A.L. Steiner is having a good year. At the Whitney Biennial, she unveiled a new photo installation and related multichannel video exploring the overlays and connections among personal histories, family histories, and the social history of radicalism. Perhaps the most intellectually and formally multifaceted work she’s made to date, it was singled out by critic Jillian Steinhauer as being “one of the few pieces in the biennial that pulls you in with a seductive complexity.” A month after the works’ debut in March, the Los Angeles-based artist was back in New York to participate in a panel on art and porn at the Museum of Modern Art, which has acquired Community Action Center, 2010, an explicit sociosexual film that Steiner made with A.K. Burns. Two days later she was at Harvard as part of a presentation by artists engaged with feminism. With typical wit, she read some of the letters then on view in a show she cocurated with Nicole Eisenman at the Contemporary Art Museum of St. Louis, offering them to students who could guess the authors. And amid it all, she has been planning another of the wall collages she builds from her everexpanding photo archive, this one to be featured in the “Made in L.A.” exhibition opening this month at the hammer Museum.
Yet as we sat in her Boyle Heights home talking about these latest breakthroughs, Steiner was clearly feeling conflicted about claiming the spotlight. “I’m still grappling with the request to be presented alone as a solo artist because these identities perpetuate themselves as branding within institutions, which then reifies the marketplace,” she says. “The other names on the labels with my installations are also makers of the works.” Her concerns are not merely academic, because collaboration pulses at the very heart of Steiner’s wideranging practice, which encompasses photography, video, performance, curation, and publishing. In addition to work with longrunning collectives such as Chicks on Speed and Ridykeulous (formed in 2005 with Eisenman), she has teamed up with other artists—including A.K. Burns, Zackary Drucker, and Narcissister—for short-term, often performance-based projects. Steiner is resolute that even the photographs most clearly identified with her solo career are never her work alone. “To me, portrait photography is 100 percent collaborative,” she says. “The person pictured in the image that I present under my name has as much to do with making that image as I do, and it’s insane for photographers not to think that.”
This attitude may have been able to take root in part because Steiner never had the “hierarchies of artistic genius,” as she calls them, drilled into her at art school. Although her mother ran a gallery and gave her an early education in art history, she chose to major in communications as an undergraduate at George Washington University. After graduating, Steiner received what she considers a form of master’s education via an early 1990s immersion in activism with such groups as Queer Nation, the Women’s Action Coalition, and the Lesbian Avengers. Throughout these years, although she still didn’t consider herself an artist, she was taking photographs and building darkrooms in her apartments as she moved from Washington to San Francisco to New York.
This combination of experience led Steiner to her first real job, as photo editor at Out magazine, then a radical experiment in treating gay and lesbian culture as just another part of the mainstream. “It was an incredible opportunity for a kid of 25 to be in charge of creating that imagery for these normative structures that were at the same time queered,” she recalls. “And along the way, it taught me everything I needed to understand propaganda.” after four years at Out, Steiner decided to shift to freelance work to make time for her artistic practice. Through the rest of the ’90s she continued to hone her understanding of how mass media uses imagery at publications put out by Condé Nast and others, including Fairchild, GQ, and O: The Oprah Magazine. But the activist in Steiner chafed at both the corporate structure and the underlying purposes of publishing. “I was fading out of that because I felt like I could not legitimize making these disposable products,” she says. “I got fired from Condé Nast when I wrote to Si Newhouse asking him to improve his use of resources in his offices and in his printing.”
