Dan Steinhilber: Perspectives 151
Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston
- Garland Fielder -
Some shows go down like a mint julep on a balmy summertime evening, the relentless heat of day recessing into the nether parts of your consciousness, while many artistic deliberations too often belabor a show to the point of drudgery. Once in a while, an artist comes along who reminds us why we still look at art. It is not necessarily to decipher or toil, explore method nor admire cleverness but to search for wonderment. More and more, a sort of renewed vision is happening in the realm of process art. That unfortunate moniker, however, reveals little about why such and such's work is actually better than so-and-so's. It is a tricky endeavor even to force process art into a working definition, but it is art and so we must investigate it as such.
Dan Steinhilber works in this auspicious and ill-defined space. In Perspectives 151 at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, his investigations are quite like that aforementioned moment of reprieve we so desperately seek. Steinhilber's medium of choice is the mass-produced object, such as plastic coat hangers, balloons and sticks of gum. But unlike artists such as Tara Donovan, Steinhilber is not overly concerned with the accumulation of detritus this society so blatantly generates.
Dan Steinhilber, Untitled, 2006
Styrofoam packaging peanuts, "Rigid air mover" blowers
Dimensions variable
Installation view, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston
Photo by Rick Gardner
Surprisingly, the artist's concerns instead revolve around the good old issue of painting. Surface quality, scale, presencethe mainstays of the twentieth-century canonare all referenced in his installations, albeit almost surreptitiously. His untitled stripe paintingdozens of sticks of gum aligned on the wall in a horizontal bandhas more visual impact than just about any painted concoction around. It has a sugary resonance all its own, and yet one still has to address formal issues of pattern-based painting.
An untitled balloon installation does something similar in that this large-scale assemblage of long, twisted plastic (picture the contorted concoctions party clowns make) presents the viewer with a very real, felt and immediate sense of mass—something not unlike a Richard Serra—but in such a manner as to bring us a fresh perspective on scale. The work doesn't poke fun at established, formal notions of contemporary art but rather allows the viewer to actually see the issue for what it is versus notions of production that have become institutionalized via the filter of academia.
Dan Steinhilber, Untitled, 2006
Chewing gum on wall
3 x 252 inches
Installation view, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston
Photo by Dan Steinhilber
An installation of Styrofoam packing peanuts dumped in a corner (about human-sized in scale), contained in a poetic flux by three blowers, takes a backdoor approach in the continuation of Steinhilber's exploration. His comment on the perceived preciousness of art delivers a literal look at the mechanizations of packaging, peanuts all heaving and massing yet perfectly contained in the space. Steinhilber is not denying the need for preciousness in art and, by extension, the museum space, but he is definitely allowing one to see the forest through the trees. This approach is what makes his work and ideas resonate so well: they inform by suggestion rather than dictation.
Other works do not carry quite as much weight. The placement of a heat lamp over an empty pedestal conveys little beyond its one-liner origin. And disappointingly, a large-scale colorfieldlike canvas made from woven plastic tarp seems to miss the mark simply due to its sheer abundance: it is as though the scale of this work depletes the investigation of presence, its own mechanism getting in the way of its valence. Although not flawless, Steinhilber's overall presentation is a remarkable rendition of a much-appreciated and much-needed act of introversion: an artist talking about art through art.