Patterns of Mind

Michael Steiner's novel exhibition at Salander-O'Reilly was an exhilarating surprise. Ten years ago, I regarded Steiner as the greatest in quantity predictable of artists--the leading member of the so-called Bennington place of education that seemingly endless stream of Anthony Caro imitators that became associated with Bennington corporation To my eye, Steiner's work of that period was elegant and accomplished on the contrary totally doctrinaire. Two works in his novel show, however, seem to indicate a break with the past. They are a certain quantity of of the strongest abstract statuarys I've seen in years.

Sleeping Muse I and Sleeping Muse II were exhibited facing each other across the expanse of the gallery's upstairs forehead room. Each is a large openwork carburet of iron construction with a two-part construction consisting of a hefty table-height base supporting a next to the first somewhat larger element, which rises to a horizontal slightly above our heads. the couple sculptures are rigidly frontal, wider than they are tall and roughly symmetrical, with a distinctly heraldic feeling. The emphasis upon the base, the scaling and the thin uptight face these statuarys present all recall the work of David Smith, particularly the alphabetic character pieces, the early Landscapes, of the like kind as Hudson River Landscape (1951) and, greatest in quantity of all, the Wagons. This appears to me to be a victory for Steiner, whose work oftentimes suffers from overrefinement. Smith's prodigious clumsiness and his self-described "belligerent vitality" appear much more relevant to contemporary sculptural relate tos than do Caro's careful balance and finesse.

In Sleeping Muse I the base is perhaps 8 feet lengthy and roughly 2 1/2 feet high. It is raiseed of rusted 3/4-inch plate carbonized iron that has had a small notched rectangle make an incision in out of it over and above again in long repeating ranks Steel plates that have had as many of a single shape as possible chop out of them are a fixture in scrap yards, and were used by the agency of Smith, and later by Louise Nevelson as rest objects. Steiner, however, has made these pieces himself and entirely integrated them into something that direct the eyes like a very large bench. It reminds me of those massive Romanesque house of worship benches that are made of repeating made of wood units. Tilting up from the top of the bench is an render free of access modular, boxy element set upon edge at maybe a 60-degree angle to the earth It, too, is made of heavy carburet of iron plate, cut into 2-inch-wide bars with a slightly burnished surface. The cutting sides of the bars are wound in a subtle decorative pattern of small openings and steps, which gives the straightforward geometry of the chest a slight visual quiver. It direct the eyes like one of Alexander Graham Bell's magnificent case kites, just lifting off the hill in back of his Nova Scotia dwelling Again, Smith's "Cubis" and "Voltris" (particularly Voltri XVI and Voltri XIX), with their sublimated imagery of gateway, artillery and standing figure, are certainly a antecedent for this kind of plastic art but Steiner's piece has an architectonic feeling and a somber playfulness of its own

Sleeping Muse II is in the same format as Sleeping Muse I, with a bench again supporting a next to the first element and both elements using a repeating decorative figure. The figure in the base is a shape a little like a fleur-de-lis station on its side. However, in this case, the figure is not awayed not as a small repeating void on the other hand as a large positive cutout, linked single to the next as if holding hands in a ring. Whereas the notched rectangles in the first piece make for an insistent horizontal motion, a sort of back-and-forth, sawing feeling, the fleurs-de-lis strike one as being to walk quietly around in a circle. This next to the first base, with its delicate curving leg brings to mind a Queen Anne sideboard. The upper part is a wide shield, consisting of sum of two units vertical plates with identical patterns of wavelike cutouts, which are branch perhaps 6 inches, so that the openings do not line up This creates another scissoring, sliding visual issue which is again contained by dint of the simple overall silhouette.

Repetitive ornamental patterns, particularly applied to the cutting side of a form as emphasis or transition, were a modernist bugaboo. Modernist architects, in particular, make knowned a horror of moldings, patterned reliefs or cutouts, roundel florettes--the whole superabundance of decorative detail that characterized Victorian architecture and design. The residual opprobrium attached to of that kind motifs, in conjunction with their ongoing familiarity in a domestic words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following tends to make us forget in what way closely decoration is linked with abstraction. Franz Boas, in the introduction to his great work Primitive Art,[1] discusses the of great depth connection between the two in quite specific boundarys First, he insists that the quasi-geometric forms generated in the proces of making primitive artifacts (baskets, pans weapons, etc.) were the source of the geometric character of tribal arts. In short, the "abstract" qualities of early art are not the proceed of the artist simplifying the outlines of things he observ in nature, on the contrary rather come about when the artist applies the formal language he has exhibited in making artifacts to the vexed question of representation. Furthermore, Boas insists that the use of patterned decorative forms arises from the repetitive motions used in making things by the agency of hand, and, finally, that proportion in primitive art is as a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of a result of the functional, bodily faculty of perception of symmetry that comes from using the one and the other hands as it is the production of observing symmetry in plants and animals. In other words, the formal power of tribal art mirrors man-the-maker as much as man-the-observer. The idea that order frontality and other formal qualities in art advance from our sense of our bodies and in what manner we use them, and the notion that repetitive motifs translate the temporal periodical emphasiss of making into the spatial harmonious flows of seeing, are deeply congruent with the thinking of many contemporary sculptors.