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Look very, very closely: Joan Steiner’s
House. |
Not
As They Seem
By
Meisha Rosenberg
Look-Alikes:
The Amazing World of Joan Steiner
New
York State Museum, through March 3
In order to deal with the on slaught of images our culture
purveys in movies, on Web pages, and in advertisements, we
often tune out, barely noticing the objects all around us.
Joan Steiner’s delightful, obsessively detailed three-dimensional
scenes made out of peanuts, ashtrays, mousetraps—the detritus
of everyday life—invite visitors to wonder at the ingenious
world of form.
Steiner, who works out of a studio in Hudson, is like Grandma
Moses gone wild with a glue gun; her miniature dioramas transform
charming visions of farms and general stores into feats of
the imagination made out of repurposed cheese doodles, pretzels
and spools of thread. Kitchen at first glance seems
a sweet diorama of a kitchen with grandma rolling dough to
bake in a cast-iron oven, but reveals surprising analogies
of shape and color: The oven turns out to be a mailbox with
a flashlight and purse disguised as the vent. Electrical-plate
burners cook a paperweight pot, while grandson awaits cookies
that are white pills, licking batter from a cotton swab spatula.
Steiner is best known for her Look-Alikes series of
children’s books, made from photos of her three- dimensional
environments. On display at the New York State Museum are
more than a dozen actual three-dimensional scenes accompanying
several blown-up photographs of Steiner’s picture-perfect
America. We see general stores and leafy suburbs, as well
as postcard scenes of foreign locales from her recent book,
Look-Alikes Around the World (2007). Everything is
as it should be, until you realize that the Great Wall of
China is a zipper, and the Taj Mahal has real white onions
as domes. Her knack for textures and colors enhances the surreal
effect: wide-wale corduroy never looked so good as it does
as rich, tilled farm earth, and cinnamon sticks are the perfect
logs.
The layers of detail are dizzying and far more engaging than
the Where’s Waldo and I Spy series, to which
Steiner’s books are compared. In a construction scene, a paint-tube
plane flies above a mustard-bottle cement truck, and a portable-
cassette-player crane uses a fishing lure to grab walnuts
that look like rocks. In some scenes, Rockwellian people made
of polymer clay appear, sporting clothing and hair made out
of things like gloves and seashells. Many environments are
uninhabited, as though an army of dwarves had left the scene
of exhausting work to rest. Viewers feel compelled to identify
the component parts of this playful world, and as we do, layers
of material and conceptual analogies emerge. As one recognizes
the cement mixer in Construction Site is a mustard
bottle, one comprehends that the construction site itself
was a work of laborious construction. There’s a similar sense
of meta-observation in Christmas Windows, as a viewer
spies on Steiner’s miniature shoppers who are themselves peering
into decorated windows (Look-Alikes Christmas, 2003).
This is, ultimately, art about the creation of art.
Steiner’s world is a brain teaser, an exercise in observation,
and just sheer fun. The exhibition text engages children with
questions such as: “How many things can you name that are
circles?” A table is set up with the Look-Alikes books
so that kids (and kidlike adults) can peruse. In a video,
Steiner talks about her process and shows viewers how to construct
a teddy-bear Christmas ornament out of peanuts. It’s rare
for an artist to share technique so freely—and it’s not everyone
who can impart the arcane wisdom that, while their color may
fade, cheese doodles last forever.
The “fun for kids!” tone of the exhibition discourages a too-serious
consideration of Steiner’s artistry, but such a dismissal
would be a mistake. Even though Steiner’s materials can be
found easily at any supermarket, each environment can take
months. Self-taught, she started out in the late 1970s making
wearable art, telling me in a phone interview that “I made
one purse that looked like a pair of ice skates you slung
over your shoulder; I made a hat that looked like a fishing
boat,” with a veil as a fishing net. Then she began doing
three-dimensional illustration, and when Games magazine
said they needed a puzzle, Look-Alikes were born. While
Steiner doesn’t credit any particular influences, she says,
“I do have eureka moments. I was making dinner one night—lasagna—and
I was thinking how pretty the noodles were and how they looked
a lot like draperies.” (Lasagna noodles appear as the drapes
in Parlor, at the exhibition.) A lot of the time, though,
she emphasizes, it’s trial and error.
One could argue that these are works of folk art or outsider
art. Like the quilts of Gee’s Bend or the drawings of Martin
Ramirez, Steiner’s worlds are made with everyday materials,
and her images speak of a cultural nostalgia.
One could also compare her to edgier artists such as Liza
Lou, whose iconic life-sized Kitchen (1991-95) was
crafted entirely out of tubular beads. However, where Liza
Lou’s work points out the iconicity of feminine domesticity,
Steiner’s scenes are lessons in how to see. Or as one teenage
girl I overheard with her friends said, “Oh my God, this is
the coolest thing ever, you guys!” I couldn’t agree more.
Joan
Steiner will be signing her books Feb. 22-23, from noon to
4 PM, for New York in Bloom weekend at the New York State
Museum. Admission will be charged on these days.
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