Art

Haim Steinbach’s signature approach – elegantly arranging consumer goods on wedge-shaped, Donald Judd-like shelves, making them desirable and querulous of desire – remains one of the smartest of all updates on the Duchampian readymade. He clearly knows it, too. A quarter-century after he began, the Israel-born and Brooklyn-based artist ploughs the same furrow and is still harvesting results. Here is a plastic dog-chew, the leitmotif of his recent art, next to a ridiculous pail in the shape of Spider-Man’s head (pictured). Over there, lined up like the elements of a sentence one can’t quite understand, are two more chews, a coil of chains and an ornamental owl. These things look valuable, mysterious, funny, self-indicting, and all because they’re sitting atop a lovely, carefully colour-coded object of display.

They also fit times that have reconfigured around them. Steinbach’s art seems much more about doubt and contingency than it used to, and about the revealed weirdness of a culture which could agree that selling cereal using an over-enthusiastic tiger named Tony is a good idea. Elsewhere, Steinbach gives Paul McCarthy a friendly swipe, pairing three dog-chews – which pointedly resemble McCarthy and Jason Rhoades’s butt-plug artworks – with the former artist’s Chocolate Santas. (McCarthy, who excoriated money-chasing art before producing these trinkets, reportedly loves the piece.) But otherwise it’s business as usual. And if business remains good, so does Steinbach.