Steps, Ladders, Stairs in Art. Volume 1
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Staircases play key roles in the plots of many Alfred Hitchcock movies, notably in “The Lodger: a Story of the London Fog” (1927), “The 39 Steps” (1935), “Vertigo” (1958) (V1, p. 176) and “Psycho” (1960). The director used stairs to manipulate the viewer’s reaction and create a rollercoaster effect. As Hitchcock’s heroes go down and up stairs, their movement reflects the waxing and waning of suspense.
Barber of Seville, 2018, Boston Lyric Opera, set design by J. Noulin-Merat
Probably the best-known staircase scene in the history of cinema is the Odessa Steps sequence in Sergei Eisenstein’s “Battleship Potemkin”. Cameraman Eduard Tisse recounted that he used sharp light and shadow to create drama in the frame. The film crew found more and more expressive opportunities as filming progressed on each of the 120 steps. The abstract idea of oppression is embodied in the drama of steps turned symbol of national pain. The scene is a tragic plea for revolutionary action, a metaphor for the confrontation between good and evil.
Penrose Steps in the movie Beginning, 2010, directed by Christopher Nolan
Here one specific episode became the emotional embodiment of the entire epic of 1905. […] One part took the place of the whole. […] [9]
The stairs in Rene Magritte’s 1936 painting “Forbidden Literature”, which addresses the duality of the world and the transition to another space, play a completely different role. Here among multiple absurd elements, only the stairway, based on that of the artist’s Brussels apartment, represents “this side” of reality, symbolizing a familiar part of our surroundings. This juxtaposition of prosaic biographical detail with mythology and text is what gives Magritte’s works their strange surreal character.
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Eisenstein, S. M., Battleship Potemkin, 1925, From the screen to life, Selected Works in 6 vols., 1964, V. 1, pps. 120–135.
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:
“…those ideas, which are the lowest grades of the objectivity of will; such as gravity, cohesion, rigidity, hardness, those universal qualities of stone, those first, simplest, most inarticulate manifestations of will; the bass notes of nature; and after these light, which in many respects is their opposite.” [10]
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.
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Schopenhauer, A., The World as Will and Idea. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/38427/ 38427-pdf.pdf
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.
“[I am] especially interested in the moments when architectural space begins to take on the characteristics of mental space.” [11]
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.
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Sosnowska, Monika, Culture.pl. https://culture.pl/en/artist/monika-sosnowska (accessed: 10/20/2019).
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”.
“Ladders are one of the most fundamental architectural forms, suggesting movement through space and endless possibilities.” [12]
Rene Magritte, Forbidden literature, 1936, oil on canvas
Like any organism, a tree grows, changes and fades, and this in turn becomes the subject of close attention by the South Korean sculptor Myeongbeom Kim. His installation “Staircase” (V1, p. 305) was executed directly in the natural landscape, where the trunks of two trees connected by rungs and steps symbolically continue the life cycle. The natural arrangement of the installation echoes the “Tree in the Garden” motif – in the Christian interpretation of the biblical book of Genesis about the “Tree of Life”, which grants eternity, and the “Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil”, whose forbidden fruit has become a symbol of the mortality of human flesh.
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Lisberger, Lin, Ladders.section/288634-Ladders. html (accessed date: 10/20/2019).
The identification of the tree with the vital energy embedded within it is transformed into a metaphor for the creative flow in the painting of “The Truth about Comets” (V1, p. 304) by the American surrealist Dorothea Tanning (1945). Against the background of the winter landscape, a staircase appears, the railing of which sprouts with woody branches directed to the celestial bodies. Their very appearance is presented as a bewitching, magical spectacle, observed by mermaids personifying the artist herself. A staircase passing into a tree, whose steps go up into the sky, creates an image of a creative process leading to the freedom of imagination. Tanning’s interpretation of immersion in the irrational depths of the subconscious is replaced by a more sensual approach to the study of the surrounding reality of the Spanish artist and designer Nacho Carbonell.
“I like to see objects as living organisms, things that can come to life and surprise you with their behavior. My works are conceptual, not practical, they are tactile and I like them to tell a story that makes a point about an aspect of life.” [13]
In his street installation “The Playground Closes at Dusk” (V1, p. 318) (2011), four interactive objects are presented on high ladders, climbing on which the viewer can smell, hear, touch and see, following the author’s instructions. At the same time, the fifth part of the installation, “Memorabilia”, embodies human memory, which plays the role of the main repository of cause and effect relationships, emotions and impressions. The many small boxes at the top of the ladders symbolize a cloud of memories like those found in our own minds. For the artist the climb carried out by the viewer goes beyond the scope of physical effort and can be interpreted as a psychological journey to the deep levels of the subconscious. Aroused interest in introspection is translated as the main feature of the individual, which in this case is projected onto the ladder-object.
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Carbonell, Nacho, “Weirdly Wonderful Art”, DECO.nacho-carbonell-weirdly-wonderful-art (accessed: 10/20/2019).