Haim Steinbach talks to Tim Griffin - '80s Then - Interview - Biography

ArtForum, April, 2003

TG: As you moved into the mid- to late '80s, who appreciated your work?

HS: I found myself interacting more with Europeans than Americans. The interest here was basically in the allure and appeal of the surface as a phenomenon-and a controversial phenomenon at that.

TG: And this had something to do with an American sensibility?

HS: By the end of the '80s, a kind of humanism had resurfaced, with mostly handmade, object-related works--metaphoric work with meta-narratives or pointedly activated autobiographical narratives. It was no longer an issue of the socially and culturally systemic structure of objects; it was about subjectivity and telling a personal story. People latch onto that.

TG: How did your work in the '80s operate, by contrast?

HS: I selected objects as vehicles to carry the narratives that they wanted to perform. There's a work from 1984 called dramatic yet neutral. It's a basket and two footballs, which I exhibited in my show at Cable Gallery in 1985. First, it's the wrong kind of ball! Also, there were two footballs, which de-focuses the center. An important issue in my work is this idea of decentralizing, and this is part of what polarized people: The work's conceptual directives were overwhelmed by the centralized nature of the viewer's personal projection onto an object. And the work lacked a narrative. So when it was interpreted, it always ended up in the same place, part of the same discourse.

TG: Was there a discourse you did feel comfortable with in the '80s?

HS: I see the '80s as an archipelago, in which different things were going on, on different islands. They were going on concurrently but nor always moving in the same direction. I was part of an island of artists who evolved our of the discourse of the late '60s and '70s, who dealt with anthropological, social, and conceptual issues.

In the mid-'80s, there was a sudden explosion. Things were changing, and there seemed to be a reevaluation happening. But the discourse did not really challenge participants to try to figure out what was going on-actually, there was no discourse. Anyway, the only symposium I ever participated in was the one put together by Flash Art. If artists were doing something that shook the world, or even if they just made noise, they became suspect. There were only discussions between critics and other critics, or within tightly knit art-world cliques. Things were pretty polarized.

TG: It's very odd for me to hear about a lack of discourse in the '80s, since that's often said about the '90s.

HS: I think that something went off-track by the beginning of the '80s. It's interesting to me that appropriation art, such an incredibly significant development, was neglected for the first five years of the decade, even though it had a phenomenal forum in Metro Pictures. Critics handpicked a few artists, but there was no sense of real dialogue or energy-even though, I think, there was the potential for an incredible collective dialogue between the appropriation artists and, say, the practice of Group Material. Their approaches, while different, were in many ways analogous. Can't you see someone like Barbara Kruger getting into a conversation with Tim Rollins? Just asking, "What are we doing? What's your practice? What's my practice?"