A 1985 piece titled related and different displays a pair of Nike shoes alongside five plastic goblets as if to suggest that Air Jordans were a contemporary version of the Holy Grail. This is typical of his work: to set selected products on simple shelves or pedestals in clever juxtapositions of shape and color in a way that shows them to be ‘related and different’ – related as commodities, different as signs. Steinbach frames art objects in these terms too: they are presented as signs to be appreciated-that is, consumed-as such. Like…
Koons he positions the viewer as shopper, the art connoisseur as commodity-sign fetishist, and celebrates the idea that our ‘passion for the consumerist code’ (Baudrillard) seems to subsume all other values-use-value, aesthetic value, and so on. With Steinbach this code of consumption is first and foremost a matter of design and display, and its logic appears total, able to absorb any object, however bizarre, into any arrangement…
however surreal In his work such oppositions as functional and dysfunctional, rational and irrational, which structured the definition of the modern object since the Bauhaus and Surrealism, appear to be collapsed, which is indeed one ‘endgame’ played out by this kind of
‘commodity sculpture.’ These artists ‘pretend to…
engage in a critical annihilation of mass-cultural fetishization, Benjamin Buchloh, has argued, but in doing so ‘they reinforce the fetishization of the high-cultural object even more: not a single discursive frame is…
undone, not a single aspect of the support system in reflected, not one institutional device is touched upon.