Steps, Ladders, Stairs in Art. Volume 1 - страница 8

Frame from the film Battleship Potemkin, 1925, director Sergei Eisenstein

In the Chapuisat Brothers’ multi-story architectural installation “Hyperspace” (V1, p. 249), created in 2005, the stairs fill their original function. They connect various levels of a large-scale (over 2150 square feet) art labyrinth, in which the viewer is invited to explore the internal structure of imaginary space.

Unlike his predecessors, the German artist Art van Triest completely rejects both the functionality and the symbolism of the staircase in order to focus exclusively on its “skeleton”. Most of his sculptural works, installations (V2, p. 206) and drawings (V2, p. 174) from the 2010s are based on a simply drawn outline of a staircase with broken and deformed steps, twisted into a Moebius band so that the ends meet. Studying the physical properties of this simple architectural form, van Triest perceives “first principles”, discovering what Schopenhauer called:

Combining different and sometimes contradictory materials, such as metal and wood, van Triest tests the limits of the plastic possibilities of the original form right up to its destruction. The artist continues the experiment outside of his “physical laboratory”, recording the stages of an endless research process and placing installations in an unexpected public context.

The Polish artist Magdalena Sosnowska is also concerned with the plastic possibilities of stairs. She addresses the topic of the psychological impact of architecture on humans through this familiar element.

Sosnowska’s work generally falls into two categories: lines marking a shape in space, and deformed structures with emotional connotations. Soviet modernist architecture is an important conceptual reference for the artist, and her 2007 installation “Staircase” (V2, p. 185) is based on a symbol of the Soviet utopian ideal. Sosnowska creates a sense of the instability of the metal structure, compressing and twisting it. The distorted shape of the spiral staircase suggests a certain expressive gesture with respect to the crumpled, and then expanded, object, completely stripped of its functionality. This violent deformation allows the transition of the structure from architectural element to sculpture. Sosnowska is interested in transforming a staircase into a living organism, which, for example, can encircle entire exhibition halls, like a flexible vine in the 2016–2018 “Stair Rail” installation, or as in her 2010 “Spiral Staircase”, recall a skeleton with steps twisting around the backbone. In her 2012 public sculpture in New York, “Fir Tree”, Sosnowska creates a similar composition in which spiral stairs lead towards the ground, forming the silhouette of a tree “sprouting” amid the skyscrapers of the metropolis.

The “stair-tree” became a central motif for a number of artists who express a powerful and vital symbolism in their works. The American sculptor Lin Lisberger uses the form of an upward-rising structure as a metaphor for infinite possibilities that open up at the different stages of growing up and becoming a person. In Lisberger’s work, many variations of ladder structures, including the 2008 installation “High Journeys” (V1, p. 298) made of wood, have a launching platform, which correlates with the beginning of a new stage and a new journey… Boats, baskets, and more ladders become part of the “travel”.