed by modernist architect Mies van der Rohe, a Mexican coffin--displayed vertically--and a horizontal niche in which a viewer could lie down.

Although the daybed and the coffin “come from very different styles or periods or cultures,” Steinbach says, both “deal with sleep and death and the unconscious and fear. . . . On a basic, structural level, the piece is about three different states of rest.”

Each receptacle for the body operates in a different way, depending on the cultural associations that it conveys. “If you lie on the daybed, you could be Mme. Recamier (from the famous painting by Jacques-Louis David),” Steinbach proposed. “Or you could (assume) many other classical poses that are presented that way” in art.

“One hopes for, you know, an opening--a pointer--to something that’s more universal,” he says. “Something that’s more psychological, something that says something about the typology of things, in a way that one could say, ‘I see what typology (the study of types or symbols) is.’ To understand that word and that--that chemistry, or whatever it is. It’s a way of working.”

“OBJECTives: The New Sculpture” continues through June 24 at Newport Harbor Art Museum, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. Admission is $3 general, $2 for seniors and students, $1 for children 6 to 17. Tuesdays are free, courtesy of Beacon Bay Enterprises Inc. Information: (714) 759-1122.