The Prescient Politics of a Seminal Conceptual Photographer
LOS ANGELES — In a press launch for a previous exhibition in Berlin, Phel Steinmetz described himself as “ however not as dedicated to” political and social points as his colleagues on the College of California, San Diego, a cohort that included seminal conceptual photographers Allan Sekula, Martha Rosler, and Fred Lonidier. Steinmetz, who was a professor at UCSD from 1971 to 2011, taught all three earlier than they joined him as college.
Whereas the best-known works by the opposite artists study labor, politics, and battle, typically with a Marxist bent, Steinmetz took a broader lens to tradition and nature, and their inexorable collision. Now, almost a decade after his dying in 2013, his consideration to the consequences of capitalism on the setting could be acknowledged as each political and prescient. Phel Steinmetz, the artist’s second present at Michael Benevento, takes a light-handed strategy in positing the persevering with, and even rising, relevance of the artist’s work, which has typically been overshadowed by that of his friends.
The exhibition’s loosely chronological association of images and photo-collages from 1970 to 1997 maps the evolution of his work and the aesthetic and thematic threads that join it. The sequence A Few Alternative Phrases, one in every of three works from 1970, begins the present on a pedantic notice: redacted advertisements for a Time-Life pictures e book sequence are juxtaposed with the redacted textual content, all generic advert copy. If nothing else, they present Steinmetz discovering his footing by means of cultural principle. (A 1973 self-portrait of Steinmetz studying Barthes, included in his 2018 present on the gallery, could be a intelligent complement.)
“He No Longer Felt Comfy in Aggressive Conditions,” from 1970, additionally layers textual content and picture: two toes clad in white socks straddle a pair of soiled Adidas fitness center footwear, enclosing them like parenthesis, above the title’s textual content. But, regardless of the nondescript subject material, its quizzical character and formal class are early indicators of the refined humor, intelligence, and sheer velvety richness that will come to characterize his images, at the same time as he homed in on the quotidian and mundane.
On the alternative wall, the diptych “Early one smoggy morning” (1976) pairs a stretch of tree-lined street with a TV set asserting Gerald Ford’s presidential candidacy. Collectively, the 2 works define the exhibition’s overarching motifs: Steinmetz’s expertise for producing nuanced exposition by means of each shrewd compositions and unremarkable snippets of American tradition, the latter exemplified by the 1979 sequence Public Utterances — pictures of bumper stickers on vehicles, with slogans that vary from the patriotic and conservative to the pacifist and subversive (i.e., “America, you look higher than ever”; “Don’t Vote! It solely encourages them”; “Unborn infants are individuals”; “No Nukes”).
The connection between tradition and the setting turns into extra pointed in three untitled photographic items that he labored on from 1970 to ’80: for example, in “Untitled (Improvement Website),” composed of two black and white prints sutured on the heart, a pair of tire tracks from a tractor silhouetted on the horizon snakes up the middle of the picture, bisecting a discipline of what appears like lifeless desert. Relationship from the second that the US was transitioning from Jimmy Carter’s smooth liberalism to Ronald Reagan’s hard-right politics, these three works encapsulate the nation’s altering cultural panorama — significantly in “Untitled (Parking Cross),” whose titular cross, designating a parking house, could be considered as a ground-level “X marks the spot” for the convergence of predatory capitalism and fundamentalist evangelicalism. This confluence of financial imperialism and conservative Christianity, solid as a sort of invasive species on the pure panorama, additionally marks a place to begin for the US that leads, catastrophically, to right this moment.
Two Nineteen Nineties picture collages within the final room (the present’s solely coloration works) broaden on the compositional experiments and environmental themes that Steinmetz invokes in his earlier photographs, however right here they arrive throughout as much less evidentiary than elegiac. In “Grass and Pines Stonewall Peak, Cuyamaca” (1991), 4 pictures piece collectively a portrait of verdant nature within the mountains east of San Diego. Greater than within the 1970-80 collages, the black edges of the overlapping frames and slight tilt of the prints, leading to minor misalignments, emphasize the photographic object as a lot because the imagery.
On this means, the piece calls consideration to the scene as a second up to now. In a way, it’s a melancholic strategy to finish. However Steinmetz approaches the pristine panorama gently and reassembles its photographic fragments with utmost care — a precarious stability that turns into an announcement of its personal.
Phel Steinmetz continues at Michael Benevento (3712 Beverly Boulevard, Los Angeles, California) by means of April 30. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.