Steps, Ladders, Stairs in Art. Volume 1 - читать онлайн

Stairs in Contemporary Art: Form, Function, Context

Mihail Chemiakin’s research on “Stairs, Ladders and Steps in Life, Consciousness, and Art” examines and interprets this archetype as it appears in the work of modern artists. Archetypes take form as symbols through the process of objectification. “Ladder” symbolism not only unites many religions and worldviews, but also through its system of imagery reaches across time. We find the theme in the Babylonian ziggurat, in the Christian icon, in African ritual objects. The very shape of ladders and stairs, consisting of vertical and horizontal lines, is imbued with inter-cultural symbols: vertical lines literally suggest ascension and progress, horizontal lines evoke the ancient sign of the horizon and of passive contemplation. When connected in the form of a ladder, they become a universal metaphor for the spiritual path.

Stairs or ladders can be counted among prototypes dating back to the birth of mankind. The earliest images we know are from the Paleolithic era, 65,000 years ago. Ladders and stairs figure in fairy tales, fables and folk expressions, poetry and myths, as well as classical and modern literature. They appear in ceremonies and rituals as well as on the stage. The obvious narrative element has inspired artists, architects, directors and psychoanalysts to study stairs and ladders in depth. They impart a wide variety of meanings to stairs, building on their traditional form and initial function; the degree of depth and actualization of those meanings depend on the religious or social context of the work. The religious context applies to such themes as the ladder as a link spatially connecting the secular world to heaven; the ladder as the path of or obstacle to spiritual ascent or liberation. In the societal context, on the other hand, the functional structure of stairs determines movement within architecture and society. Stairs provide a convenient way to convey the hierarchy and position of the individual in society, or to describe his evolution, referring to personal or socio-historical memory.

At the same time, many artists focus solely on exploring the possibilities of the very form of stairs. Going beyond the given static structure, they treat stairs as malleable plastic material for their experiments, often creating absurd staircases.

The Biblical story of Jacob’s Dream has long fascinated artists both religious and secular, from icon painters to Marc Chagall. The St. Petersburg artist Vladimir Tsivin has treated the subject extensively.

In Tsivin’s work the ladder Jacob sleeps under is of triangular form, suggesting a stepladder or a tent (V1: 80, 81); perhaps the shelter it provides indicates God’s protectiveness towards man. Or perhaps the tent, omnipresent in nomadic cultures like that of the Prophets, suggests the inevitability of the spiritual path that each of us must travel to reach our heights.

Anselm Kiefer often includes ladders in his works and in the German Romantic tradition seeks the perfect symbol to imbue his works with deep philosophical meaning. The titles of his paintings “Seraphim” (V2: 342) and “First” (V2: 343) refer to Biblical texts, one of the central motifs of his oeuvre. In Kiefer’s works, stairs and ladders are often reborn from the wreckage of the old world in accordance with established divine law. The ladder in “Seraphim” is the highest point, the culminating chord sounding in the void. This note does not oppose chaos; on the contrary, it is constructed from the elements of chaos. By mixing paints with dirt, sand, dust, straw, rusty metal and clay, the artist creates an archetypal image: a ladder, ideally capable of structuring chaos thanks to its structure, which arranges space horizontally and vertically. And just as God created man in his own image and gave him the right to create and destroy, so the artist combines these two poles in his paintings. Kiefer is acutely aware of each individual’s responsibility of for the fate of all mankind and his works often address the theme of war, destruction and subsequent rebirth. In many of those works ladders serve as harbingers of a new, mysterious life.

In Ilya Kabakov’s installation “Red Wagon”, the ladders leading up from the city invite the viewer to make a bold leap into the future, promising liberation to everyone who dares to climb them. Its complex, constructivist form alludes to Tatlin’s “Tower of the Third International”, the Babylonian tower of Communism, embodying the utopianism of the idea itself.

