The Brooklyn Rail

Following the opening of his solo exhibition at Galleria Lia Rumma, Haim Steinbach sat down with art historian and curator Francesca Pietropaolo to discuss—among other things—art as “display,” the object, language, the vernacular, the everyday, architecture, social exchange, the digital, and music. What follows is the edited version of a much longer conversation.

Francesca Pietropaolo (Rail): In the presence of your work, one feels invited to participate in an open-ended dialogue. You make art that consists in what you have referred to as “display,” a subtly orchestrated presentation of found objects or texts in a given space. In your current exhibition beep honk toot at Galleria Lia Rumma in Milan, a selection of recent pieces created in the past four years is in dialogue with earlier works from the 1970s. Stepping into the exhibition, I felt enveloped in a conversation on multiple levels. In the first room, three large-scale wall pieces in black vinyl, all text-based—hello again (condensed) 1, hello again (condensed) 2 (both 2023), and every single day (condensed) (2020)—greet the viewer. These works employ language not only as image, but treat it as an object which can be taken into a new context from its original and hence transformed. In these works, as with another group of paintings from 2024 on view, you use the digital to toy with potentially infinite possibilities of fragmentation and manipulation. The two hello again (condensed) works revisit and transform an earlier piece you made in 2013 (in MoMA’s collection), reflecting on it from a different temporality, while at the same time opening up to the unforeseen element of chance through the digital. Language is quintessentially about communication and encounter, in space and time. To begin our conversation, I’d like to ask you about how these recent text-based works came into being. Further developing your long-standing exploration of language, they underscore the continuing vitality of your speculative approach to art-making.

Haim Steinbach: What you described captures an important dialectic at the heart of my work. I see my process as evolving along a dialectical trajectory: it is akin to moving down a trail, stopping someplace and having one perspective of the view from where you’re standing, and then continuing on the trail and having another perspective because you’re moving into a different geography. It is the experience of the flâneur. By deciding to go down the trail, you set yourself on the course to be open to the unexpected. As you take it all in while going on the trail, you try to register, apprehend, comprehend what you are moving through and what is changing and what has already changed. Chance is part of the whole framework of what you already decided to set on. Getting to the text-based works that you asked about, I am interested in a statement like “hello again” because it is a form of speech that people use in everyday situations.

Rail: It is a common greeting, and you refer to its repeated occurrence.

Steinbach: Yes, in the phrase, “again” indicates that the encounter repeats itself. It is somehow fixed in the original message that someone designed, which is something I came across and immediately thought, “It’s pretty good!” Back in the early seventies, when conceptual art was influential—I was a late comer to it—I started exploring the question of language, how it manifests itself and how it has a purpose or use. I am interested in the resonance of speech, in the way of saying things, the vernacular aspects of it. The image of the found text also strikes me, its graphic design. It’s also a language, calligraphy.

Rail: You always keep the font unvaried.

Steinbach: Yes. It is not my typeface, but someone else’s, the sign maker’s or designer's. In the original “hello again” found text there was a period after each word, and I kept that in my 2013 piece. In the new hello again (condensed) works the letters and punctuation have been transformed into an abstract image.

Rail: The readability is lost, compared to the earlier incarnation of the work.

Steinbach: In my work, it is not about “reading,” but about looking; it’s about the poetry of spacing. The word collapses into the image, and vice versa. My work has been criticized for supposedly identifying with a fetishist object. That is the reading offered by many art historians who remain informed by the lesson of Clement Greenberg’s formalism, which has left a lasting mark on the New York academic world. But in fact none of the words that I find are fixed, and I am just a channel to send them off, so to speak. Of course, I make the choices. I choose the particular image of the word that compels me to think about it and do something with it.

Rail: You spoke of poetry of placement. In hello again (condensed) 1, one can see, as suggested by the placement of the fragmented words on the wall, the element of the line, which recurs in your work in different media. It is about bringing into vision something that is, in a way, in-between the visible and the invisible, the material and the immaterial. There is indeed poetry in the way you structure your compositions.

