Dvir / Paris
Gallery Hours
Tuesday – Thursday: 11:00 – 19:00
Friday – Saturday: 12:00 – 19:00
Haim Steinbach, Display #28 - Rustic Wall, 1991. Wood wall; hog pen siding; brass candle snuffer; electronic, plastic tape cassette player, 132 x 690 x 18 inches. Photo: Pierre Le Hors.
Intersecting with gallery architecture on either side, Display #28 seals half the volume of the space, its shutters opening not to glass windows but to wooden niches, establishing an exterior with no inside. The source of the installation’s soundtrack is a small plastic rectangle equipped with a pair of disembodied, grinning red lips, perched on a windowsill and softly broadcasting a halting version of White Christmas. (Display #28 was first presented at Jay Gorney Modern Art in October of 1991. With this exhibition opening mid-January, the consistently narrow untimeliness of the song suits its awkward and phantasmagoric delivery.) The cheekily anthropomorphic toy hails from 1986, when it was released under the name “Blabbermouth” as both a radio and cassette player. Freshly obsolete upon its first exhibition, Blabbermouth now appears as an analog Alexa, outputting audio absent data, dumbly ventriloquizing glitches rather than correcting them.
Listed among Display #28’s contents is a brass candle snuffer, concealed within a pair of closed shutters. Revealed by gallery staff, the antique extinguishing cone is missing a handle to facilitate human use, granting it a ghostly, animistic potential that approaches its neighboring modern automaton. As with all objects deployed in Steinbach’s installations, the candle snuffer’s use value maintains its relevance, and its suppressant function, doubled by its concealment, compounds the desire and frustration engendered by Display #28’s opacity.
Read the full article here