Mike Steiner / text

 

 

 

 

After a short apprenticeship in the lab of the corporation for film production (Afifa), in 1961 Mike Steiner started his painting studies at Hochschule für bildende Künste Berlin. It was during this period that he realized how constraining the traditional medium of painting was. He turned to other forms of expression, as Minimalism, the Living Theatre and the Happening became his new focus of interest. In 1967 he experimented with slide projections, music, film and video recordings. Already in the 1960’s and 1970’s, Steiner became familiar with the video works of different artists and filmed many performances. In 1970 he opened the “Hotel Steiner”, a legendary artistic hotel in the Wilmersdorf Albrecht-Achilles-street, near Kurfürstendamm. In 1976 he opened the Studio-Galerie, an important meeting point for international avant-garde video and performance artists, as well as for the Fluxus artistic movement. Allan Kaprow and artists of Fluxus as Joseph Beuys, Wolf Vostell, Ben Vautier, Al Hansen or Emmett Williams have been exhibited at both Studio-Galerie and Hotel Steiner. He also brought the feminists Valie Export and Friederike Pezoldová to light, as well as Ulrike Rosenbach, Marina Abramovic and Laurie Anderson. In 1982 he followed the pop group Tangerine Dream on a concert tour of Australia. He has edited the filming material of this tour, resulting to a documentary, where he combined the rhythmic and melodic structures of the music with abstract imagery images.