Andrzej Steinbach

Andrzej Steinbach was already busy working on Mögliche Ordnung (Possible Order) when he was asked to contribute to ocular witness: PIG CONSCIOUSNESS. Many of his previous picture cycles read as possible systems of order. Thematic variations invite comparison. In their interstices, questions are generated about possible readability and meaningfulness, about the constructions of individual and collective identities. These 21 photographs can also be interpreted as a continuation of Steinbach’s exploration of the portrait. One could ask how we define ourselves through what we consume: whether we feel attached to regional traditions, what we have in common with whom, and in which value and exploitation systems we find ourselves with our consumer habits. These are questions with which we compete with the arithmetic operations of the algorithms that evaluate and influence our consumer behaviour.

Even the supermarket goods – “bread, milk, produce whose names refer to regions and cities, organic fruits and vegetables, toothpaste and mineral water” appear like portraits or like actors on a stage, like architectures of the world of commodities or like those vessels in whose orders the painter Giorgio Morandi (1890–1964) once found metaphysical worlds. The 21 constellations can just as easily be read as invitations to moments of shared meals, to “guest feasts of love” in which, loosely based on Plato, the eroticism of eating is renegotiated again and again in analytical sobriety.