UPCOMING

Shine a Light 2010

The Portland Art Museum hosts Shine a Light: A Night at the Museum. The event consists of six hours of performances, installations, tours, workshops, and games by 15 artists drawn from Portland State University’s Art and Social Practice Program

Open Engagement: Art and Social Practice

May 13-15, 2011

Featuring Julie Ault, Fritz Haeg, and Pablo Helguera

2010

Condensations of the Social

Smack Mellon’s summer group exhibition Condensations of the Social will feature artistic projects that refer to the strands of the social that contribute to the formation of culture: pedagogy, ritual/performance, political and ideological engagement, work, and ecology and sustainability as they relate to place. The exhibition raises questions about the boundaries between art and life, while suggesting that social practice, to a greater degree than traditional art forms, has the potential to directly change how we live. The exhibition includes projects by Pablo Helguera, Mary Mattingly, Mladen Miljanovic, Tim Rollins + K.O.S., Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and a group of eight artists who are students of Harrell Fletcher and Jen Delos Reyes within Portland State University’s MFA concentration in Art and Social Practice. Exhibition curator Sara Reisman selected artists with the intention of linking current artistic practices to two historical nodes – the work of Rollins and Ukeles – which serve as early examples of terms that have gained important currency in contemporary art: the pedagogical turn, relational aesthetics, participation, life art, and collaboration, among others. Condensations also explores the contradictory qualities of the medium by bringing together a variety of artworks and approaches that range from altruistic and outside the art world to socially motivated from within the art system.

In 1969, Mierle Laderman Ukeles wrote the Manifesto for Maintenance Art, 1969! that is still exhibited and taught today. Since 1977, when she became the official, unsalaried artist-in-residence at the New York City Department of Sanitation—a position she still holds—Ukeles has created art that deals with the endless maintenance and service work that “keeps the city alive:” urban waste flows, recycling, ecology, urban sustainability and our power to transform degraded land and water into healthy public places.  Condensations will feature materials from Ukeles’ project Touch Sanitation in which she personally thanked 8500 sanitation workers for maintaining the city soon after her residency at Sanitation began.

Mladen Miljanovic’s project I Serve Art is a more intimately scaled project that documents the artist’s time in isolation following his military service in Bosnia-Herzegovina, a nine-month transition from serving in the military to becoming an artist. The project explores the tensions between obligation and desire, and between national identity and creative practice.

Having taken to the water in an experiment in sustainability with The Waterpod in 2009, Mary Mattingly is still focused on how we can respond to rising sea levels, this time by testing the limits of living on land. Within Condensations Mattingly will present a living prototype for Flock House, an airborne habitat that imagines, projects, and adds another level onto the city’s skyline. Built on materials that reference scaffolding, a construction material associated with changing cities, Flock House augments city space, air space, and questions air rights and functions as an observation deck with a view of weather systems and avian migration. Flock House is a collaboration with Kadar Brock and Stephanie Gonzalez-Turner, Ian Daniel, ecoarttech, Kim Holleman, Paul Lloyd Sargent, and Tressie Word.

Through his teaching in the Bronx in the early 1980s, Tim Rollins discovered that his students responded to art – art taught his way, not the way it is usually taught in public schools. Some of Rollins’ students became a group of regulars who participated in an after-school and weekend program called the Art of Knowledge Workshop. The students named themselves K.O.S. which stands for “Kids of Survival.” Early ephemera from Rollins’ work with K.O.S. will be included in Condensations.

Seven students — Katherine Ball, Constance Hockaday, Ariana Jacob, Hannah Jickling, Helen Reed, Michelle Swinehart, and Lexa Walsh— from Portland State University’s MFA concentration in Art and Social Practice are producing an indoor and outdoor banner project called Let Knowledge Serve the City. This will be activated by events meant to blur the gallery’s function as a space of art and life. PSU’s MFA concentration in Art and Social Practice is a program that encourages students to develop and utilize their artistic skills to engage in society. Students learn about a variety of working artists and non-artists who have engaged in civic activity, and apply their knowledge and abilities to initiate, develop, and complete projects with the public—individuals, groups, and institutions. The program is led by Harrell Fletcher and Jen Delos Reyes.