Nonetheless, in another work, “How to Meet an Angel”, Kabakov gives us hope: if a person manages to climb the steps of the ladder 3600 feet toward the sky, an angel will fly to him. And here the ladder represents not only the path to another world, but also a chance to see a miracle with one’s own eyes. In this context, the bronze installation of “How to Meet an Angel” on the façade of a clinic for the mentally ill in Amsterdam can be interpreted as a symbol of hope for salvation.

Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, How to Meet an Angel, installation on the facade of the Mentrum Clinic, 2009, Amsterdam, photo by Emilia Kabakova

Many artists have created largescale works on the “stairway to heaven” motif. The Chinese artist Yu Hong’s twentyfoot painting of the same name (V1: 99) was inspired by the 12thcentury icon “The Ladder of Divine Ascent” (V1: 98) in St Catherine’s monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai in Egypt. In Hong’s interpretation, men and women of different ages climb up or fall from a ladder that has no end or beginning. The dynamic poses and the characteristic details of their clothing of each character reveal their respective social status. This lends the work a theatrical-satirical tone and distances it from the sacred and sublime original.

A compatriot of Hong, Cai Guo-Qiang, created a truly evanescent “stairway to heaven”, a fleeting (2.5 minutes) but vivid performance using modern pyrotechnics. This enchanting display literally rose up over Huiyu Harbor in Quanzhou (V2: 351), in the artist’s homeland, early in the morning: a 1650-foot fiery ladder, which Guo-Qiang dedicated to his creative path, appeared in the sky. Its fiery, explosive nature, as a universal symbol of divine power, adds the theme of the duality of experience. In most cosmological texts, fire and flame are associated with both the creation of the world and the apocalypse, i. e. with uncontrollable forces of nature bearing both creation and destruction.

Infinity is an integral characteristic of the “stairway to heaven”. This is central to Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama’s installation (V1: 260). Since the 1960s, a primary theme of Kusama’s work has been numerous repetitions and reflections. Here it takes the form of a luminous road with no beginning or end, of which the viewer encounters only a small segment. An optical illusion makes the construction – a steel ladder wrapped with fiber-optic cable and two large round mirrors placed above and below it – appear endless, leading upwards to meta-space.

A different point of view on the heavenly ladder (V2: 278) is offered by Fabrice Samyn, depicting it from the opposite perspective with a wide base and steps narrowing as they get higher. Turning the iconographic symbol of man’s connection with God upside down, the artist transforms it into an instrument created by God for communication with man. The installation’s title, “You are the salt of the earth”, also suggests this interpretation. It is a reference to the Sermon on the Mount, recorded in the Gospel (Matthew 5: 13,14), in which Christ speaks of the great strength of spirit a person needs in order to travel the path of self-improvement and resist the forces of evil.

Stairs were used to represent the dialogue between the earthly and the divine long before the birth of Christian culture, in ancient architectural forms such as the Babylonian ziggurat and the Egyptian pyramid (markedly in the step pyramid of Djoser), symbolizing the ascent from various elements of nature to a common divine whole. The Dogon people’s stairs (V1: 217) are both a manifestation of the hierarchic nature of the cosmic world order, and in addition to their ritual character have a utilitarian function. The long, winding sandstone stairs, with graded steps and forked peaks, allow the inhabitants of the area around the Rocks of Mali to get to and from their homes.

Some Biblical scholars have noted the connection of the heavenly stairway with the Egyptian Ladder of Hathor, along which the souls of the dead ascend to heaven. Based on texts inscribed on the walls of corridors and pyramid chambers, Egyptologists concluded that the inhabitants of Ancient Egypt believed that they could reach the world of the dead only by climbing this ladder, and that deities guarding it (Horus and Set) assisted the deceased, turning the ladder into a path to heaven. During the Ancient and Middle Kingdoms, a wooden model of the ladder would often be placed in tombs; later, priests would draw a ladder on papyrus to illustrate texts from the Book of the Dead.

