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Reflective Spaces:
The Art of Barbara Steinman
by Gillian MacKay
“I am intrigued by the ‘sociology
of space,' how a place — museum, abandoned factory,
private gallery, outdoor site — is used and perceived, what
surrounds it, what its histories are. I often create a work for
a particular space but an in situ work may become portable, responding
to the same conditions in different places. At its most effective,
the work evokes a feeling or knowledge that viewers remember,
recognize or share. Curiosity and obsession pull me forward.”
The artist Barbara Steinman creates resonant metaphors to illuminate
the beauty and the terror of our times. A fearless poet in cutting-edge
media, she has given the world a host of unforgettable visual
experiences in installation and video art, digital photography
and public sculpture. Among them, a chandelier which has shed
its crystals like a tree in autumn; a glass hammer and nails;
a cage full of closed books hung with silent violins; a wall of
intermittently flashing orders for silence; a global monument
to victims of genocide.
Born in Montreal in 1950, Steinman is a product of its passionately
divided and dynamic culture. Fluently bilingual, she has a degree
in literature from McGill University. Apart from a formative period
as a video artist in Vancouver in the late 1970s, she has chosen
to stay in Montreal. “I use the city like a laboratory —
its chemistry informs my work,” she has said. As an artist,
she is noted for her empathy with the dispossessed and for her
heightened awareness of the vicissitudes of history and chance.
Steinman has not been afraid to address injustice, whether on
her own doorstep or around the world. The brilliant photo-based
work Day and Night (1989), created for the “Canadian
Biennial of Contemporary Art” at the National Gallery of
Canada, was in part a response to the people sleeping on the street
whom she observed from the window of her Montreal studio. She
spoke to the larger tragedy of loss of homeland — what the
exiled Iranian poet Reza Baraheni has described as “the non-place
of exile century” — in Borrowed Scenery (1988).
The sole Canadian work represented in “Aperto ‘88”
at the Venice Biennale, it was also shown at the 1988 Calgary
Olympics.
Aesthetically, her sensibility has always been polished and elegant,
in apparent contradiction to disturbing content. Even when political
correctness was at its peak in the early 1990s, Steinman refused
to toe the line, eschewing the then-fashionable puritanical aesthetic
as a form of repression. The fact that the four posed homeless
figures in Day and Night possess a classic nobility (Michelangelo's
tomb sculptures for Guiliano de Medici were an inspiration) bothered
some observers. Steinman's response was that formal beauty
can provide an unexpected point of access — increasing the
odds that we might open to subject matter which, as conventionally
represented, we tend to block. Art critic Reesa Greenberg described
the impact of Day and Night: “Truly seeing allows
us to ask ourselves questions we avoid when encountering the homeless
on the streets.” Yet thankfully, Steinman does not preach,
steering clear of didacticism in favour of imaginative connection.
A risk-taker, she has always welcomed new forms of artistic expression.
Steinman was a pioneer in extending video beyond specialized screening
rooms and into the broader realm of private and public art galleries.
She made the leap by incorporating video into increasingly ambitious
sculptural installations which might include text, sound, projections,
still photography and traditional materials. The process began
with the 1980 work, Le Couple Dormant, a double bed with
two video monitors inset in the pillows like a sleeping twosome
— one “dreaming” in a colour tape and the other
registering brain waves in black and white. In Cenotaph
(1985), a video monitor concealed within the pyramidal monument
created an illusion of an “eternal flame” flickering
in its crown.
This celebrated work — whose triangular granite base is
inscribed on three sides with an excerpt from a text from Hannah
Arendt's Totalitarianism: “The radicalism of
measures to treat people as if they had never existed and to make
them disappear is frequently not apparent at first glance”
— was a memorial to those victims of historical atrocities
whose bodies were never found. Steinman created the work for a
contemporary art centre in Lyon, France, at a time when Klaus
Barbie, former head of the Gestapo in Lyon, was awaiting trial
there. The work was also shown at the 1987 São Paulo Bienal
where it recalled for many viewers the crimes of certain South
American military regimes against their peoples. Curator and critic
Bruce Ferguson described its “portable” effect: “The
suffocating drama of extermination which underlies and supports
authoritative history is undermined by this special object which,
phoenix-like, returns to burn again into consciousness.”
