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SUNDAY, AUGUST 8, 2010
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GET THE DRIFT? Steinhilber invaded the Baltimore Museum of Art in 2006 with one of his major works, filling a gallery with packing peanuts and then animating them with industrial blowers that seemed to switch on at random.
PHOTOS COURTESY OF DAN STEINHILBER plastic swells inward to encroach on visitors. Depot?
during the recent heat wave, on the indus- trial waterfront that’s been reclaimed as Socrates Sculpture Park. It might have been better to meet him in a coffee shop. Steinhilber doesn’t merely want visitors to look at the piece as it gets made, which is always the goal at Socrates. He wants help making it. Visit Steinhilber, and be- fore you know it, you’re lying fully dressed, at high noon, in a pile of hot sand, arms and legs flailing as grit creeps into your collar, your shoes, your pockets, your briefs. Steinhilber stands above you, grin- ning — maybe, if you’re an art critic, with a touch of vengeful glee. For his new outdoor piece, called “Cast- ing Angels,” Steinhilber has built a huge sandbox and is asking passersby to make “snow angels” in it. He fills their traces with concrete, then spreads the angelic castings across the sculpture park’s grass. When the project goes on view Sept. 12, misting nozzles lashed to the trees over- head will provide a kind of heavenly cloud
cover for his very material, notably earth- bound crowd of angels who, more than anything, seem to have fallen, splat, to the ground. “An angel — what does that mean exact-
ly?” says Steinhilber, sitting for a moment in the shade. His 38th birthday is ap- proaching, but he looks much younger, with wavy shoulder-length hair and a compact build. He’s wearing plaid capris, much washed, and a hip green T-shirt with a drawing of a parking lot and the single word “hermetic.” He could easily pass for the bassist in some alt-rock band. With his puppy eyes and big, shy smile, he’d be irresistible to groupies. “I grew up religious, and I believe in
God,” he says, but he has his doubts about God’s winged lieutenants. “It’s not that I’m interested in angels — I’m not sure I be- lieve in them. . . . But I guess if anybody asks me, I’ll say I believe. There’s some- thing cool about believing in something you have no idea about.”
Perhaps, though, his pieces have more to do with childhood traditions. “People who don’t even have a faith still lie down and make an angel,” he says, to the atheist critic who’s about to make one. Or you could think that his work’s con-
nection is to flight, he says — except that the concrete pieces are aggressively grounded. Sculpture is usually about “erecting” an object, about raising some- thing up, he says, “but I’m making founda- tions.” Pointing at the water of the East River lapping at the sculpture park’s edge a few feet from his sandbox, and at the concrete of the New York skyline beyond it, he in- sists on the “site specificity” of his project, whose art supplies are nothing more than water and concrete. His site-specificity spreads further, to the people on site. Socrates, whose grounds are open 365 days a year, is all about letting local strollers watch its resi- dent artists at work. Steinhilber’s angels
are a sign that he’s embracing that idea, ceding some aesthetic control to the audi- ence in a down-at-the-heels corner of Queens, and giving them a subject they’re likely to respond to. “I’m just saying, get in there and make your best angel. And I don’t even have to say it. They just do,” says Steinhilber. He’s running a real risk that the sophis-
ticates of New York’s art world, unaware of his earlier, less populist work, will read the Socrates pieces as goofy and outsider-ish, the kind of thing a farmer might do on his lawn. But what they’ll miss, if they do that, is the community dimension. “I’m kind of letting go a little bit, letting other people do it. But that’s what this situation calls for.”
With its figuration, and its audience
participation, and its popular subject, Steinhilber admits the piece is unlike any- thing he’s tried before — almost. He fig- ures that a snow angel may just have been the first work of sculpture he ever made,
as a kid growing up in frigid Oshkosh, Wis. “It’s in my repertoire, and I know it’s in other people’s repertoires, even if they’re not artists.” Steinhilber says he’s just “playing out” his oldest idea, to see what will happen with it now. “Because you never know un- til it’s done. . . . I’m taking a risk — which is something you have to do.”
gopnikb@washpost.com
Dan Steinhilber
will be showing new pieces at Washington’s G Fine Art in October. His project at the Socrates Sculpture Park launches Sept. 12. Call 718-956-1819 or visit
www.socratessculpturepark.org.
MORE PHOTOS See a photo gallery and videos of Dan Steinhilber’s unique works
at
washingtonpost.com/style.
«HEAT SOURCE: A sculptor known for his skill with materials, Steinhilber chose to create a work here that was barely material at all: A heat lamp is poised above a pedestal, with the hot air in between as the sculpture.
A MASTER’S AT WORK: This untitled Steinhilber piece appeared at Washington’s Signal 66 gallery in 2002, the year he finished his master’s in fine art at American University. By filling them with soda, Steinhilber turned the plastic tubes used to protect fluorescent bulbs into an effervescent simulation of the stripes of Gene Davis, one of Washington’s most famous abstractionists.
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