The Munich Eye:
“New York City as a metaphor for an unfulfilled desire” 2013
by Nina Bayne
“First we take Manhattan”, Rathausgalerie Kunsthalle, 03.08.2013 – 06.10.2013
“First we take Manhattan” is an exhibition on the longing and hope which every new generation of people drawn to the city develops again and again like a forever recurring motive. The show is conjuring up images and ideas of New York City as a metaphorical place and a projection surface for desires and unfulfilled dreams. This idea of the city is presented by ten artists who had their experiences in New York and tell stories with strong narrative character in their work. “First we take Manhattan” refers to a Leonard Cohen song with the same title.
Eddy Steinhauer, an American sculptor and installation artist born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, who lived in New York for many years before recently moving to Berlin is one of the invited artists. He displays four pieces of his work: The Gold Horn, Fear Not the Charged Panther, Stand your ground – an American flag behind glass blowing, dancing, wincing in an airstream and an Apple Tree hanging upside down from the ceiling. His sculptural works deal with sociological and psychological subjects, creating strong metaphorical images that often put well known figurative forms – like the American flag – into a new context. Beside his artistic practice he works as a curator organizing shows in the U.S. and Europe.
Eddy, spoke with me about the difficulties displaying this tree in the Rathausgalerie
“One of my exhibited artworks is a tree that is hanging upside down above a fountain in the gallery. The fountain is a permanent part of the gallery and I thought it was problematic because a gallery actually needs to be a blank space; it´s very hard to work in a situation where you have something permanent in the center of a gallery and make an exhibition uniquely yours. It reminds me of the Frank Lloyd Wright scenario of the Guggenheim museum in Manhattan because he built the museum as a sculpture, as an art piece. For an artist it must be a very complicated place to show in, you have to make it work somehow and get in his architectural vision the way you display your work. When I saw the photos of the gallery and the fountain I decided that I had to incorporate it into my work; hanging the tree above the fountain is my solution for that space”.
Did it work out like you expected it to be?
Yes, it did work out – I think in the end the tree and the fountain create a poetic moment.
What about the title “First we take Manhattan”
The curator Daniel Permanetter had the vision of doing this group show and I want to say a little bit about what I know from him and what I´ve seen so far in his work. Daniel is a musician as well as an artist and his work is primarily based on Bob Dylan and so it seemed natural from my perspective – and probably his as well – that he picked a title of a song to create a visual art exhibition. Which I think is unique.
What is interesting from Daniel´s perspective is that he had just gone to New York and he queued in on this familiar theme “why do so many creative people move to the city” and coined it into this ideal of desire. People move there because they´re looking for something, fame or for some sort of liberation. They seem driven by something; when you are in New York City there are so many people and there is so much going on and very few of these people actually reach their goal, it´s almost unattainable, almost impossible because of how big the city is. But still every generation is driven to pursue this ideal. It almost becomes a scenario of lost dreams. But for some reason it doesn’t keep people from trying. Daniel´s experience surveying the city, this magical place, seeing first hand the underside of its lost ambitions and lost dreams, he titled the exhibition around this idea in order to create something that spoke to this generation.
What does the exhibition´s title mean to you personally?
When Daniel asked me to be in the exhibition and told me what the exhibition is about I felt uniquely qualified to be in the show because of having lived and worked in the city, it was totally my experience. I grew up in California and I moved to New York after school to become someone and to do something big and it never happened there.
But you are doing something big right now!
Yeah, and I thought it was a perfect opportunity to fulfill this ambition, this dream of doing something spectacular, something eventful.
What is your art´s general theme? I would like to name a few catchwords I found among others: demystification versus mystification, Haiti, colonialism, Darwin´s theory of evolution, birds, guns: it´s quite a broad approach!
I´ve never really looked at my work that way, but that´s good. Being from the US, being black and making art you are immediately put into a situation where your work becomes something political. I don’t mind if my work revolves around this political atmosphere and I don´t mind this because I can use it in my work as a platform to voice my opinions. I feel that the work that I make goes against what would be the stereotype for American Art.