Signs (1992), created for the inaugural exhibition of
the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, was
yet another piece which travelled well. Steinman covered a wall
in the museum with 60 red electric signs, of the type normally
bearing the word “EXIT” or “SORTIE.” Now reading
“SILENCE,” they flashed on and off in random sequence,
starting small and building to a crescendo. Created as a witty
yet sinister response to Quebec's language laws, particularly
those forbidding outdoor signs in English, Signs went on
to accrue a deeper significance. Exhibited at the Jewish Museum
in New York a year later, however, Signs was also able to evoke
the broader suppression of freedoms, and even to function as a
memorial wall. The critic Kay Larson praised its eloquence in
New York magazine: “…the act of silencing one
voice begets others until the wall smokes with red.”
Steinman's formal inventiveness, conceptual richness and
oft-lauded ability to respond sensitively to both site and curatorial
program has made her a regular on the national and international
exhibition circuit. In 1990, she created the video installation,
Icon, for the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1991, her installation
Ballroom was one of the highlights of Mary Jane Jacob's
“Places with a Past,” a groundbreaking exhibition of
site-specific historical interrogations in Charleston, South Carolina.
In 1995, she was one of 13 invited to participate in “Notion
of Conflict,” an exhibition of Canadian art organized by
the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam as part of official celebrations
to mark the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II.
Her Atlantis Improv was a haunting, poetic installation
of caged books and hanging violins. Accompanied by a daily performance
by a street violinist, it spoke to the endurance of art in the
face of official repression. The title was a reference to The
Emperor of Atlantis, an opera composed in Theresienstadt by
Victor Ullman, an inmate of the concentration camp who did not
survive to see it performed. Steinman has cited the resilient
creativity of the artists, musicians and writers at Theresienstadt
as an inspiration to her as an artist.
A streamlining of formal elements and a new symbolic expansiveness
can be seen in the chandelier sculpture, Lux (2000). Originally
conceived for an exhibition in Prague, in the Czech Republic,
where Bohemian crystal is made, Lux was shown for the first time
at La Biennale de Montréal in the exhibition “Tout
le temps/Every Time,” curated by Peggy Gale. In this stunning
work, eventually acquired by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts,
the skeleton of a chandelier in raw steel chain is suspended above
a mandala-like circle of crystals on the floor beneath. Dramatic
lighting in a darkened room accentuates the sparkling crystals
and casts net-like shadows on the floor around them. “To
me, it's as if the chandelier had shed its skin, revealing
the toughness beneath the façade of beauty,” Steinman
has written. “Originally, I had in mind all the historical
layering of different regimes that had invaded and dominated Prague,
and the chandelier became for me an icon of resistance and of
that very delicate balance between strength and fragility.”
In Lux, it is art itself which sheds light. The same can
be said for the luminous series of digital photographs which Steinman
began in 1997. As she did with video, she embraced the potential
of a relatively new art form to produce works of remarkable grace
and profundity. Digital photography is a computer technology which
allows the often surreal montaging of images from diverse sources
into a seamless hybrid. It permits Steinman to compress a wealth
of references, vantage points and time frames within a single
photograph.
Only in the digital photographs does the natural world first
begin to figure as a significant element. In Grace-note
(1997), we encounter from top to bottom: an evening sky, waves
at sea, a glassy curtain of ice, a shroud or ceremonial robe set
in a quiet, cave-like enclosure. Here we seem to confront the
primal fear of death itself, crystallized in an imaginative space
which allows for reflection.
And, of course, nature plays a part in outdoor sculpture and
landscape design — another field in which Steinman has recently
become a player. The small contemplative havens she has designed
in downtown Vancouver and Toronto explore the redemptive potential
of nature and of art.
The passage of time is a strong recurrent theme. As the artist
has said of the digital photographs, “…there is the
notion of a deep past and a suggested future within them which
I think I aim for in all the works.” Double Blind
(1997) is a dual portrait of a man and woman behind shattered
glass, which implies a narrative of rupture, anguish and uncertainty.
The exquisite sculpture, Houdini's Case (1999), a
glass hammer and glass nails encased in a glass cabinet, speaks
to what Steinman describes as the “futility of escapism.”
She has often used glass — etched, faceted, sculpted or shattered
— in ways which suggest our terrifying vulnerability to time
and to fate.
A high-noon confrontation with fear in all its manifestations
— from the personal to the political to the existential —
such is the experience of Steinman's art. For all its formal
beauty, her work is never complacent. Adventurous, probing, courageous
and lyrical, it connects us to the present moment so that we may
better know ourselves and one another.
Gillian MacKay is a contributing editor of Canadian Art
magazine and a former visual arts columnist for The Globe and
Mail. She is co-editor, with Jessica Bradley, of House Guests:
The Grange 1817 to Today.
For more information on Barbara Steinman: www.arsbrevis.com |