Essay on the works by Dr. James Romaine
Drawn: The methods and Zahirs of Kenneth Steinbach
Since 2004, Kenneth Steinbach has developed an unconventional method of art making that overlays, without directly superimposing, ink drawings of the same object in glazes of semi-transparent resin. Each rendering is done free-hand and varies slightly but noticeably from the other drawings of the same object. The total effect of this process is a layering of image and meaning, of possession and being possessed.
In The Success and Failure of Picasso, John Berger states that Pablo Picasso could possess anything, a house, an object, even a person, simply by drawing it. Comparing Picasso to King Midas, Berger’s point is that a drawing of a house by Picasso could be worth more than the house (in fact Picasso did purchase a house in exchange for a single work, though that work was not of the house he purchased) and by drawing a person, presumably a woman, Picasso could possess her as a lover. However, Berger, perhaps unintentionally, raises other issues that are equally applicable to Picasso and Steinbach, namely the conceptual and perceptual relationships between drawing and possession.
Drawing, perhaps because of its immediacy, its direct connection between eye and hand, conveys a sense of intimacy between the artist and the object. A line rendering the object corresponds to the artist’s eye circumventing the object. The drawing becomes a material record of the artists taking personal possession of what he/she sees. Steinbach’s method of working further narrows the creative gap between perception and action.
As a strategy of possession, Steinbach’s particular method of drawing is a means for him to explore and materialize a process in which sight and seeing are the mediating means between himself and a series of initially insignificant objects. Steinbach’s drawings depict stuff, such as a pair of eyeglasses, a bottle, a telephone, a pair of binoculars, a glove, a tape recorder, or a gun, that is neither usual nor unusual. These things are at once familiar but unexpected as the subject of a work of art. They aren’t particularly beautiful (at least they don’t seem to be until we see them through Steinbach’s eyes) or valuable (at least they don’t seem to be until we consider the devotion he has paid them).
These objects, often found or inherited, came into Steinbach’s possession by chance, fate, or just the luck of the draw. The drawings may be read as a record of his investigation of his relationship to these objects to discover, over time, what they might mean to him. As they become evidently meaningful to Steinbach, these objects, which we discover mediated through his vision, can potentially become meaningful to us. Yet this implied meaning remains veiled to us.
This refusal to immediately disclose itself may be what distinguishes Steinbach’s drawing, from illustration, as art. In an illustration, the content, that invisible dimension of the work of art, is communicated unchanged by the subject matter. (Looking at the work, we can recognize it as a picture of X and have wholly exhausted what the work can offer.) In a work of art, the content is incarnated in the form and process that manifest it in the world. In Steinbach’s art, we are compelled, by a promise of meaningful content, to investigate, even excavate, his forms and processes, drawing our own conclusions along the way. Steinbach’s process of creation draws us into our own contest with the object that first enticed him. He strategically leaves us, for the most part, to our own devices to find iconographic or visual clues that would confirm and particularize the meaning strongly but vaguely implied by the process.
Although these objects do not share any immediately apparent iconographic commonality, there is a strategic synchronicity between his subjects and process. Many of these objects are conduits of time, energy, substance, or action. Inherited objects are bridges between the past and the present. We see through binoculars and speak through telephones. In each case, we are temporally or spatially extended. We see beyond our natural vision; we speak beyond our natural capacity; we live beyond our lifetime. At the same time, these objects may be limiters. The binoculars limit our peripheral range and our telephone conversations are determined by “connections.”
Saying, ”I like to draw objects that don’t have a voice,” Steinbach suggests that he sees his role as an artist to, at least in part, be a servant to his subject (the paradox of this reversal is, I think, intentional). However, some of his subjects, such as the telephone and tape recorder, are machines that have no voice of their own but rather transmit or preserve the voice of another. As objects whose purpose it is to connect or mediate between two other things, times, or places, they parallel Steinbach’s drawings which were created out of a relationship between the artist and the object. They persist in mediating between our vision and his.
Steinbach’s process of layering is not a conceptual trope or aesthetic elaboration; it is a strategic method of incarnating stratums of meanings as levels of reading. Born of a process, sustained over a period of time, of concentrated and perpetual observation, Steinbach’s art draws connections between thought and sight. He layers drawings, without harmonizing or synthesizing them. This leaves it to the viewer to piece together the composite image of the object. This stretches our conceptual and perceptual capacities. If, for Steinbach, his sketches are a process of attempting to possess and understand the object before him, the viewer, with Steinbach’s object before him or her, engages in a similar process of viewing as an act of attempted possession. The proficiency of Steinbach’s works is evidenced in their causing the viewer to experience the same sort of problems he encountered in their formation. Thus they create an experience of looking rather than simply provide something to be looked at.
