Essentials: Barbara Steinman: Beauty, Magic and Points of View
Barbara Steinman is an artist who aims for and achieves excellence, one who is firmly based in Canada and has achieved international standing. In 2002, she was awarded a Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts, and she is now working on a commission for the Canadian Embassy in Berlin.
Steinman is particularly known for taking on highly charged social issues yet presenting them gently, allowing her viewers to contemplate the many facets of the dilemmas she presents. Her distilled images—dice, sleeping figures, leaves, violins, tripods, shattered glass—belie the complexity of the human themes she addresses and her innovations in form and content. Steinman's topics range from fate to homelessness to our appropriations of nature. They also include the relationships of sound and language to image; our need for measuring devices; notions of life, deterioration and death; and probing explorations of injustice. Steinman has described her art as presenting "issues of tolerance and dominance and the fragility of boundaries." She states that her art offers insights into "issues of privilege, loss and identity."
Like many contemporary artists, Steinman does not have a signature style. Her art is made for different settings—museums, galleries, lobbies, parks—and in many forms—video, photography, paint, metal, salt, sound, glass, space. She is widely recognized for her experimental yet understated uses of new media. For example, Steinman was one of the first video artists in Montreal to show her tapes in gallery installations rather than on a monitor. Sometimes, what seems like a straightforward photograph has been shot from video, or reworked on computer, then reprinted so that the colour and clarity of the initial image are altered, made slightly unfamiliar to construct a different reality. Steinman also combines traditional materials with complex technologies—shattered safety glass with computer-altered images, brass tripods with etched magnifying lenses, wool with sound graphs—to destabilize what we think we know. Steinman's method of changing approaches from piece to piece allows her to find appropriate and inventive ways to express a vision that responds to the task or moment at hand.
The art Steinman produces, in both large- and small-scale work, is poetic and profound, non-didactic and polysemous. Her combinations of pressing sociopolitical themes, sophisticated uses of technology and inspired responses to site highlight the strengths and vulnerabilities needed to negotiate our contemporary, temporary world. What follows are a few thoughts on what for me are some of the artist's most intriguing pieces. I have chosen works that have a prophetic quality, introduce the unexpected and comment on recent political issues.
Like all Steinman's art, Lux (2000) is very beautiful, stunningly so. At first glance, it appears that we are looking at a magnificent chandelier suspended from the ceiling and its shadows cast on the floor. Slowly we come to realize that it is only draped steel chains that are suspended. All the light fixture's crystals lie on the floor in a circular arrangement that we initially took to be one of the chandelier's shadows. We are left contemplating our ability to be deceived by appearances, how easy it is to confuse shadow with substance and how often what is beneath, under or covered is masked. Art critic Gillian MacKay has described the actual shadows as "net-like." It is as if Steinman has visualized possible traps for her viewers, using the central area of light and outer darkness of Lux as metaphor.
Steinman first conceived the sculpture for an exhibition in post-Iron Curtain Prague. In that context, the "fallen" crystals and polished chains would have alluded to the Bohemian glass-making tradition and Soviet steel. "Originally, I had in mind all the historical layering of different regimes that had invaded and dominated Prague, and the chandelier became an icon of resistance and of that very delicate balance between strength and fragility," Steinman has written about this work. "To me, it's as if the chandelier had shed its skin, revealing the toughness beneath the facade of beauty."
When Lux was exhibited at La Biennale de Montréal in 2000, its unexpected elegance in the grungy Palais de Commerce evoked a sense of surprise that an object of such beauty could exist in the world of contemporary art. At Olga Korper Gallery in Toronto, where Lux was exhibited in 2001, Steinman's sculpture was paired with Paterson Ewen's Flying Rope (2000), painted a year before his death. Installed in the vast space of the commercial gallery that represents the work of both artists, the pairing gave greater resonance to each artist's use of curved rope or chain forms, allowing viewers to see affinities and understand differences in the work of two outstanding Canadian artists. Juxtaposed with Ewen's exuberant, mixed-media painting, Steinman's Lux also seemed to function as a monument to the persistence of working idiosyncratically and, when seen in retrospect, a memorial to an artist she admires. One has the sense of something broken or shattered and, simultaneously, a feeling of endurance and transcendence. At the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, which later purchased Lux, the sculpture was shown in a gallery with other contemporary artworks from the permanent collection. There, its allusions to earlier eras and elegance were in marked contrast to the other art on display. Lux functioned like a magnet, its luminosity and beauty drawing viewers closer, its kaleidoscopic qualities reconfiguring past and present.
