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Lewis Stein Works from 1968–1979

Essex Street, New York 29 October – 22 December

‘Can I be more concise?’ were all the words delineate a perfect square, imposing and of Minimalism and its pursuit of perceptual
offered by the American minimalist painter inaccessible, ushering its audience to move objectivity. Here, the viewing subject is never
Lewis Stein in the press release for his Artists around it along the walls. A sole metal guardrail allowed free passage or objective orientation,
Space show in New York in 1979, consisting flanks its one side, aimlessly blocking access but is instead constantly reminded of the
of just a wall and a door – the culmination to nowhere in particular, except for dividing surveillance, authority and control enforced
of the artist’s interest in charged objecthood, the space further. A series of classic American on her body by and through objects – objects
which dismayed his gallerists as well as his anodised trashcans – first introduced in that conceal their force under the ‘neutrality’
devoted painterly following. Almost 40 years late-nineteenth-century New York for urban of functionalist design. Too rarely have the
later, the clarity of his unusually cryptic body hygiene – further complicate easy movement sanitised aesthetics of High Minimalism been
of sculpture – stern-looking readymades, frag- through the space. A brightly shining metropol- interrogated for its resemblance to those of,
ments and objects sourced from the streets of itan streetlight casts a glaring spotlight onto say, corporations; or how the dream of an
urban America, conceived sporadically between the ground; and on a nearby wall, a wooden institutionally prescribed ‘meditative spatiality’
1968 and 1979 – only seems to have intensified, billy club hangs quietly from a single nail, in the encounter with art bears an uncanny
as they’re re-presented in a sleek installation an artefact of state-sanctioned policing of relation to perverse ideas of ‘public order’.
at Essex Street’s subterranean white cube. disobedient bodies. Yet here, in the charged Lewis’s sharp critique of institutional space
Speaking in an institutional language space of the white cube, it feels almost beautiful, extends to today, when control and surveillance
of industrial design, Lewis’s collection of objects certainly auratic, as any good sculpture. in spaces used by the public have become no
share an abstract relation to the regulation Lewis’s spatialised readymades are – like less pronounced. The politics of orientation
of public life and the control of bodies as they most derivatives of ‘hostile’ and ‘regulatory’ and occupation inevitably changes when state-
move through the city streets. At the very centre architectures – seductive in their violence, regulated space transforms into corporate space,
of the gallery space, four polished velvet rope and thus position themselves as deeply antago- and in this light, Lewis’s readymades feel both
stanchions, as seen in museums or banks, firmly nistic, in particular to the idealist project impactful and prophetic. Jeppe Ugelvig

Works from 1968–1979, 2017 (installation view).
Courtesy the artist and Essex Street, New York

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