For Condensations, Pablo Helguera is developing an entirely new project: a variety show and podcast called The Art World Home Companion. Helguera explains that the variety show is “for those of you who feel lonely amidst the social choreographies of the art world, whose anxieties about professional issues generate unanswered questions that you are afraid to ask, who can’t detach from Facebook and are a bit nostalgic of the time when you actually got to see and talk to people in person, but feel awkward at openings.  It is for those of you for whom the art world remains inscrutable, who cannot understand why it is the way it is — who feel that our social rituals are slightly absurd and contradictory, our theorizing incomprehensible, our ethical behavior suspicious, our professional acting opportunistic, and yet who still ache to be part of it —this program is your friend, your companion and your Saturday morning sunshine.”

The exhibition is accompanied by an essay on social and critical practices by Saul Ostrow.

text via: smackmellon.org

Open Engagement: Making Things, Making Things Better, Making Things Worse

The Open Engagement conference is an initiative of Portland State University’s Art and Social Practice MFA concentration and co-sponsored by Portland Community College and the MFA in Visual Studies program at Pacific Northwest College of Art and supported by the Cyan PDX Cultural Residency Program. Directed by Jen Delos Reyes and planned in conjunction with Harrell Fletcher and the Portland State University MFA Monday Night Lecture Series, this conference features three nationally and internationally renowned artists: Mark Dion, Amy Franceschini, and Nils Norman. The conference will showcase work by Temporary Services, InCUBATE, and a new project by Mark Dion created in collaboration with students from the PSU Art and Social Practice concentration.

The artists involved in Open Engagement: Making Things, Making Things Better, Making Things Worse, challenge our traditional ideas of what art is and does. These artist’s projects mediate the contemporary frameworks of art as service, as social space, as activism, as interactions, and as relationships, and tackle subject matter ranging from urban planning, alternative pedagogy, play, fiction, sustainability, political conflict and the social role of the artist.

Can socially engaged art do more harm than good? Are there ethical responsibilities for social art? Does socially engaged art have a responsibility to create public good? Can there be transdisciplinary approaches to contemporary art making that would contribute to issues such as urban planning and sustainability?

The conference hosted over 145 artists, activists, curators, scholars, writers, farmers, community organizers, film makers and collectives including: Nato Thompson, The Watts House Project, Linda Weintraub, Ted Purves, Henry Jenkins, Wealth Underground Farms, Brian Collier, Anne E. Moore, David Horvitz, Chen Tamir, and Parfyme.

Credits:

Open Engagement Director- Jen Delos Reyes

Open Engagement planning committee—Katy Asher, Ariana Jacob, Ashley Neese, Sandy Sampson, Crystal Baxley, Laurel Kurtz, Amy Steel, Lexa Walsh, Ally Drozd. Graphic design- Belin Liu. Sponsors-RACC, PNCA, PSU, The Cyan

Mandrake Museum

A museum dedicated to the mandrake root, created in conjunction with Mark Dion and stemming from a seminar investigating the history of museums.

The museum was on view during Open Engagement 2010.

Portland State University Art and Social Practice Display

Display of student and faculty work in the PSU MFA Art and Social Practice concentration displayed in Neuberger Hall at Portland State University.

The Incidental Person

The British artist John Latham (1921–2006) coined the expression the “Incidental Person” (IP) to qualify an individual who engages in non-art contexts – industry, politics, education – while avoiding the “for/against”, “you vs. me” disposition typically adopted to resolve differences. The IP, Latham argued, “may be able, given access to matters of public interest ranging from the national economic, through the environmental and departments of the administration to the ethical in social orRon Bernsteinientation, to ‘put forward answers to questions we have not yet asked’.”(1)

Diagrammatically, the IP transforms the linear, two-dimensional plane of conflict into a three-dimensional, triangular network that fosters the flow of ideas and the interconnections between individual perspectives.