Stairs and ladders as ritual symbols have developed into a familiar metaphor for the passage out of the world of the living. In this context, a ladder appears in the finale of Slava Polunin’s lyrical show “Chu”. The show tells the story of a group of old clowns, who have only one thing left to do as their lives near their end: to leave on time. A ladder decorated with gold funereal tassels, lowered from “heaven”, indicates the solemnity of the moment; but it is not the ladder that predicts the clowns’ departure. At the appointed hour, an angelic guide comes for the hero, who is late, and punches his one-way ticket, thus marking the end…

Chaim Soutine, The Red Staircase at Cagnes, 1923–1924, oil on canvas, 28.5 × 21.25 ins

In Mihail Chemiakin’s work “The Ladder” (V1: 253) a border between two planes is clearly marked. The passage here represents not the transition between worlds, but rather the choice of a moral path. The change in color from red to white can be seen to symbolize the choice between spiritual purity (white) or bodily passions (red), if we consider red and white to be symbols of the diabolical and the divine. The dichotomy of red and white, present in European culture since the early Middle Ages, today is most often associated with the Russian Revolution.

Red and white tones predominate in Chaim Soutine’s paintings, notably in his “Red Staircase at Cagnes” – a profoundly tragic image that reflects the artist’s dramatic life and its constant psychological stress. This landscape from the artist’s early period is an attempt to comprehend the meaning of color. Soutine was very interested in red as the color of both life and death. His red staircase, reminiscent of the backbone of the split carcasses so often depicted by the artist, runs along a crooked street, conveying the finiteness of the flesh and the “fluidity” of being. Here once again we find the heavenly staircase, uniting the carnal and the sublime, the inaccessible but possible.

Leningrad nonconformist Gennady Ustyugov’s 1993 painting ”Whither Leads the Ladder?” (V1: 159) can be seen as a reference to Russian Orthodox Marian iconography. Ustyugov places the ladder, in dialogue with a female figure, against the background of an unreal landscape. The bent position of her translucent body reminds the viewer of the angels in Andrei Rublev’s “Trinity” icon, and her head is tilted toward a ladder, suggesting it is a way to the mountaintop. The female figure is imbued with the mood of estrangement from the earthly and the readiness to make a journey; the presence of a ladder as a transcendental sign gives hope for salvation, hope that the soul will gain strength and recover after suffering. The painting largely becomes a mirror of the internal state of the artist himself, who has defined his primary question in the work’s title: does the ladder represent atonement or punishment?

Stairs as a symbol of Christ’s suffering appear in the Catholic tradition as early as the 9^thcentury and is found in icons, crucifixes and retablo. And although the presence of a ladder in “Ascension to the Cross” and “Descent from the Cross” is not mentioned by any Gospel – ladders first appeared in illustrations and images – ladders are often mentioned in theological manuscripts from the Middle Ages. One can even speak about the formation of established medieval iconography in the image of Christ climbing a ladder to the crucifix, an example of which we see in the illustration by Pacino di Buonaguida to the c. 1320 manuscript “Vita Christi” (V1: 102). In Fra Angelico’s “Nailing of Christ to the Cross” (1442) (V1: 106), both executioners and Christ are depicted on ladders leading to the cross. Thenceforth the ladder is frequently an attribute of execution. For example, Jan Luyken’s 1685 etching, “Anneken Hendriks, tied to a ladder and burned in Amsterdam in 1571” (V1: 119), depicts the execution of a woman condemned for heresy. Here the ladder itself, in an analogy to the cross, is the instrument of execution.

Among contemporary artists, Richard Humann developed this theme with a neo-conceptualist twist in his 2008 installation “ You Must be This Tall” (V1: 114–116). The artist explores the collective subconscious through a projection onto everyday objects in a miniature amusement park. And apparently innocuous, at first glance, children’s attractions turn out to be modified to serve for executions.

Thus, we can talk about the ambivalence of the image of stairs and ladders, now uplifting and sacred, now aggressive and destroying; they are often encumbered with elements contrary to their practical nature. Stairs or ladders, helpful tools that accompany a person on his path, can be transformed into obstacles blocking that path. The materials, stairs or ladders are constructed from, can evoke associations with physical pain, communicating an aggressive message and a danger sign.

