Mike Steiner and Contemporary Art: A Trailblazer at the Crossroads of Media and Performance

Dive into the multi-layered world of contemporary art shaped by Mike Steiner – a pioneer whose impact on Berlin’s artistic avant-garde and the global scene continues to resonate.

The art of Mike Steiner stands as a portal – a vivid, sometimes electric crossing between media, moments, and movements. In the panorama of contemporary art, few names embody such restless curiosity and boundary-pushing spirit as Mike Steiner. What happens when the canvas is no longer enough? When time and space themselves become mediums in the hands of a visionary? Steiner’s trajectory reads like a map of artistic invention, sketched across decades, media, and partnerships that redefined the possibilities of Contemporary Arts Berlin.

Sensual, disruptive, experimental: Steiner’s career mirrors the pulsing heart of Berlin’s creative avant-garde from the late 1950s onwards. Born in Allenstein in 1941 and shaped by the postwar atmosphere of West Berlin, Mike Steiner quickly gravitated toward the world of images, first through film, then painting, then – never looking back – video and multi-media installation. As early as 1959, before turning eighteen, he debuted a painting at the famed Grosse Berliner Kunstausstellung, already signaling a precocious appetite for innovation and visibility within Germany’s burgeoning art scene.

A singular trajectory marked by places as much as passions: From his studies in „Freie Kunst“ at the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Berlin, to an extended, formative stay in New York City during the seminal 1960s, Steiner’s artistic language evolved steeped in the influences of artists like Robert Motherwell, Allan Kaprow and the culture-shifting energies of Fluxus, Pop Art, and Happenings. His early exhibitions alongside Georg Baselitz and Karl Horst Hödicke confirmed his place among the key voices of a new wave of abstract paintings emerging in postwar Europe.

Yet it was in the fevered climate of Berlin, particularly through his legendary Hotel Steiner, that Mike Steiner catalyzed his role as catalyst. The hotel became Berlin’s own Chelsea, a melting pot for artists, musicians, and thinkers–a touchpoint for conceptual and performing arts. International figures such as Joseph Beuys, Valie Export and Marina Abramovi? frequented the address, while visual dialogues with contemporaries like Bill Viola, Richard Serra, and Nam June Paik unfolded in his Studiogalerie and later in the realm of video.

By the early 1970s, the canvas could no longer contain Steiner’s ambitions. The “Legitimationskrise die Malerei betreffend” (a crisis of confidence in painting) led him to embrace videotape as his new canvas, spurred by collaborations with Fluxus stalwarts Al Hansen and Allan Kaprow. His sojourn in Florence at Art/Tapes/22, then the founding of his own Studiogalerie in Berlin, marked the birth of an iconic venue for radical art installation and performance. The Studiogalerie served both as production hub and a performance space, empowering fellow artists–INTERMEDIA, Carolee Schneemann, Jochen Gerz–to experiment using the latest video technologies, then prohibitively expensive and scarcely available elsewhere in Germany.

This convergence of art forms found its apotheosis in action and documentation–notably the 1976 “Irritation – Da ist eine kriminelle Berührung in der Kunst,” a collaboration with Ulay. Here, performance threatened to become criminal act: the removal of Spitzweg’s famous “Der arme Poet” from the Neue Nationalgalerie, the painting temporarily ‘kidnapped’ and rehung in a working-class Kreuzberg home. Steiner’s video lens transformed the happening into a lasting artwork, a relic of both radical gesture and social commentary.

From 1985 to 1990, Steiner shifted his energies to the small screen. His TV-format “Videogalerie,” broadcast from Berlin, introduced German audiences to video art at a scale and depth previously unseen, featuring artist interviews, festival reports, and his expanding archive. This archive itself–amassed since the first acquisition in 1974 of Reiner Ruthenbeck’s “Objekt zur teilweisen Verdeckung einer Videoszene”–has become a cornerstone of Berlin’s own media art legacy.

The scope of his work is impressive: painted tapes fusing gesture and electronics, Super-8 experiments, conceptual photography cycles like “Das Testbild als Readymade,” and, in later years, abstract paintings and textile works that continued to question and extend the borders of the visual field. His “Color Works” series, highlighted in his 1999 solo show at the Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, encapsulated decades of crossing genres and media with undimmed curiosity. This monumental exhibition not only paid tribute to Steiners own production but also celebrated his role as collector, collaborator, and transmitter of an entire movement, echoing the approaches of other international luminaries such as Marina Abramovi?, Nam June Paik, or Allan Kaprow himself.

When we compare Steiner’s oeuvre to figures like Paik, Viola, or Kaprow, striking similarities arise: a rigorous inquiry into the nature of image, time, and authenticity; a willingness to seize new technology as expressive tool; and a deep, sometimes playful, engagement with performance art’s contested meanings. Yet Steiner remains singular–as both facilitator and creator, his impact radiates across the continents of performance, video, and contemporary art installation. Where Kaprow or Beuys tore down the wall between art and life, Steiner created the rooms, tapes, and archives where that process unfolded and was preserved for future generations.

What of the present? Mike Steiner’s legacy lives on–tangible in the vast holdings of his collection now housed in the Hamburger Bahnhof and pulsating still through myriad contemporary practices that weave together live action, moving image, and the vibrant residue of the everyday. His works, whether glowing with abstract color or vibrating with the tension of documentation, compel the viewer to consider art as something fugitive and yet enduring, as something we experience together in the moment and reencounter, refracted, through the lens of history.

For those eager to delve further into this remarkable legacy–to see, feel, and think along the lines drawn (and redrawn) by Steiner himself–his official artist website offers a comprehensive archive of works, exhibitions, and texts. The journey through Mike Steiner’s art is a window into the last half-century of contemporary art: ever-changing, always urgent, and perpetually ahead of its time.