Though the IP was Latham’s own term, it was to find practical application within Artist Placement Group, or APG, the “artist consultancy and research organisation” conceived in 1965 by Barbara Steveni and established a year later with Barry Flanagan, Latham and Jeffrey Shaw.(2) (APG’s fluctuating membership would include over the years, among others, Ian Breakwell, Stuart Brisley, Garth Evans, David Hall, Anna Ridley, Rolf and Ros Sachse, as well as industrial and political representatives.) Steveni’s role in negotiating invitations (not commissions) from private corporations, non-profit organizations and governmental bodies was instrumental to APG’s success in placing artists in situations where they would be paid and, more importantly, would enjoy – at least during the placements’ initial feasibility period – complete freedom from any contractual obligation to produce a material outcome (be it an object or a report). Discussions around the various APG initiatives would then be imbedded in art and non-art contexts, in the form of pubBarbara Stevenilic discussions and exhibitions such as Inno 70: Art and Economics at the Hayward Gallery, London, in 1971, and, upon the invitation of JJason Zimmermanoseph Beuys, at Documenta 6, Kassel, in 1977.

Although it was not embraced by all APG members to qualify their engagement, the notion of IP in placement allowed Latham to give aAriana Jacob particular form to the “time-based” or “(T)” framework upon which he based his work. In the (T) framework, any thing – from the molecular interaction to the explosion in the universe – is determined not by basic elements of space and matter (this would be the spacebased or (S) framework), but by time, and by the basic temporal unit Latham called “the least event”.

The implications of the shift from space-andmatter to time-and-event are far-reaching. Gone, for example, is the division between subject and object. Formerly perceived as ontologically different, in the (T) framework subject and object co-exist in varying simultaneous temporal frequencies or, to use Latham’s terminology, in various “time-bases”. ObjJoachim Pfeuferects themselves no longer occupy stable positions in the taxonomic grids belonging to distinct disciplines. If, as matter, a rock formation, an eighteenth-century chair, an encyclopedia and a microchip belong to incompatible categories of objects, as events they partake in a shared infinite “score”, their positions defined in terms of relative frequencies – relLaurel Kurtz & Sandy Sampsonative to one another but also to the person determining their position. Thus the chair (made of wood, crafted over time in a particular historical context, in which I am sitting) may intersect in an event-based structure with the rock (developed over millennia, but extracted only recently by sophisticated machinery).

Another opposition to dissolve as a consequence of the shift from matter to time is that between art and politics. For art and politics have no particular significance beyond the context of their formulation, and the quality of a certain politics, no less than of an art practice, depends on its relative long-term effectiveness and appropriateness to its intended time and place. There is some irony to the fact that APG is now being seen as a prime example of a politicized artistic collective, when at the time it was taken to taskKeiko Sei (most notably by Stuart Brisley, Gustav Metzger and Caroline Tisdall) for being politically neutral. This apparent neutrality – which was in fact a repudiation of the politics/art divide – represents a key characteristic of the IP for Latham:

In the course of conducting a professional role an APG artist (Incidental Person) has to approach all contexts without any declared personal bias (if one exists). The work will demonstrate or indicate the strongest lines of difference in interpretation if it is kKaty Ashernown that the position is approached without preconceptions, temporary enthusiasms, publicly declared causes supported, political formulations already circulated. The strength of a well-stated new viewpoint can be the greater for this adopted independence, the political impact included.(3)

Finally, incidentality lifts the entrenched opposition between artist and non-artist. What the creative individual (an expression covering anyone dedicated to a particular life practice) brings to bear on situations is not a set of skilLexa Walshls honed in art school and rewarded (or not) in the market place, but an awareness of her or his relative position on an infinite and infinitely variable temporal score.

This ability to see both the object qua object and the object as a dynamic web of forces allows the IP to imagine novel solutions without a particular expertise of the field under scrutiny. APG’s radicalism lies precisely in thHannah Jickling and Helen Reedis desire to promote the inclusion of the individual sometimes referred to as an “artist” into the wider complex of events that inform our worRaphaële Bidault-Waddingtonld, from the food we ingest as singular body-events to the decisions we make as collective social events. If the IP can only be, by default, an “artist”, “this is not to say that any person who takes up an art medium will qualify as an IP within the meaning of this specification”.(4) To avoid the confusion between the artist-as-IP (potentially anyone) and the professional “artist”, we might as well

dispense with the public use of this word artist, in the same way that we are supposed to be dispensing with sex-discriminatory and value-judging language. APG has put forward alternatives from time to time, Incidental Person havinNeal Whiteg some advantages, if referring to one in whom certain specially formulative capabilities show up. There is a tendency for society to abandon such a person, who then comes under impossible pressures. The APG is interested in such people, whether they have run the intuitive line of “artist” or some other …(5)