Steinbach: The structure is behind, hidden. In the sense that structure is the concept itself, implied in the decision to explore this particular geography. The question is how do you set a structure for finding things. There are different types of things and different settings, different situations. In the case of wall texts, I choose to recognize the poetics of the people who make those signs, their typeface. Then I choose how to alter the text. The spaces between the letters are also part of the design, for me.

Rail: It is also about finding a certain beauty where usually one doesn’t look for it, in common things around us.

Steinbach: Absolutely.

Rail: Your work brings the everyday into the realm of art, be it a found vernacular statement or a found object.

Steinbach: The question is what is art, to the artist and to the viewer. In a way, in choosing this particular trail and engaging it, I take a kind of leap of faith.

Rail: That resonates with Sol LeWitt’s belief that conceptual artists “leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.” Compared to hello again (condensed) 1, hello again (condensed) 2 turns words into more expansive shapes.

Steinbach: Yes, there is a different way of focusing. The concept of focusing is important. The whole idea of the condensed text is about focusing on the shapes of those letters and putting them upfront, and seeing how those shapes change in space as they are contracted or expanded. The space of the architecture also evolves. In reverse, there is architecture in the design of letters.

Rail: Definitely.

Steinbach: This architecture of shapes also interacts with the architecture of the gallery. You’re seeing parts of the shapes and suddenly you may notice how they relate to a window or a door in the space of the architecture that the work inhabits. The tool used for this condensation and expansion is a computerized one. It allows me to manipulate the fragmented words through different steps that can be systematically programmed, and then at that point I make a choice.

Rail: Do you also see this as a way of thinking about digital space in relation to architectural space? I wonder how the virtual aspect engages you, vis-à-vis your long-standing exploration of spatiality.

Steinbach: I have been working with digital tools to produce the condensed texts for the past four years. These works are in fact in-betweens, you know. They are about the relationship between the digital and the real that changes all the time.

Rail: In the 2024 digitally printed paintings in the show, beep honk toot (condensed/spectrum), you introduce color within the manipulation of language. The text, announced in the title, was first used in a 1989 wall piece and this new work is a condensed revisitation of it. Here you engage with the color spectrum, toying with solid monochromes as well as with relationships between gradating hues.

Steinbach: Yes, and you can also talk about the spectrum of the curves of the letters whose fragments appear in the paintings. There is a transformation that opens up many possibilities. If you ask the computer to give you the spectrum from red to blue it can give you millions of options, which is great.

Rail: In these paintings, you play with the grid structure within the square format of the picture plane.

Steinbach: Yes, the grid applies to these works, as it does to the large wall texts.

Rail: Looking at them, I am reminded of Ellsworth Kelly’s fascination with the color spectrum, from his chance-based collages from the early 1950s, such as Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance (1951) to his multi-panel paintings, the latest of which is the monumental Spectrum VIII (2014). His painting, with its exploration of form, color, line and space, was important to you as a painter in the early 1970s. You worked with spray paint then. Kelly’s attention to perception, to how we look at things—sometimes a shadow projected on a wall could trigger his imagination—and the dialogue between abstract art and the everyday around us resonate with some aspects of your work, despite the profound differences in your respective practices. I wonder whether you see these new paintings as connecting, in a way, to your early interest in Kelly’s painting?

Steinbach: Yes, and not only in Ellsworth Kelly. There is a certain evolution in the history of art, in which I am interested, that goes in the direction toward the geometry of the canvas and invites the question, “What about breaking up that geometry?” The grid calls for the mathematical breakdown of space. So, early on, relevant to me were also artists such as Barnett Newman, Sol LeWitt, and Donald Judd. In 1966 I saw an Ellsworth Kelly painting in the Systemic Painting show at the Guggenheim Museum in New York that really caught my attention. I also remember coming across a color reproduction of a Paul Klee painting in a small booklet, which employed the grid and got me thinking. This was also when I was very young. That language has been on my mind for a long time since.

Rail: These new paintings are beautifully hung in the gallery, with a spareness that allows them to breath, so to speak, and that opens up space for thinking as we experience them. As you have said, you play within a system of your choice. Here the canvas is akin to a game board. Can you speak more about this notion of play?