The Cuban artist Kcho (Alexis Machado) expresses this ambivalence in his 1990 installation, “The Worst of All Traps” (V2, p. 215). His ladder’s frail wooden frame suggests that it would make easy prey for enemies, but the rungs are made from machete blades – symbols of the Cuban war of independence. The artist’s use of palm branches – the national tree of Cuba, strengthens the already obvious allegory and ensured that the work attracted broad attention in Cuba. Nevertheless, Kcho asserts that the materials do not dominate the installation, but rather help the viewer find meaning in their very physical essence.

Unlike Kcho’s rusty machetes, which recall Cuba’s history but pose only a metaphorical threat, the sharpened steel knife-steps in Marina Abramovic’s 1996 installation “Double Edge” (V1, p. 126–127) can cause real physical harm. Here, as in much of her work, Abramovic examines the limits of physicality, provoking in the viewer an emotional involvement on the level of reflex. The work consists of four ladders with rungs made of different materials – from ordinary smooth wood to knife blades, heated metal and icy rails. The sight of these ladders whose familiar form has been transformed into something dangerous causes psychological discomfort in the viewer. These “dangerous steps” are a metaphor for trials that have to be overcome by overcoming mental and physical fears. In the museum setting, this installation did not involve physical contact, but in 2002, Abramovic revisited the ladders in her performance piece, “The House with the Ocean View” (V1, p. 124–125). For twelve days the artist lived in specially built minimalist rooms, open for viewing by visitors to the gallery. Under these conditions, ordinary actions take on the ritual character of a trial, a test combining asceticism and total publicity. Ladders with knives for rungs physically prevent the artist from going beyond the allotted space, thus an inanimate passive object becomes an actor in the performance, demonstrating its power over the will of the artist.

Eadweard Muybridge, Woman Walking Down Stairs, Chrono-photography, 1887

In another project, “The Abramovic Method” (2016), at the Benaki Museum in Athens, the viewer becomes part of the performance that takes place on a gently sloping ramp that connects floors of the museum on the way to the main exhibition space. The artist has deliberately chosen a space in the museum that is usually considered secondary, to be passed through quickly. Participants in the performance are forced to move in slow motion, concentrating on a more profound consciousness of their bodies in time and space; this is particularly noticeable in contrast to the movement of other visitors to the museum. In this way, Abramovic induces the viewers to focus, through body experience, on a specific “episode” of life.

Artists began to portray movement on stairs in painting at the end of the 19^thcentury. Marcel Duchamp’s famous 1912 cubist painting, “Nude Descending a Staircase” (V1, p. 183), which The New York Times christened “Explosion at the Tile Factory”, depicts a woman’s motion down five steps along a spiral staircase through the successive overlapping of individual fragments. The painting was inspired by the new technology of cinema and particularly by Eadweard Muybridge’s famous series of photographs “Woman Descending Stairs”, made in 1887.

Gerhard Richter’s “Ema. Nude on a Staircase” (V1, p. 185), painted in 1966 is a comment on Duchamp’s work. Like Duchamp, Richter based his painting on a photograph. The model was the artist’s wife, descending an ordinary staircase devoid of details that would indicate a particular time. Richter’s almost ghostly image, seemingly woven of dreams and memories, renders Duchamp’s experiment to the limits of traditional portrait painting, a genre much out of favor in the art world of the 1960s. Richter’s painting later served as an inspiration for Bernhard Schlink’s 2014 novel, “The Woman on the Stairs”.

The phenomenon of movement both up and down steps is the subject of Mario Ceroli’s sculpture “La Scala” (V1, p. 186). His staircase with profile cut-outs of men and women, made of unpainted wood, captures the various phases of this movement, focusing on the contrast of static and dynamic. In her live installation “Plastic” (2015–16) by the artist and choreographer Maria Hassabi explores the same dichotomy of static and dynamic, examining pauses both plastic and temporal in a museum space. Hassabi placed performers along the flight of stairs lying perfectly still, contrasting sharply with the rapid flow of visitors around them. Thus, the artist expands our idea of the obviously utilitarian significance of the stairs in the museum, slowing down the rhythm of our reaction to its meaning.