APG, however, was not aimed at recuperating selfproclaimed outsiders and pacifying radicalLuca Frei practices; rather its core belief was “that society is starved of an important informing ingredient when creative people are kept outside the working parts of governments, organisations and institutions”.(6)

Notoriously short of money, perpetually on the margins of the official art circuit, Robert Filliou undoubtedly qualifies as an IP for his steadfast conviction that society was starved for creativity, not the creative person for social status. Filliou in fact played an incidental part in the emergence of APG: while staying in Latham’s and Steveni’s house, Filliou and Daniel Spoerri asked Steveni (Latham was in the US at the time) to find discarded material for their contribution to the 1962 Festival of Misfits at Gallery One in London. It was while Steveni was searching for material – in the middle of the night, in an industrial estate in full activity on the outskKatherine Ball with Alec Neal and Matthew Warrenirts of London – that she realized how disconnected the artist was from the underlying structures of society, and that she experienced a “Eureka moment”, as she put it, which led to the founding of APG.

In the early 1960s, Filliou was living in Paris, where he befriended another IP, the AmeEric Steenrican-born architect and painter Joachim Pfeufer. Together, Fillou and Pfeufer developed the Poipoidrome, an ambulant architectural environment in which visitors/users could give free reign to their imagination and where the distinction between work and play would blur. The Poipoidrome owes its name to “poipoi”, an expression with which – according to the Dutch architect and ethnologist Herman Haan, who relayed the information to Pfeufer – the Dogons in Mali would greet each other. When two Dogons crossed paths, one would ask the other “How is your cow?”, to wWill Holderhich the other would answer “Poipoi”. Every subsequent question would then receive the same “Poipoi” response. By naming their structure after this ritual of politeness, Filliou and Pfeufer hinted at a different form of mutual recognition, a de-centered zone (at least with respect to Europe) for the deployment of generous and futile cConstance Hockadayreativity.

Taking Filliou’s and Pfeufer’s Poipoidrome into account expands the definition of incidentality to include, after APG’s first two tenets – that “context is half the work”, and “the function of medium in art is determined not so much by the factual object, as by the process and the levels of attention to which the work aims”(7) – an emphasis on generosity and the value of (free) exchange. For Latham, langGianni Mottiuage and money were the two most divisive mediums in contemporary society, and in his view the IP, when placed in a new context, was expected to be able translate them into the (T) framework, where the value of money and language disappears in favor of longer-term preoccupations such as investment (rather than speculation) and poetic intuition (rather than administrative know-how). All the incidental projJennifer Delos Reyesects featured in this exhibition stress the durational, the slow or progressive encounter over the quick fix, since the IP knows full well that time is not (always) money, but rather a means of approaching a context, of exploring the different angles from which to study a given situation and seek to imMegan Francis Sullivanprove it.

When, instead of “masters” and “visionaries”, the IP is chosen as the unit with which to narrate the history of art (or any other history), the canon quickly finds itself open to question. Substituting the names of Picasso and Pollock with Cage and Duchamp is not nearly incidental enough: a “true” incidental history of art would have to consider the “artist” at varying frequencies and in different contexts, from the short-term recurrences of body-events to her or his long-termMichelle Swinehart effects on others, as well as the long-term effects of other persons and contexts on him or her. In sum, an incidental history would be impossible to transcribBrian O’Dohertye; only some of its fragments could be performed, highlighting one or a few frequencies.

It follows that this exhibition cannot, in good faith, pretend to recover overlooked IPs in official art history, no more than it can legitimately aspire to representing a lineage of IPs from Latham to today. More incidentally, The Incidental Person at apexart seeks to underscore the power of the incidental approach to such problematics as global warming, reading, political repression, singing, horseback riding, money, family, raft-building, printing, psychiatry and making pancakes. The question is not whether such approaches warrant the name of art, but whether the diversity of tThe Print Factoryheir manifestations serves to underscore the potential of incidentality to address the innumerable events that constitute our contexts, from the apparently trivial to the purportedly momentous.

Postscript
There is something both unsettling and gratifying about not opening packages one receives, like the box of homebaked biscuits R.’s mother sends him, or used to send him, every year. The package received in 2008 may have been the last, he sensed, and so he refused to open it. The box would remain unopened: an inert thing sitting on a shHarrell Fletcherelf, wrapped in brown paper, weighed, addressed, its content priced and described, scribbled over with handwritten words and numbers.

