WILLIAM STEIGER

William Steiger’s prints reflect a deep-felt response to his environment. The dark structures looming over gray, carboniferous skies suggest that all is not well. There is a mnemonic longing in these pictures — for the past, for the exactness of the smooth geometries of the machine aesthetic. Yet their post-industrial context forces us to view them as pictures engaged in a critique of — or lament for — something lost. 

When the machine made its appearance in the American Landscape at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the movement to embrace its image of harmony, strength, and purity served to mythologize the efforts of technology upon nature. The progenitor of a new Utopia, the machine image validated man’s indiscriminate utilization of nature by any means. In this context, artists of the period up through the 1930s continued to reflect an unquestioning positivism in their industrial landscapes and machine “still lifes”. Borrowing from Duchamp, Picabia, and others, the artists of New York Dada (1915-25) developed an American aesthetic which spawned the precisionist movement of the 20s and 30s. The work of Charles Sheeler, Joseph Stella, and Charles Demuth, to which Steiger’s work has often been compared, glorified factories, bridges, and railroad yards with a cool, somberly-colored perfection. 

With Steiger’s work, the tower and large wheel are relics, blatant testimonies to a bankrupt mystique. Centered on the page, they  become icons of a past era, yet hollow — reduced to shells of desuetude. Still here is beauty — a strange mix of foreboding and desire. The drawing in black crayon evokes the fine dispersion of black particles in the air. We also see in La Grande Roue and Transmission Tower the artist’s fascination with perspectival structure. Steiger has often worked with elaborate perspectives—drawing the viewer back into the picture, tweaking the frontality to distort our expectations, letting us lose ourselves in myriad converging lines. In Transmission Tower, also the subject of a painting, the artist chooses to place us underneath, looking up and through the structure as inside the body of the tower. Diagonal guide wires crisscrossing the image suggest a frenzied cacophony of electronic information. This activity is anchored by the sobering planar development of the lower portion of the picture where light just begins to emerge from the spaces in between concrete. By omitting the anecdotal and concentrating on the synthesis of formal elements, Steiger shows us a world departed from, yet still with us. Like monuments in their solitude, they reflect on us and show us to ourselves. 

— Andrew Mockler