Maria Hassabi, Plasticity, performance, 2016, Museum of Modern Art, New York

A staircase represents not only movement but also stability – architecturally, staircases are pillars that unite different levels. Since ancient times, this simple formula has given rise to many plastic variations, to the point where today we can determine the architectural style and period of a structure from the staircase. To this day architects continue to experiment with stairs, often sacrificing functionality to play with forms. Perhaps this is because other means for ascending and descending have diminished the staircase’s practical function, leaving it only a romantic role in modern architecture.

Macbeth, 2015, Vienna State Opera, set design by Gary McCann

M. C. Escher was one of the first artists to depict absurd stairs, stairs that are endless and simultaneously devoid of function. In his 1953 lithograph “Relativity” (V2, p. 50) he depicted an architectural structure with several levels united by stairs, full of geometric paradoxes. Escher eventually created a series of lithographs with impossible stairs and constructions, making him a major figure in the school of “impossible reality”. They were created under the influence of Lionel Penrose and his mathematician son Roger, whose model of a “continuous staircase” in the form of a square with no exit causes the walker, if he walks clockwise, to descend, and if he walks counter-clockwise, to ascend, in both cases endlessly.

Escher’s use of stairs as a dynamic symbol of forward movement, spiritual ascent and transformation, transition to a different, higher state, gave rise to a whole direction in the visual arts. Stairs as an Escherian symbol became an integral part of modern mass culture, appearing in the theater, cinema and animation. Martina Casey designed a set for a nonexistent spectacle based on “Relativity” (V2, p. 51), in which ladders as a metaphor for elevation, change and movement connect different points of view: artist, actors and spectators. Escher’s “Relativity” has inspired the set designs of numerous theatrical productions. Gary McCann built a multidimensional maze of walkways and staircases for the opera “Macbeth” at Vienna State Opera in 2015. The bewildering series of stairways mirrors the characters’ confusion and moral decline and embody the seductive nature of evil. In Julia Noulin-Mérat’s 2018 set for “The Barber of Seville” at Boston Lyric Opera, “impossible staircases” are placed all over the stage, emphasizing the paradox of what is happening. Shizuka Hariu’s set for Nitin Sahwney’s “Dystopian Dream” is one example of Escher’s influence on contemporary choreography. The set embodies the space “between a dream and twisted reality”[8], in which Escher’s image symbolizes the internal contradictions and reflections inherent to man.

Escher’s “Relativity” has been recreated in mass-market movies as well, for example, the room where the final confrontation scene in Jim Henson’s “Labyrinth” (1986) takes place, and the moving stairs scene in “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” directed by Chris Columbus in 2001. In Christopher Nolan’s 2010 film “Inception” two episodes evoke and attempt to explain the Penroses’ “continuous staircase”, and characters climbing the stairs recall Escher’s“ Ascending and Descending”. Escher’s stairs also appear in the cartoon series “The Simpsons” and “Futurama” among others.

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-Mérat

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

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.

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”.

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.

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.

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.

A similar visually constructed relationship between the installation and the viewer is emphasized by the work of the American artist Nick Clifford Simko in “Still Life with a Ladder” (V1, p. 215) (2012). The stepladder taken as a basis is identified with the body, assembled from objects sequentially placed on the steps, such as a classic plaster head, flowers, a phallic figure and boots, which in general is built into a portrait. The addition of shoes makes the generalized nature of the comparison of the stairs with the figure of a person more personal, introducing an everyday detail of identification. An even more personalized image endowed with psychological characteristics is created in the installation of the Spanish photographer Chema Madoz in “Disabled Ladder” (2003). A crutch-based design loses its stability and integrity, which creates a convincing emotionally charged focus on physical features. This emphasizes the clarity of comparing the ladder with a living organism that is capable of experiencing suffering and pain.