Your next exhibition is about a huge horn; what does it mean?
The horn is complicated; a smaller model horn is exhibited in “First we take Manhattan”. The truth about the horn is that it’s my mythological object. I went to a bullfight in Mexico City in this huge stadium and I saw my first bull fight. The bull was fighting for its life and in the end it was slaughtered. You can´t even eat the meat after it died this way, you can´t do anything with the bull afterwards but skin it and cut off the horns and hooves, and this is a total waste to me. I really identified with this animal because it is just trying to survive and doesn’t know that it is part of a spectacle. So after the second bullfight I saw that day I couldn’t take it anymore and left. I bought the bull´s horn and I have had it with me ever since.
In practically every society the bull has a mystical quality. I basically just wanted to do something that would make this particular animal´s life more meaningful. I just thought it was such a wasteful and useless waste of life. In New York there is this Wall Street saying: when things are good it´s a bull´s market, when things are bad it´s a bear´s market. So I took the horn, I made a mold of it, cast it in concrete and put gold leaf on it for this show. I thought that this was a good way of playing with this idea of an artificial perspective that most monetary goods are based on. On the surface it´s gold but underneath it’s just concrete.
What inspires you?
What inspires me to make art is that it gives me a voice; some people are politicians, some are singers and others are writers. I love to make things, I communicate through these things and I hope when people look at them they see things differently and it affects them in some way.
How did James Hampton inspire you?
James Hampton is an interesting scenario. He worked in his garage outside of Washington D.C. and he created a shrine of household items with a throne, above it the motto “Fear Not” which I also use in my work. He would slightly manipulate these found objects and covered them with gold and silver foil from candy wrappers and cigarette boxes. It is one of my favorite art works in the Smithsonian, I saw it as a kid and it really inspired me. He created his own myth and this is what I really loved about his work.
I feel that this is what art is about: your story, your mythology. I did a show that was dedicated to James Hampton about 2 years ago in Brooklyn. Why not create your own myth? Why not live it? I think this is a really beautiful and inspiring way of making art even though he probably didn’t consider himself an artist. It changed me to see that exhibit and, at the time, I remember being inspired by seeing these objects that he had collected and transformed just by walking down the street and maybe finding a gold wrapper of a cigarette pack, taking it back to his garage and covering a part of his throne with it. That is art, you live your art and your art is a part of you. And that is the myth – and a story to tell.
“Amerikaans Imperialisme” 2013
by Quinsy Gario
Bij binnenkomst op Art Warehouse wappert er een Amerikaanse vlag. Niet triomfantelijk aan een vlaggenstok, maar in een frame van stalen buizen. Is het de zoveelste Amerikaanse poging om de wereld te veroveren? Via kunst en cultuur is het net als via de maag. Het gaat erin en voor je het weet ken je alle woorden van het nieuwste nummer van Justin Timberlake.
AIS Houston TX is de enige internationale stand op Art at the Warehouse. En daar wappert de Stars and Stripes. Naar beneden gedrapeerd lijkt de vlag naar achteruitgang te verwijzen. Volgens de New Yorkse kunstenaar Edouard Steinhauer gaat het niet om imperialisme, maar om het conceptueel kijken naar hoe we kunst en nationalisme vormgeven. “De Amerikaanse vlag is een symbool dat kunstenaars altijd blijven gebruiken. Jasper John’s kunstwerk is een mijlpaal in hoe je de vlag en haar gebruik kan onderzoeken.” John’s werk gemaakt in 1953 zorgde er inderdaad voor dat een criticus vroeg of het een vlag of een schilderij was, alsof de twee van elkaar gescheiden konden worden.
Steinhauer zit in eerste instantie haast verlegen te vertellen over zijn werk maar straalt gaandeweg het gesprek. “Ik heb het werk niet in Amerika tentoongesteld. Ik weet ook niet hoe ze daar zouden reageren. Tot nu toe vonden mensen het of te gek of vonden ze het afschuwelijk.” Het werk heeft hij in München, Berlijn (zijn huidige woonplaats) en nu in Rotterdam tentoongesteld. “Amerika is het enige land dat gebaseerd is op een idee en dat vind ik belangrijk om terug te brengen in de omgang met haar symbolen.”