The shifting meanings of Lux depend as much on the way we see the work as on site. Wherever it is displayed, viewers must look up, down and around to grasp what is happening, for Lux reads differently depending on where we focus: a glistening sea, a weighted form, a set of webs. Steinman's deconstruction of the chandelier allows us to see it for what it is—a sensuous, if sagging, core; a shining skin; and peripheral projections. As with her 1991 Ballroom, which also used a chandelier and floor elements as well as a tripod with a magnifying glass, Steinman's inclusion of different viewpoints encourages viewers to shift positions, both physically and psychically, and, in doing so, adjust previous perceptions.
At the end of the nineties, Steinman expanded her art practice to include large-scale, permanent, outdoor commissions in conjunction with commercial, upscale, urban real-estate developments. Her first venture of this type, the 1998 work Perennials, created for the Beatty Mews development, a new neighbourhood at Pacific and Cambie in Vancouver, won a Gold Georgie Award. It established the approach she would take in subsequent exterior projects, like the recently opened Leaf Garden, a downtown garden-park for Bay/Breadalbane streets in Toronto, set amidst high-rise condominiums and adjacent to the downtown YMCA.
Like so many of Steinman's works, Perennials is a multi-part piece. Its two main components are a 4,500-square-foot, leaf-shaped pool echoing the triangular shape of the site and a standing wall or fence of shattered glass at some distance from the pool. The horizontality of the pool and verticality of the wall embody the relationship of the towers to the land on which they stand and reference the development's proximity to the water.
In both Vancouver and Toronto, Steinman expanded her use of multiple views to include ground-level (pedestrian) and aerial (apartment-dweller) perspectives. In Vancouver, there is also a drive-by view and, as in many of her less permanent installations, like Ballroom in Charleston, South Carolina, or Colonnade (1998), on Boston Common, specially lit night features. From a car, in the dark, the illuminated wall of shattered glass appears out of nowhere, a swift reminder of the fragility of life and safety. With Perennials, she began including seasonal views as well. The reflective surfaces of the pool give way to the opacity of its materials once the water has been emptied for the winter. Despite the monumentality of Perennials' enormous components, she has incorporated the ephemeral as a reminder that everything, no matter how permanent its appearance, does change.
According to Steinman, "Perennials is a sculptural overlay, a botanical metaphor for the constant shifts in natural and cultural landscapes and for the fragility of their survival." The words she inscribed into the granite benches surrounding the pool—transplanted, cultivated, hybrid, seasonal—allude to the many changes on the site, and her humorous inversion of scale—the humongous leaf, the smaller wall—as well as her title suggest that even though nature has been usurped, it will dominate.
Perennials is also a contemporary response to a perennial theme of Canadian art—landscape—a topic Steinman considered in Promissory Note and Borders, both photo-based works made in 1991. All three pieces address nature's permutations and appropriations, but Perennials is Steinman's first response to the place of nature in Canada's rapidly growing cities. Unlike the usual park, Steinman transforms a prominent area of the downtown core—through eloquent, unexpected images, a range of materials and references to the site's history—into an urban green space that is a beautiful haven and provocative interlude.
Although it isn't a permanent installation, Signs (1992) is probably Steinman's most Montreal work. First created for "Pour la suite du monde," the inaugural exhibition at the new Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, Signs uses the architecture of the museum, the museum's location near Boulevard St-Laurent, the street that traditionally divided English- and French-speaking Montrealers, and 60 sign boxes, each with the bilingual word "silence," to point to Quebec's repressive language laws. The sign boxes are arranged irregularly, in clusters, on a curved wall in a passageway of the museum. Steinman uses repetition and quantity to suggest the extent of what wasn't being said in the Parti Québécois government's use of language as a political tool.