While each individually embedded line drawing seems intuitive and spontaneous, collectively and stacked they register as deliberate and analytic. Steinbach’s drawings don’t read quickly or all at once. We decipher their compression of time and space with difficulty. The object is drawn and redrawn so many times that it can no longer be seen. This transcription of time is a process of negation by addition. As individual drawings dissolve into a labyrinth of lines, each layer adds and detracts from our ability to see each individual drawing resulting in a visual density that make these works read more like objects than images. The work of art’s visual density can be calculated, though this is far from a scientific process, by dividing the depth of pictorial space by the number of planes that are crowded into that space. Steinbach’s use of resin material creates a shallow, perhaps even non-existent, pictorial space. Every layer of drawing that Steinbach adds to the work compounds its visual density.
Although it may not initially be apparent, there is a kinship between Steinbach’s drawing and Ad Reinhardt’s late black-on-black painting. As in Steinbach’s work, Reinhardt’s method ritually layered numerous intangible surfaces until they read as a palpable substance. These works, what Reinhardt imagined would be the end painting, become arenas of benediction. Reinhardt’s cruciform designs slowly emerge from the works’ visual density and suspend the concentrated imagination in boundaries and unified depth of space that, almost like twilight, transitions between states of time, space, and spirit.
The density of time, space, and form in Steinbach’s drawings suggest that the object that he has sought to possess has perhaps possessed him. As he has returned to these objects over time, they seem to change for him. Of course, it is not the object that changes, it is Steinbach who is changed by them. Each renewed engagement with the object carries with it memories of the object in the past that must be tested against the present. The object is drawn and redrawn until it becomes real to Steinbach. Drawing becomes a way capturing the object as seen (unlike photography which captures the object as viewed) and projecting the seer into the future. Because the drawing captures the object as uniquely seen by the viewer it becomes a way of possessing, not only the object but a way for the viewer to possess himself.
Zahir is Arabic for “the visible;” (“Al-Zahir,” “the Manifest,” is one of the ninety-nine names of Allah in the Qur’an). In the short story “El Zahir,” the Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges explores the power of a mystical object, in this case a coin, over those who see it. Although the coin has no special appearance, its affect is phenomenal. In fact, there may be some question over whether the person is in possession of the coin or the coin is in possession of the person. Even after he gets rid of the coin, which he had initially received by chance, Borges cannot remove the coin from his memory. Eventually, the Zahir, even in its absence, makes Borges unable to see or think of anything else. For an artist like Steinbach, whose vocation it is to “make the visible,” Borges’s story describes a dialectic of possessing and being possessed that underlies the motivations, methods and meaning of his art.
Dr. James Romaine is a New York based critic and art historian. He teaches at the New York Center for Art and Media Studies, and is a frequent contributor to Image magazine, among others.
Since 2004, Kenneth Steinbach has developed an unconventional method of art making that overlays, without directly superimposing, ink drawings of the same object in glazes of semi-transparent resin. Each rendering is done free-hand and varies slightly but noticeably from the other drawings of the same object. The total effect of this process is a layering of image and meaning, of possession and being possessed.
In The Success and Failure of Picasso, John Berger states that Pablo Picasso could possess anything, a house, an object, even a person, simply by drawing it. Comparing Picasso to King Midas, Berger’s point is that a drawing of a house by Picasso could be worth more than the house (in fact Picasso did purchase a house in exchange for a single work, though that work was not of the house he purchased) and by drawing a person, presumably a woman, Picasso could possess her as a lover. However, Berger, perhaps unintentionally, raises other issues that are equally applicable to Picasso and Steinbach, namely the conceptual and perceptual relationships between drawing and possession.
Drawing, perhaps because of its immediacy, its direct connection between eye and hand, conveys a sense of intimacy between the artist and the object. A line rendering the object corresponds to the artist’s eye circumventing the object. The drawing becomes a material record of the artists taking personal possession of what he/she sees. Steinbach’s method of working further narrows the creative gap between perception and action.
As a strategy of possession, Steinbach’s particular method of drawing is a means for him to explore and materialize a process in which sight and seeing are the mediating means between himself and a series of initially insignificant objects. Steinbach’s drawings depict stuff, such as a pair of eyeglasses, a bottle, a telephone, a pair of binoculars, a glove, a tape recorder, or a gun, that is neither usual nor unusual. These things are at once familiar but unexpected as the subject of a work of art. They aren’t particularly beautiful (at least they don’t seem to be until we see them through Steinbach’s eyes) or valuable (at least they don’t seem to be until we consider the devotion he has paid them).
