A Commemorative

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National Banned Books Week

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GALLERY ONE
Stephen Laub
[Untitled] (Book)

For all their pointed particularity, photographs suffer from a lack of physical presence, like creatures that are all brain and no (or virtually no) body.  Abstract sculpture, on the other hand)--especially when it is based on geometric forms--often suffers from the opposite problem.  Stephen Laub addresses both of these potential lacks by combining the two media, making objects that, depending on one's point of view, can be seen as either abstract wall sculptures with tiny photographs set into them, or photographs for which these sculptures serve as elaborate frames.  The objects are derived from the photographs, with Laub selecting an element depicted in each photograph, simplifying it to a pared-down form, and enlarging it.  In this way he sets up a smart formal game in which the viewer first sees the sculptural object, then must step up to peer at the tiny photograph in order to figure out what object in it the abstract form refers to.

Charles Hagen, ARTFORUM

Photo 1. The whole book but fore edge clearly showing (the spine recedes into the background, left side, in this shot).

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Photo 2. The whole book, but full frontal face.

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Laub takes an archival image of some men burning a pile of books and shrinks it to the size of a matchbook; the photo is embedded in a gold (actually metal leaf) facsimile of an oversized book, which hangs on the wall like a radiant trophy.  the photo has no context, the figures have no identities, and the books have no titles.  The sculpture is a memorial to the idea of burning books.  We are probably supposed to assume Laub's disdain for these people, but the piece is capable of leaning toward either side of the controversy; it could lend its support to the torrid authors or the raving zealots.

Elizabeth Hess, THE VILLAGE VOICE

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Photo 3. Close-up of the little photo inset in the cover of the book. (To see an enlargement of the photo inset, click on it.)

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GALLERY THREE
Censorship Videos
Idaho State Library, Boise

Stephen Laub's constructions revolve around the central questions of translation, as they attempt to mediate a long series of seeming opposition:  between sculpture and photography, fact and report, the physical and imaginary, art and politics, form and content, abstraction and representation.  As such these works reflect Laub's own status as the son of German-Jewish immigrants who, he reports, seldom spoke of the terrible circumstances under which they fled Europe during the Second World War.  In his early performances Laub attempted literally to inscribe himself within his family's history, by standing inside projected images of family photographs, substituting his own face for that of his father or mother.  In a similar way Laub's constructions combine historical investigation and commemoration, analysis and mourning, cutting across two modes of time:  the one sculptural, immediate, based on direct spatial apprehension of the object; the other photographic, historic, with events caught in a timelessness of utter potentiality and a concomitant immutability.

Laub's alluring objects announce themselves first as sculptures, intruding into the gallery space.  But imbedded in each piece is a tiny photograph; when a view comes close to look at it, the unity of the construction is lost, and one falls through the frame of the photograph and into its imaginative realm--into a described space and time which, while undeniably real, lacks all direct physical references to location and moment.

Laub's first works of this sort were coated in gold leaf, and used black and white photographs from such diverse historical periods as the Nazi holocaust and the civil rights movement in the American south.  The use of gold leaf and black and white photographs gave these works a somber, funereal quality, distancing them in time and allowing us to regard the events they presented through the emotional filter of mourning.

Charles Hagen, HEARTS AND MINDS:
Stephen Laub's
Paradoxes of History and Presence

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For further information, contact:
Tom Trusky - Director