Many artists of the XX–XXI centuries, realizing the irreversible process of the de-sacralization of art, appeal to their audience through the personification of the art form. Even Hegel at the beginning of the 19^thcentury noted the loss of sincere reverence for the work. Today one can observe how religious consciousness gives way to social consciousness by visualizing everyday life. By putting forth new, or updating old, approaches during crises in the worldview and identifying themselves with some of them, artists bring personal experience to their work.

French-born American artist Louise Bourgeois (V1, p. 251), in the “Woman House” series, places a brightly lit staircase inside a female body enclosed in the shape of a silent, dark building, making it the only possible way of communication. The house serves as both a safe haven and a prison. Its complete confluence with the figure reflects the inner world of a woman who is enslaved but rebellious. In an earlier series by Bourgeois “He Disappeared in Complete Silence” (1947) (V2, p. 251), the theme of alienation between people, which is portrayed through lonely architectural structures, is revealed. The composition of sheet 8, filled with a surreal spirit, allows the artist to combine multiple ladders that have lost their basic function of a “connecting element” and hang in space in defiance of gravity. From the embodiment of her personal history, through the image of the ladder, Bourgeois goes on to explore issues of gender self-identification, which, in turn, are the central theme of the feminist trend in art. In the graphic variations “Mother and Child” (1999/2000), the staircase forms the silhouette of a high-rise building, and the figure depicted at its foot allows us to discuss the place of women in contemporary society. Another form of stairs in the work of Bourgeois is a spiral, which is identified with the image of reversed time, return to oneself, to one’s body. This psychological component is disclosed in the installation “Cage (Last Climb)” (V1, p. 315) (2008), executed shortly before her death, in the center of which is a spiral staircase, preserved from her old Brooklyn studio. Going beyond the allotted space of the cell, it symbolizes the release of the artist herself from the shackles of memories of the past.

The installation “The Night She Left” (V1, p. 290) (2011) by the Indo-British artist Bharti Kher addresses problems of gender and national tensions. The staircase in it acts as a kind of stage set on which the symbolic conflict of two principles is played out. The steps, covered with small ornamental ripples of traditional Indian bindi dots deliberately shaped like sperm, represent the masculine. A female sari twisted like a rope intensifies the confrontation giving the installation a feminist context.

By taking an extreme position on one of the conflicts pervading society an artist can arouse the interest of a democratic public, a phenomenon which Swedish artist Larissa Stenlander treats with irony. In her series “Women with Baggage” (V1, p. 151) (2016), figures in long, tight-fitting dresses that emphasize their voluptuous figures climb stairs, carrying huge suitcases. The contrast between the flirtatious characters and the weight of their suitcases makes an apparently humorous picture. Nevertheless, the women’s “baggage”, in the sense of the burden of their own histories and ideas, hinders women as they strive to achieve their goals, and the images convey a sense of the absurdity of their situation.

The British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare uses the ladder to address the problem of self-identification in a post-colonial society.

Louise Bourgeois, Woman House, 1946–1947,

In the series of installations “Magic Ladder Kid” (V1, p. 144) Shonibare shows the degree of identification of people with a foreign culture. Instead of a head, a child has a globe, which makes him a “victim” of globalization. It rises up the steps of knowledge that are dictated by textbooks on Western literature, art, war, gardening, etc. The gap in the cultural matrix is expressed in the appropriation of an imaginary identity, the acceptance of alien, largely foreign traditions and attitudes from the West. The artist reinforces this idea by using a Victorian dress on the child, made not from handmade batik, but from a cheap British manufactured fabric, made to look like a “genuine African” print, which the British then sold to West Africans, and that the latter still ironically consider as a sign of their own authenticity.