These objects, often found or inherited, came into Steinbach’s possession by chance, fate, or just the luck of the draw. The drawings may be read as a record of his investigation of his relationship to these objects to discover, over time, what they might mean to him. As they become evidently meaningful to Steinbach, these objects, which we discover mediated through his vision, can potentially become meaningful to us. Yet this implied meaning remains veiled to us.
This refusal to immediately disclose itself may be what distinguishes Steinbach’s drawing, from illustration, as art. In an illustration, the content, that invisible dimension of the work of art, is communicated unchanged by the subject matter. (Looking at the work, we can recognize it as a picture of X and have wholly exhausted what the work can offer.) In a work of art, the content is incarnated in the form and process that manifest it in the world. In Steinbach’s art, we are compelled, by a promise of meaningful content, to investigate, even excavate, his forms and processes, drawing our own conclusions along the way. Steinbach’s process of creation draws us into our own contest with the object that first enticed him. He strategically leaves us, for the most part, to our own devices to find iconographic or visual clues that would confirm and particularize the meaning strongly but vaguely implied by the process.
Although these objects do not share any immediately apparent iconographic commonality, there is a strategic synchronicity between his subjects and process. Many of these objects are conduits of time, energy, substance, or action. Inherited objects are bridges between the past and the present. We see through binoculars and speak through telephones. In each case, we are temporally or spatially extended. We see beyond our natural vision; we speak beyond our natural capacity; we live beyond our lifetime. At the same time, these objects may be limiters. The binoculars limit our peripheral range and our telephone conversations are determined by “connections.”
Saying, ”I like to draw objects that don’t have a voice,” Steinbach suggests that he sees his role as an artist to, at least in part, be a servant to his subject (the paradox of this reversal is, I think, intentional). However, some of his subjects, such as the telephone and tape recorder, are machines that have no voice of their own but rather transmit or preserve the voice of another. As objects whose purpose it is to connect or mediate between two other things, times, or places, they parallel Steinbach’s drawings which were created out of a relationship between the artist and the object. They persist in mediating between our vision and his.
Steinbach’s process of layering is not a conceptual trope or aesthetic elaboration; it is a strategic method of incarnating stratums of meanings as levels of reading. Born of a process, sustained over a period of time, of concentrated and perpetual observation, Steinbach’s art draws connections between thought and sight. He layers drawings, without harmonizing or synthesizing them. This leaves it to the viewer to piece together the composite image of the object. This stretches our conceptual and perceptual capacities. If, for Steinbach, his sketches are a process of attempting to possess and understand the object before him, the viewer, with Steinbach’s object before him or her, engages in a similar process of viewing as an act of attempted possession. The proficiency of Steinbach’s works is evidenced in their causing the viewer to experience the same sort of problems he encountered in their formation. Thus they create an experience of looking rather than simply provide something to be looked at.
While each individually embedded line drawing seems intuitive and spontaneous, collectively and stacked they register as deliberate and analytic. Steinbach’s drawings don’t read quickly or all at once. We decipher their compression of time and space with difficulty. The object is drawn and redrawn so many times that it can no longer be seen. This transcription of time is a process of negation by addition. As individual drawings dissolve into a labyrinth of lines, each layer adds and detracts from our ability to see each individual drawing resulting in a visual density that make these works read more like objects than images. The work of art’s visual density can be calculated, though this is far from a scientific process, by dividing the depth of pictorial space by the number of planes that are crowded into that space. Steinbach’s use of resin material creates a shallow, perhaps even non-existent, pictorial space. Every layer of drawing that Steinbach adds to the work compounds its visual density.
Although it may not initially be apparent, there is a kinship between Steinbach’s drawing and Ad Reinhardt’s late black-on-black painting. As in Steinbach’s work, Reinhardt’s method ritually layered numerous intangible surfaces until they read as a palpable substance. These works, what Reinhardt imagined would be the end painting, become arenas of benediction. Reinhardt’s cruciform designs slowly emerge from the works’ visual density and suspend the concentrated imagination in boundaries and unified depth of space that, almost like twilight, transitions between states of time, space, and spirit.