Opening or not a received package presents, in R.’s words, an “essential ethical dilemma”. Not opening betrays a wish to kill time, to preserve a gesture doomed to pass in the unwrapping, to not face the obligation of mMarysia Lewandowskaatching gratitude with reciprocal generosity. On the other hand, opening may betray an indifference to the giver’s intention, in favour of the object’s materiality, its capacity to fulfill or disappoint expectations.

This exhibition, curated from across the Atlantic, had to contend with this dilemma, of whether to open the packages sent directly to the gallery by the participating IPs – without the curator having had a chance to see them – or try to preserve the gestures, the unwrapped gifts, in their incidentality. In order for the dilemma to remain open, unresolved, APG’s 1971 exhibition at the Hayward and Filliou’s and Pfeufer’s Poipoidrome served as structural models for the spatialising of fundamentally temporal, eventbased practices. Opened packages, like documented events, allow the process of giving to be recorded and to continue. May this exhibition, then, at the cost of having contributed to objectifying incidentality, at least open onto nothing but a renewed appreciation for the incidental approach.

1. The Artist as Incidental Person: new role vis-à-vis government, John Latham Archive (JLA) 13/4231, Folder 335.
2. Artists & Decision Making, APG Research, London, 1988, JLA 13/4654, Folder 347, Sub-Folder 349.
3. The Incidental Person – approach to government, JLA 11/2745, Folder 233, Sub-Folder 242.
4. Ibid.
5. Studio International, March–April 1976, pp. 169–170.
6. The Incidental Person/Approach to Government, JLA 6/1781, Folder 85.
7. Ibid.

© Antony Hudek 2009

2009

Parties Prenantes: Info Point

Parties Prenantes: Info Point is an exhibition of informational displays that have been created to represent the interests and knowledge of people who are in the ZAC Paris Rive Gauche. These displays are made collaboratively with people from the neighborhood and associates of Portland State University MFA Art and Social Practice Concentration. Similar to the format of a science fair or a conference poster session, displays are produced that communicate the research, interests, and positions of the involved parties.

Art and Social Practice starts and ends not in rarified spaces, but out in the world, although there are intersections with studios/galleries when necessary or appropriate. This way of working is not restricted to any medium, but instead uses various forms, methods, and approaches as the situation dictates. Sometimes Art Social Practice might look more like sociology, anthropology, social work, journalism, or environmentalism than art, yet it retains the intention of creating significance and appreciation between the audience and artists.

Shine A Light: A Night at the Portland Art Museum

On Saturday night, the sluggish giant that is the Portland Art Museum awoke, beckoned by strange and unlikely presences: break dancers, outdoor beer gardens, gorgeous ikebana floral arrangements, mystical dowsing auras, and much more.  

Lethargic from a recession and debt that have cut its budget to the bone, the museum has rarely been as bustling and groovy during a DIY-themed community open house of sorts, “Shine a Light: A Night at the Museum.”

From 6 p.m. until midnight, most of the museum was made available to the public with the price of general admission, including its collections and current exhibits. But the night’s shining allure, so to speak, was a series of installations, events and other happenings intended to temporarily transform the museum’s physical space and attract different visitors than it normally does, says Christina Olsen, the museum’s education director who conceived of the event.

Indeed, more than 1,500 people attended, and the museum seemed less like a museum and more like a counterculture event. There were nearly three dozen ongoing shows, installations and events throughout the museum and its outdoor sculpture court. And you would have to have been unusually energized to catch all or even most of them.

Here’s a sampling:

• A break dancing performance by a trio of pliable young men, Nic Raingsey, Othai Siharath and Mike Sy, who are members of a Vancouver dance group called Groove Nation Academy;
• An idiosyncratic beer project by artist Eric Steen that commissioned three local brewers, Laurelwood, Old Lompoc and Lucky Lab breweries, to craft beer inspired by the museum’s art. The beer, of course, was made available to attendees;
• An enchantingly eerie dowsing demonstration by Laurel Kurtz, Avalon Kalin, Mike Downey, Tom Lauerman and Ashley Williams that attempted to divine the “auras” of some of the sculptures in the sculpture court;
• A video performance by avant-garde darling Khaela Maricich;
• Highlights from the museum’s collection chosen by the venerated Doris Ennis, a beloved volunteer at the museum for 35 years.