“Path of a Tempest” chronicles of Hurricane Sandy in New York. EAF13 Artist in Residence — Socrates Sculpture Park, Long Island City, NY. Self-published in 2014.
“Vivid Darkness” 2012
by André Juste
Be they trained or outsider types, artists inclined toward the visionary and the mystical are all over the art-historical map. They usually present their mysterious visions as something beyond our immediate realm. Or they insinuate such visions in the everyday world, as if it’s naturally embedded there.
“In No Strange Land” is a solo exhibit by Edouard Steinhauer at the gallery FiveMyles in Brooklyn. In it, the mystical is something that’s individually engineered and grounded in one’s chosen socio-historical sense of being.
The entire show is based on the only surviving work by the African-American visionary artist James Hampton, “The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly.” A monumental 14-year labor of love (currently in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian), it consists of over 150 pieces of various found objects almost all covered in aluminum foil and presented in a shrine-like installation. If Hampton’s work exudes an awesome presence of spiritual mystery and his deep faith in Christ’s Second Coming, Steinhauer’s exhibit, in contrast, galvanizes such a concern, launching viewers in a dark universe that he himself has aesthetically (re)fabricated and encoded. It’s a marvel that, through his earnest engagement with this chosen realm, he manages both to demystify as well as amplify its mystery.
Steinhauer achieves this paradoxical demystification, though, partly because he has (wisely) localized, and therefore grounded, the spiritual-mystical in the particular aesthetics of a self-taught artist. Made immanent or politicized as such, the mystical forfeits some of its transcendence. Five of the six works presented in the show, especially the wall-sized triptych “The Illuminated Throne of the State of Eternity no. 2,” “Winged Beast,” and “The Illuminated Throne […] no. 1,” consist of images or motifs that are, like Hampton’s installation, foil-wrapped. These include toy-like spacecrafts, winged quadrupeds and other creatures and even a couple of handguns. In the latter photograph, there’s a sense of theatrical opposition and of imminent combat between vestiges of shimmering beings seemingly facing off in the lateral sides of the composition. The staged action takes place as if under a central watchful presence flanked by two gold-handled guns aimed in opposing directions.
Unlike Hampton’s work, however, the artist uses the foil-wrapped objects seen in the photo-based works as electrical capacitors and conductors. The shimmering lightning-like fringes that seem to streak against the dark background of his pictures result from the artist generating and manipulating electrical discharges or filaments of light emitted by the wrapped objects and then photographing them in complete darkness. By electrifying images that recall Hampton’s shrine, Steinhauer not only affirms and amplifies the mystery he has appropriated but also vouches for it as a viable means of projecting one’s chosen identity in the world.
That Steinhauer deliberately seeks to establish to some extent a spiritual and brotherly identity with another black artist is of course also evident in the sense of connection suggested by the show’s title, “In No Strange Land.” Born in Haiti, the artist came to the United States at age two and went on to receive his art training from Yale. Having visited his native country several times as a child and as an adult, even attending school there for about three years, he seems rather familiar with Haitian culture and its fantastical art tradition. His compelling “Winged Beast,” one of two smaller magnificent photo-based works in the show, is an existential, frenzied take on the theme of chien pays or (stray Haitian) “country dog” the artist referenced in an exhibited work at the alternative space Exit Art in 1996.
But the cultural-historical identity that underpins the show is only part of what makes it compelling. Aptly presented in a dimly lit gallery, the overall feel of the works is contemplative but longingly so, quite at ease but open to possibilities. In “The Millennium General Assembly Starship,” the seemingly bulky but actually lightweight radar-like rotor that glints and crowns this large but finely economical sculpture seems able to detect even imperceptible vibes far and wide, not least from the other exhibited works, on which its reflected light flashes. But the entire work, under which viewers could easily walk, seems self-contained, emitting (as in “Winged Beast”) an abiding stoicism as the rotor’s engine whirs on.