The density of time, space, and form in Steinbach’s drawings suggest that the object that he has sought to possess has perhaps possessed him. As he has returned to these objects over time, they seem to change for him. Of course, it is not the object that changes, it is Steinbach who is changed by them. Each renewed engagement with the object carries with it memories of the object in the past that must be tested against the present. The object is drawn and redrawn until it becomes real to Steinbach. Drawing becomes a way capturing the object as seen (unlike photography which captures the object as viewed) and projecting the seer into the future. Because the drawing captures the object as uniquely seen by the viewer it becomes a way of possessing, not only the object but a way for the viewer to possess himself.
Zahir is Arabic for “the visible;” (“Al-Zahir,” “the Manifest,” is one of the ninety-nine names of Allah in the Qur’an). In the short story “El Zahir,” the Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges explores the power of a mystical object, in this case a coin, over those who see it. Although the coin has no special appearance, its affect is phenomenal. In fact, there may be some question over whether the person is in possession of the coin or the coin is in possession of the person. Even after he gets rid of the coin, which he had initially received by chance, Borges cannot remove the coin from his memory. Eventually, the Zahir, even in its absence, makes Borges unable to see or think of anything else. For an artist like Steinbach, whose vocation it is to “make the visible,” Borges’s story describes a dialectic of possessing and being possessed that underlies the motivations, methods and meaning of his art.
Dr. James Romaine is a New York based critic and art historian. He teaches at the New York Center for Art and Media Studies, and is a frequent contributor to Image magazine, among others.
Essay on the works by Michael Fallon
In the light of the Olson Gallery, Ken Steinbach’s wall images seem reminiscent of laptop computer screens. Starting with a hard plastic surface, Steinbach’s simple ink drawings of ordinary everyday objects are embedded in layers of resin and glow as if back-lighted—the resulting compound image seem to well up from within the image ground. This is a beautifully simple effect and a nimble, almost meditative way to explore the craft of drawing. And the sinewy, murky multiple objects and object-shadows that result are alluring to look at. They seem halfway between manifestation and fading—like fossils or ghosts. This in-between state is also reflected in the freestanding pedestal pieces in the center of the room, which reveal both embedded objects and empty shapes left by objects that are no longer present.
The operating principle of Steinbach’s work then is to study the realm between object absence and presence. That is, objects are both trapped in their essence and removed of physical existence. The overarching ideas are that the things of this world don’t really matter as much as we would like to believe. It’s a deeply spiritual assertion that is reflected in the show’s very title: The Shape of the Earth = The Shape of the Sky”. Steinbach’s work ruminates on the connections between what is real and grounded as opposed to what is ethereal and fleeting. His repetitive act of making drawings, then obscuring the individual drawings with further layers, reinforces the idea that the image-object is not as important as the act of realizing the image. The final version is less crucial than the intent to make it.
The Dutch painters called this approach to art “memento mori” or “I remember death”. In Dutch vanitas paintings of the 17th century, it was not uncommon to find signs of decay, and worms and other insects tearing at a lovely and exacting rendering of exotic flowers—as if to signify the vanity of our focus on beautiful objects. Paradoxically, the artists toiled intensely to make their precise images. The key to understanding this cycle comes when we realize they often included images of fresh buds just beginning to open in their flower arrangements—to signify the regeneration inherent in death, the beauty inherent in the process of living/dying (and of art-making). Steinbach’s glowing images are reliquary studies that give life to the objects of daily life without memorializing them.
Michael Fallon
Minneapolis 2004
The operating principle of Steinbach’s work then is to study the realm between object absence and presence. That is, objects are both trapped in their essence and removed of physical existence. The overarching ideas are that the things of this world don’t really matter as much as we would like to believe. It’s a deeply spiritual assertion that is reflected in the show’s very title: The Shape of the Earth = The Shape of the Sky”. Steinbach’s work ruminates on the connections between what is real and grounded as opposed to what is ethereal and fleeting. His repetitive act of making drawings, then obscuring the individual drawings with further layers, reinforces the idea that the image-object is not as important as the act of realizing the image. The final version is less crucial than the intent to make it.
The Dutch painters called this approach to art “memento mori” or “I remember death”. In Dutch vanitas paintings of the 17th century, it was not uncommon to find signs of decay, and worms and other insects tearing at a lovely and exacting rendering of exotic flowers—as if to signify the vanity of our focus on beautiful objects. Paradoxically, the artists toiled intensely to make their precise images. The key to understanding this cycle comes when we realize they often included images of fresh buds just beginning to open in their flower arrangements—to signify the regeneration inherent in death, the beauty inherent in the process of living/dying (and of art-making). Steinbach’s glowing images are reliquary studies that give life to the objects of daily life without memorializing them.
Michael Fallon
Minneapolis 2004
