0% by Haim Steinbach
Haim Steinbach is not solely responsible for that feeling you get when you walk into a store that assaults you with its minimal layout of goods, which in most cases is starkness cosplaying as minimalism. No artist can control whose mood boards they end up on. Steinbach’s shelf forms, by far the most well-known works from his 40+ year career, are angular vitrines, display solutions jutting from the wall that then become art. Sneakers, lamps, various-size Kong dog toys, cereal boxes, and found objects stand in as mini-pop-up shops within a gallery or museum setting—a precursor to the shopping experience institutions constantly reroute us towards. It’s all for sale but in a different way.
My first reaction to 0% was an amused chuckle. Within the set of emotions that an artwork can evoke, nothing beats something that has slipped its way past being simply clever and raises the viewer’s willingness to engage. Clever art, much like political art, immediately dates itself and becomes stale. Clever belongs to t-shirts and bumper stickers, a quick read that lays on the irony thick enough to adhere to the amorphous blob of the cultural climate.
Seeing 0 also invites confusion. It’s like seeing an out-of-business gas station with weather-beaten prices still up on the sign, pegged to a fixed state while the world gets smaller in its windshield. Here we are, in one of the most controlled environments we can easily enter and exit (aside from needing to be buzzed into Tanya Bonakdar, a protection from a period of the neighborhood’s turnover, the various sweeps and relocations involved in the making of a reinvigorated art scene in any neighborhood of Los Angeles) and we are confronted with the artist presenting the absence of measurable quantity. The second reading of 0% asks us to declare whether it’s starting or finishing.
Steinbach has created a body of work that constantly challenges the ideas of presentation; what gets to be called art and what is merely commerce. Vinyl on a wall, pristine items on a shelf, and even the exposed aluminum studs that make up the physical walls of the world. 0% is wide open. This is a confident way to show us nothing. This work is not idle or inert but has been pared down to integer and mathematic symbol. There are surely cases of “zero percent” being positive and warmly accepted as an answer. This is a loud answer to a quiet question; the natural outcome of every biological lifespan.
0% (1997)
Found text in matte vinyl applied to the wall variable dimensions
61 x 48 in (154.9 x 121.9 cm)
Edition of 2
Part of the exhibition “Haim Steinbach: Appear To Use” at Tanya Bonakdar in Los Angeles from March 16 - May 18, 2019