Steinbach: It is at the core of my work dealing with found objects, chance, and object-oriented ontology. It is tied to the context of ideas that surfaced in the eighties. I first started making my displays in the late seventies. Until then, I was painting, but painting with systems.

Rail: You started making these paintings in the early seventies, right?

Steinbach: Yes, I made those paintings using spray paint. I didn’t use a brush, except for the bars appearing in the paintings, which I realized by hand. Most of the surface of the painting was one color, sprayed on the support. I made a transition to systems of language, arranging the bars around the frame of the support.

Rail: This body of work is exemplified by several particle boards from 1976, which share the room with new shelf arrangements of found objects. Can you talk about both groups of works? Interesting correspondences between them arise in the context of the exhibition.

Steinbach: In the mid-seventies I dropped painting and decided to take the material of the particle board, which is part of the construction material of a wall, and in that sense is architectural. The particle board is used behind the sheetrock to give more solidity to the wall. I decided to bring it back into the room and put it on the sheetrock, if you will. I would cut a four-by-four-feet particle board on the table into a two-by-two square and then I would put on it small geometrical shapes, like pieces in a game. Like on a chessboard, where you have a grid and the chess pieces.

Rail: Did you generally pencil the grid in, on the board?

Steinbach: Yes, I did. But if you break down the square geometrically in equal sections, you already break into the grid. So the grid was the background for deciding where marks would be put on. Then I placed the “objects,” that is, geometric shapes of small squares, triangles, rectangles, sometimes trapezoids, according to the grid, stenciling and using oil stick. In a chess game, the pieces are also placed according to the lines of a grid, but always in the center of the square. In these boards, the organization was more peripheral. I set a way of reading the shapes not compositionally, but in terms of placement.

Rail: Four of those particle boards are shown together with three shelf-pieces from 2024 and, upon sustained looking, one can see interesting relationships emerge between the two bodies of works. There is a beautiful consonance between the small geometric shapes on the boards and the shapes of the different elements, or sections, that make up the shelves.

At first glance your shelves seem to form just one line and to have a unitary presence, but up-close one sees they are made of different fragments, which sometimes are not quite aligned with the rest in their placement; or, at each end of the shelf, the natural wooden material is exposed revealing triangular shapes, while the rest of the surface is covered in black plastic laminate. The geometry within the shelf appears at once reinforced and broken down. And the shelf stages a display, in which aesthetic, cultural, social, and psychological aspects of objects are invoked. The objects are akin to characters put on a stage. There is no narrative, but there is this almost performative quality to them.

Steinbach: There too there is a game going on. These works are also connected to the idea of a chess game. In chess, the pieces on the board are moved from one place to the other depending on certain rules. The shelf is also a board, in a way. It has a top where some objects are placed. It holds things that are other to the shelf. It serves them. These questions of use and function are always part of the gaming that I do. What I do involves the social framework of those functions, the social dimension inherent in objects, in the everyday. My work is about a different way of thinking about class—art class or not art class, for instance—and it makes these different object-oriented references interact with each other as part of a bigger language. Also, I see my displays as akin to the lines of a poem, or the five-line arrangement of a musical sheet.

Rail: Your work breaks up the hierarchies of objects.

Steinbach: You know, there is the making of an object by hand, the object as presentation as in Marcel Duchamp, but in my case it is really about putting the object in a linguistic horizontal level. When things are next to other things, their context means different things. So mine is also a grammatical approach to everyday objects on the ground of communication.

Rail: The horizontality that you talk about also brings to the fore the democratic aspect that your art elicits, within this “community of objects” that you convene. That is a timely issue.

Steinbach: Yes, it is very democratic. The art historian David Joselit has explored my practice in terms of democracy. My early displays are examples of what is called installation art, but the reason why I don’t call it that is because it doesn’t function like installation art generally does. It is direct in its mode of presentation. It is not a representation of something else. It is about the presentation of things. And the work is about difference as well as the relationship between things.

Rail: You started “presenting things” with your work Display #7, a 1979 site-specific intervention at Artists Space in New York. An installation of architectural scale, it consisted in a wall covered with different wallpapers onto which you placed two shelves holding found objects. You also incorporated the existing reception desk, making its geometric volume all blue. Can you talk about this work where you used shelves for the first time?

