Haim Steinbach’s latest artists’ book incorporates several of his sculptural themes into the codex form, exploring the choice and display of mass-market products and creating a dialectic between photobook and sculptural book. Object is a board book comprised of sixty-one color photographs featuring Steinbach’s signature found objects, mostly shot one per page, head-on, and silhouetted against a white background. Approximately the size and thickness of a stack of LP record albums, the book is made fully sculptural with rounded fore-edges and, most dramatically, a hole die-cut through the whole thing. This tension between book and sculpture constitutes the (empty) core of the book: Steinbach ultimately denies the illusory and abstract two-dimensionality of photography, typography, and page, forcing it to be a specific object.

Steinbach, born in 1944 in Israel, immigrated with his family to New York City in the late 1950s. In 1969 he received a BFA from the Pratt Institute, followed by a 1973 MFA from Yale. He recently retired from teaching at the University of California, San Diego. He originally studied painting, but by the 1970s, like others such as Donald Judd and Eva Hesse, Steinbach was exploring relationships between painting and sculpture in an effort to break down traditional distinctions.

These investigations came to fruition in the 1980s as tableaux of mass-produced products arranged first in front of various backgrounds and then upon his signature wedge-shaped shelves. This engagement with the issue of display was especially prescient, contributing to the nascent discourse of institutional critique. The theme is relevant to artists’ books in that they, too, are forms of curation that aspire to authority. Discussing a breakthrough work from this period in a recent interview, Steinbach could be speaking of an artists’ book: “I was investigating how context influences the meaning of objects. What difference is there between an art setting and a domestic one? Don’t they both involve exhibition? And aren’t the objects being presented, in either case, loaded with significance?” (“Haim Steinbach in the Studio with Steel Stillman,” Art in America 100, no. 1 [January 2012]: 82–91)

In this way, his sculptures were at once reinventing the readymade, riffing on Minimalism, and adding a third dimension to appropriation, at the same time contributing to the discourse of both pop culture and institutional critique. His subsequent career remains heavily invested in these themes, consistently manifested in gallery installations of carefully selected, manufactured objects.

As manufactured object and sculptural book, Object is physically compelling for its weight, solidity, and the contrast of the soft, gray cardboard page edges with their shiny, brightly colored surface. Standing the book upright makes a pleasant monolith, pedestal, or even a thick picture frame—one in which the photos make the frame and the picture space is void. Most striking, the hole simply obscures—in fact does violence to—the imagery. It is a blunt gesture, hitting harder than a John Baldessari sticker on a photographed face. This comes across strongly in the book’s final image of a Yoda mask. Here the visage of the sage, with whom the artist has said he identifies, has been completely drilled out, leaving only ears. On a subtler level, the hole puts one in mind of the photographic method of punching holes in rejected prints. As in that gesture, by destroying the integrity of the picture plane Steinbach denies any pretense to photographic truth.

In Object the question of photographic illusion surfaces (so to speak) in subtler ways as well. In fact, this constitutes the real depth of the work. It contains high-quality images of objects high and low, old and new, folksy and modern, right-side up and upside-down. The search for a pattern compels paging through the book. Just as with Steinbach’s sculpture, the open-endedness both encourages and frustrates interpretation. One can argue that this is exactly the point: assemblage of objects within a considered structure as a means to encourage multiple interpretations. But unlike a gallery space, in which sequence is optional, the codex comes with the baggage of seriality, and the sophistication with which one addresses it is a marker of a good artists’ book. This can be seen especially in terms of the spreads, where one tends to look for relationships between facing pages. On the one hand, Steinbach takes advantage of this cue, triggering the tendency to make associations between things arranged serially. But as with so many artists’ books, compiling is easy, sequencing is hard. Another problem concerns typography: considered as a precisely produced, virtually wordless photobook, poor letter-spacing on the cover title is an unfortunate oversight.

In his gallery installations and earlier artists’ books, Steinbach has also addressed the object/image tension using the stringent vocabulary of print in the form of found words, phrases, and typography. Non (Paris: Onestar, 2002) is the most relevant example. A conventional offset paperback, each page features either an element of apparently appropriated display typography or a symbol for infinity (∞). In this way Steinbach embraces infinite interpretation of (mass-produced) forms but still just says non to two-dimensional abstractions. An even earlier work, No Rocks Allowed (Rotterdam: Witte de With, 1992), is a less overt meditation on the object/image question, taking the form of a modestly produced book of small half-tone photos (including photos of objects) and appropriated texts on water in the Netherlands. The result is intimate, refined, and lyrical.

A key secondary theme of Object concerns childhood, which emerges at first through the choice of items, book design, and the colophon dedication to the artist’s son—for example, one of the photos features a well-used pair of Crocs. This blending of store-fresh toys with evidence of a specific child references baby pictures and their display in albums; it even evokes a reliquary or memento mori.

A major strength of the work is the clever way it uses a cognitive aspect of childhood to support the object-image argument. On a structural level, Object formally evokes didactic children’s books such as Mary Steichen Martin and Edward Steichen’s The First Picture Book: Everyday Things for Babies (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1930) and early Dorling Kindersley primers. In both, ostensibly neutral photography is intended to help a child comprehend objects. By extrapolating this idea into a sculptural photobook, Object skillfully evokes a three-dimensional child development tool such as a Fröbel gift or mega-LEGO piece. The true smarts of the cognitive development gesture can be found here: to the diaper set, images and other abstract signifiers such as written language simply do not register. Rather, a book is literally grasped through the senses—in fact, “teether book” is a product category. Moreover, such encounters help an infant to perceive herself or himself as an entity semi-distinct from her or his environment—the subject of object relations. The object, Steinbach argues, remains primal.

Like a Disney movie, Object also tries to keep adults entertained, as seen in riffs on the art and design world. For example, the book includes items straight from museum design stores as well as the vintage “collectibles” that tend to amuse those of us in this book’s target market. One especially witty gesture is a trophy, presumably the one awarded to Steinbach in 1991 by the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation. The trophy is toy-sized Lichtenstein sculpture of a brushstroke—again, image made object.

In this vein one must finally consider Object in the larger economy of artists’ books. They are consumer products, after all, ones that aspire to high exchange value. In terms of Steinbach’s use of consumer products in his sculptures, Object is an excellent forum for considering the longstanding issue of commodification. Many artists’ books still aspire to be truly “trade books,” mass-produced works intended to be affordable, low-maintenance, and ostensibly “democratic” art. Yet artists’ books also constitute a fully fledged, high-end art market, with all the complexities and contradictions this entails. Interpretation is left to the reader, however, for in at least one interview Steinbach resists taking a critical position and insists that consumer culture is but one of an almost infinite series of associations evoked by his product.

To those familiar with Steinbach’s career trajectory and postmodern discourse, Object makes a contribution to the artists’ book genre. At its strongest, the work constitutes a meditation on the illusory nature of images created through the production of a compelling product. But in Object, the bluntness of the sculptural gesture blasts through the refined rigors of the codex form, missing an opportunity with which to less explicitly express his themes. That said, in his Object Steinbach has found a way to incorporate book-making into his larger practice, in particular the play of object relations.