She found a way to convert those personal and professional frustrations into art when Onestar Press asked her if she would create a publication for them. She agreed to the project on the terms that the edition be limited and that it be printed only on demand, so that no unwanted copies would be generated. Stop (Onestar Press), one of Steiner’s only photographic projects not built around portraiture, takes a critical look at the environmental impact of publishing. An opening section with lyrical pictures of trees gives way to documentary photos of the papermaking process taken at a mill in Alberta, Canada; they are followed by imagery of printed pages that fade to show the blank paper of the book in hand. It is a pointed indictment not only of the publishing industry but also of the press that reached out to her. Call it biting the hand that feeds her, or institutional critique. having produced this coda to her publishing career, Steiner began teaching at the School of visual arts in New York in 2000. She was eventually invited to UCLA, and in 2011 joined the faculty at USC, which led her to move to the West Coast. She now serves as director of the Master of Fine arts program at USC. A founder of Working artists and the greater economy (W.A.G.E.), an activist group dedicated to seeking remedies to the gross inequalities of the art economy, Steiner laments that “the sale of art is not a reliable way to make a living, even for people who have garnered a ton of cultural capital.” But she is quick to point out that teaching is not just a job. “Pedagogical relationships are a huge part of my work,” Steiner says. “I feel as passionate about the students I work with as I do about my work. Taking an authoritarian role is antithetical to me, so teaching is as much a collaboration as other work I participate in.” Although her role at USC is itself now a fulltime occupation, the switch to teaching initially gave Steiner more time to focus on her art practice, and she achieved a number of milestones in the years that followed.
Early in the decade, Steiner’s understanding of her own photography came into focus for her as a holistic practice, whose meaning rests in the context of the full body of work rather than the individual image. She first tried to express this in 2004 by presenting her overflowing flatfiles in “1 Million Photos 1 Euro Each” at Starship in Berlin. The images she had created until then had not yet reached a million, but the title indicated its potential, while, in a sly nod to the distorting market imperatives, visitors could pick up any one for a euro. In successive years she restaged the show at art Cologne and John Connelly Presents in New York. The amended title “1 Million Photos 1 euro each (minimum order)” indicated that an institution could purchase only the full archive, including all images she would make and continue to add in the future. “I had nibbles from some institutions,” she says, “but then they bought something easier, less cumbersome.” For a final presentation at Yale in 2008, she allowed that visitors could choose any image and have it for free, but they had to tell why they chose that image. “It was an incredible project,” says Steiner. “It was one time where I was allowed to understand a lot about the people looking at my work. That’s invaluable.”
By the middle of the decade, Steiner had joined the art collective and band Chicks on Speed, which moved performance to a more central place in her practice. Steiner recognizes that for many art institutions, the term performance carries a restrictive set of expectations. “One of my favorite reactions to a performance followed a Chicks on Speed show as part of an exhibition at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt. The show was called ‘the Making of Art,’ so we made some art for our performance,” Steiner says, laughing. “At one point we were naked and we wanted to paint some people. We didn’t know if they were more scared of us because of our bodies or because of the paint. But afterward, the curator said, ‘that was not fun.’ But in performance, one point is that the experience is different for everyone in that space.”
For Steiner, performance is to be understood as both signifying and expressing the “realness in the relationship between people.” Connie Butler, the hammer curator who selected Steiner for “Made in L.A.,” sees this capturing of authentic interaction as key to Steiner’s larger project. “A social practice is a central part of her work,” Butler notes. “The work is not unrelated to Larry Clark and Nan Goldin in that the act of photographing is very closeup, intimate, and from within a community.”
Because of Steiner’s deliberate shifting among partnerships and mediums, it had been easy to see her as an unsettled theoretician, dissecting one concept before moving on to something else. But her recent photocollage installations have created a perhaps unexpected unity among all these notions—the sense of personal history and social activism as not only intertwined but equivalent; the belief that each image really exists only as part of a larger ongoing archive; the idea that in performance and the documentation of performance, we are able to glimpse real intimacy.
A still from A.L. Steiner's multichannel video installation, "More Real Than Reality Itself" (2014)
When we spoke in April, Steiner was still in the preliminary stages of planning the framework for her installation at the Hammer. Harking back to her encounter with the firm that printed her indictment of publishing, she would offer only that she was thinking she needed to explore activism in relation to occidental Petroleum, the multinational corporation whose headquarters house the museum, and whose former CEO was the art institution’s namesake philanthropist. “There is a long story there,” she notes. “it is not a neutral space for me.”
A version of this article appears in the June issue of Modern Painters magazine.