At the same time, the staircase as one of the oldest symbols of humanity is able to unite, to overcome various kinds of communicative barriers – linguistic, religious, and political, creating a common semantic field. An example of this is the huge mural (76 × 70 ft) by the Iranian street art artist Mehdi Ghadyanloo, displaying the image of a staircase to heaven. Filled with hundreds of people of different nationalities with red balloons in their hands, the composition soars into the air, personifying the ease of being and embodying a universal metaphor that is understandable in all cultures. Conceived by the author as a sign of rapprochement between the Iranian and American peoples and prominently arising at one of the busiest intersections in Boston, he clearly demonstrates the communicative power of relevant topics through mass art in an industrial civilization.

In the informational onslaught of our modern high-tech urban environment, people generally feel much more vulnerable than in the 19^thor 18^thcenturies, and the influence exerted by mass art is much more significant. Mass art is not only an expression of the society’s level of aesthetic development, but also can illustrate or ironize its current social problems. For example, a sculpture by the German satirist and provocateur Peter Lank, (V1, p. 148–150) installed near an investment bank in Berlin (and dismantled shortly afterwards), depicts moving up the career ladder as an end in itself in the human journey. The sculpture’s characters, rendered as caricature, are easily recognizable as typical office clerks. They all cling to ladders reminiscent of children’s Swedish walls, a metaphor for the “back-stabbing games” adults play.

In contrast, “Our Journey” (2010–12), a large-scale outdoor installation on the wall of the Orlando Sports and Entertainment Centre by the American sculptor Bill Starke, excludes competition among its characters, depicting team spirit instead. Characters gradually ascend the ladders in the work, reminiscent of progression in a computer game. By hinting at an artificially created reality, the artist offers a model of an ideal society in which people are on the verge of great discoveries, and the construction of one person’s career makes it possible to create a harmonious world. Ladders in this case allows the artist to convey the image of a person “interacting, colliding, cooperating, striving and achieving”.[16] Starkes’s bronze sculpture “Solitary Climber” (V1, p. 146) emphasizes the individual’s role in his own ascent; here the ladder is both a symbol of all-powerful man’s movement towards the new, and a perfect tool to enable this movement.

A person’s position in society is inextricably linked to his professional affiliation, and this is the central motif in the work of Jim Rennert. In his bronze sculpture “Entrepreneur” (V1, p. 156) (2008) the viewer is presented with an illustration of the common expression “career ladder”.

At the same time, Rennert’s sculpture suggests that the moment of jumping from the ladder represents a dramatic act of going beyond the boundaries of possibility, limited as it is by social dogmas. The sculpture symbolically reveals the development of man outside a precarious structure, directed not upward, but deep inward, into his own experience.

We see how variations on the theme of self-identification have become a natural component of modern artistic thinking, which is largely dictated by the current paradigm infused with commercial intentions. In the works of contemporary artists, people often climb stairs, then descend and clamber up again, hoping to jump over a couple of steps and land immediately on a beautiful marble pedestal. There is a faster and more direct way to this goal – the elevator, which allows one to move quickly and easily according to trends, fashion and public opinion. It is no accident that the elevator is increasingly present in works of art. Stairs and ladders, by contrast, reflect spiritual, intellectual and moral elevation by virtue of their primal symbolism, they enable man to restore lost contact with the divine, at the same time emphasizing the value of the path itself.

Climbing the steps of ancient temples, our ancestors advanced towards to secret knowledge and spiritual perfection. The number of steps, in most traditions seven, is important. The mystical number seven personified the cosmic order, spiritual purity, completeness and perfection. Stairs or steps as an image of the world order have expanded from their purely religious context to encompass earthly values, exemplified by Abraham Maslow’s pyramid of needs and Vladimir Lukov’s less popular seven-step “thesaurus pyramid”.