Steinbach: The work incorporated shelves that were just pieces of lumberyard board and were placed on the wall with objects arranged on them—those shelves were in relation to sections of wall paper. The objects were borrowed or gifted from friends and family. This presentation contrasted somehow with the gallery reception desk, which I decided to paint blue to include it in it.

Rail: Then in the eighties you devised your wedge shelf, which you can design varying its size and the ways in which its sections come together, within the set proportions you established. You created a system offering a wide range of possibilities.

Steinbach: I made the shelf into a paradigm. The cross section of that wedge shelf is a triangle and all the sides of that triangle are three-dimensionally boarded. But from the front, the back side of the triangle is against the wall. At the front, you have the diagonal that goes down and the horizontal line that is the shelf. So you have a volume in which you can give each section a three-dimensional presence and color. If you look at the shelf from the front, it has plastic laminate on it, top and bottom, but, from the side, the cross section of it sometimes shows the lumberyard material, as you noticed. From the side, you can see the skin of the laminate. The color, applied as plastic laminate, is just on the surface, like skin. By the way, the wallpaper in Display 7 also acted like a skin. So it is about deconstructing the whole idea of the gallery wall and the object. It is a way of setting up a critical relationship with the way we see objects three-dimensionally. How do they relate to the space they are in?

Rail: Another interesting aspect to me is the space in-between the objects. There is a placement, a rhythm, that is also musical as you suggested. Within that, moments of emptiness, of silence if you will, exist in between objects and seem just as important as the items on the shelf, because they connect the objects. Can you elaborate on this notion of the space in-between? It seems to reinforce your poetics of the contingent.

Steinbach: Let me go back to chess. On the chess board, when you start a game the pieces all have a specific and fixed placement, until someone begins to play and moves them. My objects are not glued to the shelf, so they can be removed. For instance, they could be replaced by the collector with other objects. Even though each one has a section of color and is divided geometrically by a line or a section that is a little bit higher than the other section, the division of spaces, the in-between of spaces, is not different from the in-between space of the pieces in a chessboard. But while those spaces don’t change on the chess board, in the sense that each piece goes back to the square, even if in another place, the configuration of my objects changes when you begin to move things around. In a way, my work is the presentation of a position that is contingent.

Rail: In Untitled (kong, books, sculpture, head, totem) (2024), there are placed objects from different contexts on a white shelf: the dog toy often recurring in your work; a tiny ceramic figurine of a fellow reading a book while seated on a miniature brick that rests on top of two books, Homer’s Iliad and E. H. Gombrich’s The Story of Art; an antique head sculpture and a more abstract totemic-like sculptural head in profile mounted on a geometric base. A distant past and the everyday present collide. And categories such as “Western” and “non-Western,” “high” and “low” seem to disappear. A great sense of playfulness also comes through. Like another piece nearby, this work was made in collaboration with an Italian collector. You often collaborate with collectors and sometimes also with local communities as part of exhibition projects at museums. Can you speak about the collaborative aspect of your process in relation to this new work?

Steinbach: You know, it can be a playful dialogue, like “Shall we dance?” It is a form of communication, open to the unpredictable. The shelf you brought up was a commission. The collector was open to having a dialogue with me in creating a new piece for him. The idea was for me to choose one or more of my objects and for him to choose one or more of his. He and his wife sent me a picture of ten objects from which I could choose. The choices they made included a group of objects—the stack of books with the figurine and the miniature brick. So they were already playing a game with me because it was a group of objects, not just one object. I took this group of objects and put it in dialogue with two other objects of theirs—the two heads—and I introduced the dog chew toy, which I call “kong” from its brand but with a lower case. In the process, other contingencies took place, for instance the Gombrich book was originally an older volume with a brownish color and then the collector replaced it with a brand new one with a bright yellow color.

Rail: There are social but also existential aspects associated with possessing and collecting. Collecting is somehow an act of emotional transference. In On Unpacking My Library (1931), Walter Benjamin’s remarked that “ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in [the collector]; it is he that lives in them.” He focused on his book collection, but his reflections can be extended to any object. You first presented a collection, in that case in its entirety, in the project you did for Documenta in 1992.