Most of these exhibits and happenings were created by students at Portland State University’s Art and Social Practice Program, a new curriculum developed by internationally regarded local artist Harrell Fletcher. Fletcher was one of the artists at the museum Saturday night, doing what he does best: getting normal people to think about art by involving them in the process itself. Situated in the museum’s photography collection, Fletcher asked visitors to print enlarged images from their cell phones, which were eventually displayed at the museum for the night.

Like Fletcher’s approach to art, “Shine a Light” was an attempt to demystify the museum and make it more accessible to the larger community, literally and aesthetically. The outdoor sculpture court, for example, was a poster to urban hipster Portland with its DIY art shows, crepe carts, artisanal pizza and gelato stands, and craft beer garden. Along with the participatory, non-object-based work by mostly student artists, the atmosphere and feel at the museum had an informal charge.

Which means the evening worked according to the museum’s plan.

“We are seeking a younger crowd that is not our normal demographic,” says Olsen.

The median age for a museum member is 53. Baby boomers were plentiful, but the night was clearly dominated by those educated by and immersed in digital media and Facebook.

Museum officials don’t know if “Shine a Light” was a one-off event. The extra security and staff as well as additional measures to protect permanently installed artwork proved a slight headache.

Still, it affirms a retacking of the museum’s mission and embrace of the local community under the roughly three-year tenure of Executive Director Brian Ferriso. Extravagance and big tent shows are out; the idea of community and exhibits that deepen local connections and history are in.

Of course, such stewardship and emphasis on education is good museum practice. But part of it is also financially motivated. The recession has trimmed the museum’s revenue and endowment by as much as 20 percent, just as it has done with other cultural institutions. The budget pruning has forced the museum to discover more prudent values in every sense, from funding to programming.

The museum may be able to afford to splurge a bit, however. It got a financial boost last week when it announced the James F. and Marion L. Miller Foundation’s $400,000 grant to fund exhibitions for 2009-10. One of those shows will be a much-anticipated survey of one of the Northwest’s finest sculptors, Portlander Lee Kelly.

– D.K. Row

Image: Serenades by Ariana Jacob. Performer: Mirah

Social Practice West: SF MoMA Panel

In the last year, graduate programs in public or social practice were launched at Otis College of Art and Design and Portland State University. The social practice concentration at California College of the Arts has thrived since 2005. Faculty and students from these programs convene for a discussion of the evolution of social practice on the West Coast.

Featuring: Ted Purves, chair and assistant professor, Graduate Program in Fine Arts, California College of the Arts
Jen Delos Reyes, adjunct Assistant Professor, Portland State University
Randall Szott, writer and students from CCA, PSU and OTIS

2008

PICA TBA—Neighborhood Projects— A Lot of ____

Drinking Beer With Friends And Working, Eric Steen

Making Sense of Suffering, Artists: R. Shubha (India), Varinthorn Christopher (Thailand), Michael Christopher (US), Mohsen Golmohammadian (Iran), Parisa Yaseminejad (Iran), Meena Kharkwal (India). Curator & Director: Varinthorn Christopher

Seitanic Petition, Varinthorn & Michael Christopher

The Convenience Truth, Varinthorn Christopher

Exploring Hood Lore, Laurel Kurtz, Chris Andreae, & Sandy Sampson

Public Speaking: Museum of The City, Laurel Kurtz, Sandy Sampson, & Jimmy Moore

Daisy Chain: Voodoo Donuts Too, Sandy Sampson

The Official Unofficial Goodwill Residency Program (in accordance with Parallel University and the Office of Inclusion), Laurel Kurtz, Vicki Lynn Wilson, & John Larsen

Viewfinder, Avalon Kalin

Society of the Spectacle Screening, Avalon Kalin

Breakthrough, Avalon Kalin & Sierra Norris

Plant Walk With Urban Edibles, Amy Steel & Urban Edibles

Art Talk AM on the Radio, Cyrus Smith

24 Hour Residency, Cyrus Smith & Brian Merkel

Neighborhood Projects Media, Cyrus Smith

Personal Advisor, Ariana Jacobs & Katy Asher

Listen to My Dad, Charles Kurtz, Talk About Birds, Laurel Kurtz

24-Hour Residency, Amy Steel