All in all, the magical beauty – and even the mystery – in the show lies in it’s transparency of means. For instance, in the kinetic piece “Crown # 1,” which somewhat recalls Duchamps’ playful machine “Rotary Glass Plates (Precision Optics),” Steinhauer dispenses with the already deconstructed theatricality with which he conveys the notion of mystery and opts for a more open engagement with it. Here, a simple metal ladder, a couple of light bulbs, a motorized contraption that spins some foil-wrapped spacecrafts and a transparent disc with a lone star glued on it are all that the artist needs to project cyclically on the gallery wall a sort of shadow film about a space quest to an unreachable star. (Hampton had claimed that the Star of Bethlehem supposedly appeared in 1946 in Washington, DC, where he labored as a daytime janitor and nighttime artist.)
Steinhauer’s quest is all convincing. But it’s not about attaining a fixed, external goal. Nor is it about acquiescing to the promise of salvation per se. Like the glinting, persistent and surprisingly dissimilar faceted bulks that make up the two sensors of the would-be symmetrical rotor probing the heavens (the only variation in an otherwise thoroughly balanced work) the artist simply insists on the freedom to stand for one’s belief against, as he has written, “our ingrained acceptance of the current ‘global order.’”
It’s this dynamic that lends “In No Strange Land” its reverberating power.
“Utopian Conquest – Ideal Domination” 2006
by: Chris Twomey
Eddy Steinhauer works in kinetic assemblage and fabricated recreations, mining the field of history and myth. The work underscore’s the axiom that one person’s utopia may be another person’s hell.
We see a complex, mechanical landscape standing on spindly legs gyrates and belches with bursts of light. On closer inspection we discern that the movement comes from an antique globe, out of which springs the head of a black man which is attached to a long wire. A bell rings, the globe spins and the light flashes. Did our presence affect the motion? The viewer becomes a participant in this alternate reality. A molten ape at the base of this landscape contrasts with the molten rocket ship attached above, and we sense that these elements tell of a serious historical drama. Steinhauers alternative cosmology, in fact, references Darwin’s theory of evolution and the forgotten history of the 1791 Haitian revolution, an early anti-colonialist slave uprising.
Colonialist and imperialist expansion is also critiqued in a photo-collage of a burned out armored tank stuck, on a pristine Caribbean beach. The words “I wasn’t invited, so I came here to see why I wasn’t invited” speak of displacement and an inability to reconcile. Ideals fuel both sides of these wars, revolutions and dreams of a better future, leaving us sadder but wiser, stranded somewhere between Utopian Conquest and Ideal Domination.
“Changelings” 2005
by: Carl E. Hazelwood
In a recent statement, Eddy Steinhauer has described the parameters within which he works as a kind of “black space”. This is a metaphorically complex space where the modern black ‘body’ can come to terms with its complexity and ‘difference’ within a circumscribed social space. Steinhauer is especially equipped to explore this complexity because of his personal biography. As a Haitian-born person who was adopted by Americans as a child, he has, for all his life, continually crossed and re-crossed the resistant, yet permeable barriers of race and social position in relation to the political and emotional territory of the constructed family.
But as a Western person within the black Diaspora, Steinhauer’s art underscores his struggle to come to terms with contending elements of a classically complicated American biography. He does this via his understanding of the integrating function of myth for the human family; as he says, his interest is in “how consciousness is manipulated through religion, science and media. And, how a collective unconscious, consisting of archetypes, is the spiritual language of our environment realized through dreams and other unconscious states…”
Since I first became acquainted with Mr. Steinhauer and his work about ten years ago, his artistic projects have continued to develop in various ways, deepening in subtlety, and always gaining in its mediated response to modern life. It attempts to expose, or at least ponder what lies beneath the smooth surfaces of contemporary consciousness, ‘the given of the now’ as the late poet Martin Carter put it.