Steinbach: That’s Display #31 – An Offering (collectibles of Jan Hoet) (1992). Jan Hoet was the curator of that Documenta and he invited me to participate in it. In his office, he had shelves full of objects. Not books, but objects. I asked him for a photograph of these shelvings with objects because I was impressed. I then said, “For Documenta, what about if I make a new structure and place your objects on it?” He said, “OK!” So I presented all of his objects in the same order he had them but in a circular display, conceived in response to the given space at the Neue Galerie. That intervention in the museum space addressed sociological interpretations of possessing and collecting.

Rail: Let me double back for a moment. I’d like to ask you about your experience studying in southern France in the sixties. You studied as an undergraduate at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn (1962–1968) and then took your MFA from Yale University (1971–1973). In 1965 you decided to go off to Europe and studied at the Université d’Aix in Aix-en-Provence for a year. You were in your early twenties and I am curious about how that experience nurtured your thinking.

Steinbach: When I was at Pratt I quit school for a year and set off with a friend to London for a few days and then on to Paris. From there, I was aiming to go to Spain. My friend and I got a Vespa scooter from people who were leaving town and needed to get rid of the scooter. We hadn’t driven a scooter before but off we went! We traveled south together and somewhere there we split, he went to Italy and I drove to Spain where I stayed a good month before returning to France. It must have been my goal to enlist at the Universitée d’Aix—I don’t remember the details now. There I took courses in French literature and philosophy. It was the high time of Existentialism. I studied Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir, and the nouveau roman of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute, among others. It was all so full of energy, at the time. Existentialism was parallel to my own history in a way—both in terms of the history of Israel and its postwar foundation and in terms of the people of Israel’s existence and survival after the state’s creation, so it related to all the big questions that come with that. This was a philosophy that I very much felt was timely and offered a set of ideas which were very inspiring. So that experience in France had a very big effect on me in that it opened a very significant door to ideas and thinking that applied to other things, like art. Also, Aix was the home of Cézanne, and early in my work I was influenced by Cézanne’s breakdown of the picture plane..

Rail: In 1965 George Perec’s Le choses was released in France and that same year won the Prix Renaudot. Were you aware of Perec’s poetry of the everyday at the time? Was it something in the air, for you?

Steinbach: No. In fact, I didn’t hear about Perec until 1987 when Jean-Louis Froment then director of the CAPC in Bordeaux brought him to my attention. I had an exhibition there in 1988. In the introduction to the catalogue, he referred to Perec in relation to my work. So it’s an interesting parallel.

Rail: I’d like to ask you about your interest in music. Sound is very important to your work, in relation to language. This very show evokes sound in its title. In your 1979 work Display #7, which we discussed earlier, you included actual sound in the installation: from a tape player in sight came popular music and, from a hidden tape player, came a passage from Schubert’s Moment Musical no.3 in F Minor, a piece you used to hear a neighbor playing over and over when you were a child in Tel Aviv. This detail bespeaks a sense of loss, of displacement. It seems to conjure a memory of “feeling at home.”

Steinbach: Yes, the tape player on a ledge played fragments of popular music, for instance Patty Smith’s Gloria, while from the hidden player Schubert’s piano piece played very quietly in an endless loop, and the idea was to conjure the impression that the music was coming from another room nearby. You know, contrary to the many installations with everyday objects seen today, the collection in Display #7 was not about a specific narrative like “identity,” “history,” “geography,” “ecology.” It was about a kind of flow of instances found in the culture and around the home.

About my interest in music more generally, I grew up with Israeli music; my parents, who came from Germany, loved classical music; when we moved to New York from Israel in 1957, they got a subscription to the New York Philharmonic. Both them and other family members often listened to a classical music station on the radio. I also went a lot to the opera growing up in New York. About that Schubert piece, I was in Tel Aviv with my grandmother—my parents were away—and I remember having a cold and needing a lot of rest. Lying in bed, I would hear this music played by a guy in the other building. It is a very simple and very beautiful piece of music. It always stuck in my mind. As time went on, I listened to all kinds of music.