The American artist and ecologist Mark Dion explores the evolution of values and uses stairs as a structure for works that look like natural science catalogs or encyclopedia Dion raises the urgent issue of the relationship of man with nature through the prism of the classical concept of the “Great Chain of Being” that dates back to the ideas of the ancient philosophers and at different times influenced theories of the world order of such thinkers as Giordano Bruno, Johannes Kepler, Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz among others. In his installation “Scala Naturae” (V1, p. 322) (1994), incorporating historical and natural artifacts, he illustrates theories about natural history. The artist builds a hierarchy from inanimate objects and minerals on the lower steps to plants and animals on the upper. According to a medieval religious interpretation, it is led by God, whom the author symbolically replaces in his installation with a bust of a person.

Mehdi Ghadyanloo, Spaces of Hope, mural, 2016, Boston

The construction of a “chain”, which is stable by definition, may turn out to be fragile when implemented in the unnatural human uses of nature, as demonstrated by the work of Korean sculptor Seon Ghi Bahk (V2, p. 321). Thousands of pieces of coal suspended on transparent nylon threads, as a result of careful alignment, create the image of a fragile staircase with a rather rough texture, that can be considered the artist’s testament about the need to maintain a universal balance that includes the natural world.

Scientists use the form of a spiral staircase and its function of connecting to illustrate their scientific discoveries. It is noteworthy that long before the discovery of the DNA molecule (1953), in 1505, Donato Bramante created a spiral staircase in the form of a double-helix for the Vatican Palace. The design was intended to distribute the flow of movement both up and down the staircase.

Stepping back from the functional and practical characteristics, we turn to the aesthetic component of the image of the double-helix. It is embodied in the project “Ribbon of Life” (V2, p. 103) by the modern American sculptor Mike Fields. The sculpture resembles the shape of a swirling staircase, which, according to the author’s idea, can rotate around its axis. The revealed dynamics emphasizes the image of a complex molecular compound of DNA, which gives impetus to the development of a living organism. Fields notes the infinite potential of this orderly and at the same time variable element embodied in his work, where the creative nature of the molecule symbolizes a significant creative act for the artist.

Bill Starke, Our Journey, 2010–2012

The biotic memory stored in DNA is comparable to cultural memory hidden in archetypal forms, one of which is “stairs”. Through it, in a chain of cultural DNA, times and styles are connected. The staircase as the embodiment of this mental process is the subject of Mark Tansey’s “Triumph Over Mastery II” (V1, p. 154) (1987). The staircase here is a metaphor for the connection between generations with reliance on classical art. Installed vertically, it literally allows a character to rise to a level of viewing the work and paint over the distinctive outline of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment fresco by from the Sistine Chapel, using a roller filled with white paint. By virtue of his arrival in that plane of space this new hero is symbolically elevated to the level of virtuosity of the Renaissance artist. From this point of view, the ladder becomes a kind of embodiment of the artist’s desire for self-improvement. His emphatically athletic physique has something in common with the anatomy of the central character of the mural – the figure of Christ the Judge, to whom he is likened in a sense. The symbolic act of “rewriting” a work of the past raises the question of continuity of mastery. Using the ladder as the metaphorical link between generations becomes the foundation of the artist’s vision. The artist’s shadow is projected onto the mural and connects the silhouette with the outlines of Michelangelo’s figures. The artist on the stairs represents the dynamic development of art, which replaces and thus defeats the work of the past, which is statically frozen in its spatial and temporal plane. But this triumph is illusory, the viewer notices how the artist, working with energetic gestures, destroys the shadow of the stairs and then his own shadow. A break with traditions comes practically down to an act of vandalism, the paint-roller reduces the central image of the artist to the level of an artisan. It is noteworthy that the movement of the hero himself, despite the symbolic tendency to move up, works down, and systematically “whitens” the space. The absurd desire to erase the legacy of the past, as well as the destruction of one’s own shadow, seems an unnatural process. The contrast of the white plane and the detailed pictorial work in Tansey’s work can be regarded as a reflection on the development of the avant-garde movements of abstract art of the twentieth century against the background of the old established tradition of figurative direction. The strict use of monochrome oil paint gives the image the look of a photograph, which emphasizes the feeling of actually fixing what is happening.