Space oddity

Without a doubt the most surprising element in a recent exhibition of works by Swiss artist Erik Steinbrecher is the boldly titled Dong (2004). The long, smooth, pale column, which juts out from a white wall, is suggestively phallic and so heavy it requires the support of a wooden trestle, cushioned by a piece of foam rubber. Hung next to it is Beutel (Bags, 2004), which look like two more drooping examples from the realm of Dong (although their source material is soft, the actual objects are made of acrylic resin and therefore solid). Meanwhile Dong (which is, in some countries, slang for penis), appears to be a response to a snapshot on the adjacent wall of a policeman with a chubby backside leaning against a dong-like bollard - gun and walkie-talkie dangling from his belt (OK Poster (001-100) #72, 2003).

On the wall opposite is another photograph, Volksbank (People's Bench/Bank, 2003), this time of a white bench with a picket fence as a back-rest in an auditorium full of chairs. The venue is the library of the Free University, Bolzano, Italy, where Steinbrecher was commissioned to contribute a fine art element to the architectural design. However, the project didn't quite go according to plan. The 'picket-fence bench' was originally supposed to be sited in an otherwise empty space, but later it was decided to use that space as an auditorium so that rows of chairs were placed all around. Now the object finds itself oddly out of place in this environment. Was it just a commission gone wrong?

In a way, yes, but Steinbrecher was making a point by hanging Volksbank close to Dong. Whereas the latter references the bollard, the image of the oddly placed bench constitutes a more formal similarity: that between two objects that dominate a space by their intrusive presence. Yet while one object is shown in a photograph, the other is physically present in the gallery. This is only one of several transitional shifts in this exhibition; initially it may seem a rather banal one, but it indicates an interesting development in the artist's work.

Throughout the 1990s Steinbrecher edited still images (most of them found, some of them made by him) into sequences that looked like narratives without a plot, and then exhibited these in vitrines or compiled them into artist's books. His piece for Documenta 10, Farmpark (1997), comprised 16 found images - including a pagoda-like building, a ground-floor window looking on to a pavement and a man in a pair of swimming trunks - framed in the sort of metal display cases used to show timetables and hung on the concrete wall of a bus stop in Kassel. (Originally he had planned to create an architectural project for Documenta, but the construction of a container hotel by the River Fulda proved too expensive.) Like Jeff Wall's light-box Milk (1984), which was shown in a Kassel underpass, Farmpark introduced an unexpected visual and narrative element to a space normally reserved for advertising. But unlike the frozen moment in time that Wall so elaborately produced, Steinbrecher's images mined the slippage between likeness and difference, familiarity and strangeness.

Steinbrecher has only recently begun, in his words, to 'circumnavigate the traps of abstract Modernism' and to work once again with space. It is a sort of homecoming: he originally trained as an architect, and ventured into the photographic field only by chance. His playful arrangements of visual material are now intertwined with the display of physical objects.

However, his recent Berlin show was not the first time that Steinbrecher had used installation; Radioranch (1998) explored bourgeois lifestyles in a sequence of still images, digitally superimposed and projected on to the wall like a slide show. As with many of his photographic sequences, it opens with a house and then delves into the details of the interior and its inhabitant(s): here, a sauna, a shower, a radiator and a woman. It looks as though the minutiae of everyday life, from which Richard Hamilton might have fashioned whole worlds, could disappear at any moment into insignificance. Overall the effect is of a volatile phenomenology of modern life. In an artist's book called Gras (Sleepers, 2002) Steinbrecher collected photographs he had made of people sleeping on public lawns. Never is a person more exposed (or in a more idiosyncratic posture) than when they are asleep, yet Steinbrecher is not going for the obvious social comment about the invasion of privacy. Rather, he depicts the person against an almost abstract background - green grass. Unlike Ryuji Miyamoto's photographs of cardboard shelters built by the homeless (for example, Tokyo, 1994) - the framing of the image itself constitutes the only delineation of a space of retreat. Steinbrecher's sleepers are in an ambivalent state of absence/presence - present but unaware. They are like objects, their subjectivity held in abeyance. This reveals a lot about the kind of spectatorship Steinbrecher presupposes: not the voyeur or the political documentarist but the unwitting witness, somebody who is struck by a chance observation and begins to reflect on it. There is a lot to learn in these images about how almost every element of contemporary life can become a signifier, but there is never enough evidence in (or between) them to come to a conclusion, sociological or otherwise.

Steinbrecher has begun to investigate more closely what it means to appear - in every sense of the word - in certain settings. A barn in an American landscape, for example, can be an epiphany, even for the non-believer. (Shaker architecture was a major influence on Steinbrecher's teachers and friends during his time as a student at the élite Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule in Zurich.) A dong in a white cube can refer to the absurdity of objects in urban landscapes and to the awkward
loneliness of the art piece in a gallery - the point where Steinbrecher's current shift from a hermeneutical reading of material towards a more hermetic forming of it takes place.

The Berlin exhibition reflected this process. The first piece you encountered was Rope Mummy (2004), a 12-second loop of found footage from action films shown on a monitor. Men doing Tarzan-like stunts with ropes are edited out of sequence, an approach that creates an aleatory pattern - a twist in its repetition. Slapstick humour (although not the genre of the films the artist has appropriated here) is a prominent feature of the work. In the second room were the images of the bench and the policeman, grouped around Dong and Beutel. In the third room were three objects, two of which are parts of designs that Steinbrecher originally created in the context of public or private architecture. Knüppel (Club, 2004), made of silver painted iron, was designed as a prototype for the supporting elements of a bridge railing in Berlin. Pfosten (Post, 2004) is part of a cast-aluminium pergola that Steinbrecher designed for a vineyard in south Tyrol. Positioned in a gallery and grouped around Haken (Hooks, 2004) - an aluminium cast of a naked branch protruding horizontally from the wall - these objects communicate with each other in a weirdly mute way, like three deadpan comedians locked in an elevator.

In his exhibition at the Vienna Kunsthalle this summer Steinbrecher is showing what he calls a 'team' of his sculptures. Mostly fashioned from synthetic resin, the pieces, like Dong, will jut out from the wall. Although, judging from drafts, there are faint references to a greyhound or a car exhaust, they will be even less dependent on visual references than usual. It seems that Steinbrecher has seen enough of the world to expose a little less of it. He has, after all, become an abstract modern artist. We might call this the lesson of the Dong.