No Rocks Allowed (ijskoude douche.)

The exhibition No Rocks Allowed (ijskoude douche.) at Witte de With was curated by Haim Steinbach (b. 1944).

Each year since its inception in 1990, Witte de With has invited an artist to curate an exhibition. The third artist invited to curate an exhibition at Witte de With was Haim Steinbach. Other guest curators have been Jiri Georg Dokoupil (in 1990), Henk Visch (in 1991), Daniel Buren (in 1994), and Jef Cornelis (in 1995).

The exhibition No Rocks Allowed (ijskoude douche.) included Haim Steinbach's selected texts, films, videotapes and objects by: Bas Jan Ader, Marcel Broodthaers, James Joyce, Joseph Kosuth, Cas Oorthuys, Klaus Rinke, Gerry Schum, Shelly Silver, J.J. Slauerhoff, the Van Toer family, G. Lee Thompson, and Lawrence Weiner.

Haim Steinbach borrowed the title No Rocks Allowed. from an advertisement where the phrase alluded to the outstanding quality of the advertized product. In his work, Steinbach often employs images and wording from consumer society that have been anonymously conceived and created by others. The objects and slogans which Steinbach shows always remain what they originally were; he leaves it up to the viewer to assess whether they will belong to the domain of art or not. In both the exhibition and the accompanying catalogue, which functioned as a complement to the exhibition, the images and texts that were brought together remained primarily autonomous works by others, both artists and non-artists. But something else occurred in Steinbach’s selections and arrangements; he appealed to the full concept of comparison. Images and texts, which at first appeared to have little in common, were placed beside one another, under one and the same nomenclature, and in the name of something that we all allege to know: art. Yet the images and texts actually were connected by one element they all had in common: in one way or another they all referred to or made use of water.