Rail: Was John Cage influential to you, with his emphasis on chance and the everyday?

Steinbach: Totally. He is very important to the side of contingency and placing. Steve Reich is very important too, with his structuralist repetition and the shift of meaning within one type of sound that repeats and another type of sound that repeats. There is a shift going on there.

Rail: You talked about “shifting” and I think that’s a key word. Through your art one encounters shifting points of view, shifting meanings. While broadening the scope of artistic creativity, your work invites an alertness in interpreting the world around us in ways that point at nuance and complexity. This encouragement to engage things with an openness of the mind and the senses is refreshing, particularly in the context of today’s polarized culture and society. Ours is a time where ideologically constructed “truths” seem to prevail. The idea that experiencing art requires sustained looking and engagement and encourages propensity for the unexpected has a timely relevance.

Steinbach: Yes, but the world in which we live right now is not only polarized. It is shifting also.

Rail: Yes, you’re right.

Steinbach: In today’s world there is a shift in the perspective of identity. Not one identity, but identities. You can have more than one identity. But politics is focused on “my identity” and not “your identity.” You can see that also in large-scale shows like the Venice Biennale, which I just visited. It is about projecting my identity. The idea of shifting identities is not as prevalent, even in the theme of the show which centers on the notion of the “foreigner.” We live in very challenging times precisely because people have a hard time accepting the fact that it is possible and should be possible to recognize other identities and make them your own to the extent that you recognize them. This Venice Biennale tends to be more about identity politics. This may be problematic as it risks becoming more polarizing, even if that wasn’t its intention.

Rail: I agree with you that it remains entangled in the perspective of the politics of representation.

Steinbach: This reminds me of the politics of the October Journal group. In 1986 the ICA Boston organized the exhibition Endgame: Reference and Simulation in Recent Painting and Sculpture. It was a show about the politics of representation.

Rail: Curated by David Joselit and Elisabeth Sussman, it included your work and that of artists such as Jeff Koons, Sherrie Levine, Peter Halley, and Ross Bleckner, to name a few. Yve-Alain Bois, Hal Foster, and Thomas Crow, among others, contributed to the catalogue. In the entry devoted to that exhibition in the Art Since 1900 book by Hal Foster, Yve-Alain Bois, Rosalind Krauss, and Benjamin Buchloh, you are presented as having “equated art works with commodities directly” and having positioned “the viewer as shopper,” which seems to me such a simplistic and ideological take on your work. A mis-representation, if you will.

Steinbach: Indeed, it is a misrepresentation, among other things that they wrote. It’s clear to me that, when they discuss my work related and different (1985) in the book, it is not only misrepresented, it’s mocked! In that work, on the shelf there is a pair of sneakers and to their side there are five brass candlesticks of different heights. They name the sneakers “Nike,” meaning “commodities” and they describe the candlesticks as “plastic goblets.” What follows is a narrative about the Last Supper and Christian mythology. Going back to our reflections on the Biennale, what about “Guests Everywhere” instead of “Foreigners Everywhere”?

Rail: That’s beautiful.

Steinbach: It’s a different way of looking at relationships. You are the guest, and somebody else is the guest. Thinking in terms of guests instead of foreigners would have allowed for a different direction of focus. The notion of “foreigner” falls in with a traditional discourse of the other. We remain stuck in the false-true binary. It’s problematic.

Rail: A word play by Duchamp comes to my mind: A Guest + A Host = A Ghost. It’s the title of a 1953 piece. He had that pun printed on candy-wrapping tinfoil. The wrapped candies were offered as gifts to the invitees at the opening of a show of Duchamp’s friend and fellow artist William Nelson Copley at Galerie Nina Dausset, Paris in 1953. Once the candies were eaten, it remained just the wordplay on tinfoil. In its richness and ambiguity of meaning, it evokes the notion of relationship. And it humorously plays with binaries, which may collapse in a ghost-like image.

Steinbach: The guest is a host, could be very good too!

Rail: Yes. And I think that is the perfect conclusion for a conversation that started out with art as dialogue, as encounter.