The shifting terrain of both public and private discourse is evoked by a moving visual field comprised of the word "silence"—really words—flashing in red, then going dark in random patterns. Constantly changing illuminated areas programmed by computerized on/off sequences draw the eye over the wall in an attempt to decipher what is happening. There is also a sense of ever-present urgency imparted by the continual changes of focus, a feeling enhanced by the similarity of the sign boxes to exit signs in public buildings. Because Signs was located in a transitional area between two galleries in the exhibition, viewers had to move along the wall to pass through the space, unable to escape the insistent repetitions of the flashing calls for "silence." In a museum setting, where silence has traditionally been deemed appropriate behaviour when viewing art, Steinman's seemingly redundant demands can be seen as a device drawing attention to a stereotypical but debatable situational response.
The wall of windows opposite Steinman's installation ensured that, unlike every other work in the exhibition, Signs would be seen from the heavily trafficked street outside. At night, her message would be especially striking. Steinman may have chosen her site for Signs and tailored the work to respond to it but, like so many of her pieces, Signs has what curator Bruce Ferguson identifies as "portability." It takes little imagination to envision Signs commenting on more contemporary silences in Montreal, Canada and abroad.
Steinman's use of words as image is especially resonant in The Giants' Dance (1989), where two inscriptions—JE SUiS iSLam—sandblasted into sheets of glass can be read either as single words (Jesus, Islam) or as sentences (I am Jesus, Jesus I am, Islam am I, I am Islam). Her portrayal of getting lost in words visualizes the intransigence of many fundamentalist beliefs and the difficulties of locating oneself in relation to monolithic traditions. In the wake of 9/11, the recent American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and continuing unrest in Israel and the West Bank, Steinman's images, made more than a decade ago, are chilling.
The sculpture consists of two larger-than-life, upright, heavy wooden boxes—the giants—positioned across from each other as if in an unending face-off. Both inscriptions are on the inside planes, placed over an abstract photograph that can be read as dark red swirls of blood on an ancient stone wall. The photograph is a blow-up of spray-painted red graffiti, a more colloquial form of language. The space between the "giants," which are set a dozen feet apart, allows viewers to enter the dance, but because of the placement of the boxes, only one image or partner can be seen at a time. Viewers are caught, turning their backs on Christianity or Islam, English or French, literally unable to see the other side without turning around. This performative element of The Giants' Dance enables viewers to experience corporeally the rigidity of ideological positions and the about-face needed to view another side. The shifting required to envision the whole applies as much to the various parts of oneself as to the ethnic or religious differences that comprise our world.
Shifting is also important in Steinman's subtle use of language, where the slippage between upper-case and lower-case letters allows the formation of words within words. This embedding through realignment weaves together the individual and the collective as well as the common origins of the Judeo-Christian and Islamic religions, which all described God with the words "I am." The depth of the letters and their cast shadows connote how deeply these ideas are rooted in our cultures and the reach of their influence.
In From Here to There (2003), Steinman has returned to the common elements in the words of these sometimes warring religions. This time, however, the weaving is literal and the words are abstract, for Steinman has created a thirteen-metre-long red carpet with an audiowave pattern based on the reading of selected Koranic or Biblical passages that, in Steinman's words, talk "about peace and love, enmity and war." Each time certain words appear, the solid black line representing the text changes colour: blue for paradise or heaven; darker red for war, enmity or violence; and white for peace or forgiveness.
This time, viewers are kept outside the work, left to figure out its meaning on their own. And this time, the imagination rather than the body is called into play. Steinman's carpet, as shown at Olga Korper Gallery, lies on the floor and then moves up the wall towards a circular window. Depending on how we read it, Steinman's irregular placement is a reminder of the continuity between the celestial and terrestrial realms, or the magic needed if we are all to be transported to heaven together.
Winter 2003
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