Humans and museums have a touchy, complicated relationship. Many, museums are just cold mausoleums. Portraits of dead men and women glare down disapprovingly from their high, 2D perches. Marble statues stare off into the distance, superior and dressed in perfectly creased togas. Museums create a divide between humans and the art they are supposed to explore and enjoy.
Dan Steinhilber's exhibit at the Baltimore Museum of Art, "Front Room," explores the prickly relationship that man has with space and art. The most playfully ambitious piece of the museum, "Untitled," does not hang in a gilded frame on the wall. Nor does it repose on a pedestal. Instead, it's built of Styrofoam packing peanuts, Rigid air-mover fans, Genie garage door openers, Rigid wet-dry vacuum detachable blowers, timers, electrical components and Roomba vacuum cleaners. This wonderful assemblage of metal, Styrofoam and plastic is housed in an oblong room in the Contemporary Art Wing.
Steinhilber's Styrofoam packing peanuts -- small, nearly weightless, and crushable in a human hand -- radically redefine the relationship between humans and art. The fans and blowers scatter the peanuts about the floor and through the air. Suddenly art is kinetic, playful, tangible. It's skittering over shoes and blowing hairdos apart. Literally flying in the face of traditional, gaze-but-don't-touch art, patrons are allowed to step into the room. However, most just peer in with trepidation from the door. They create and destroy dunes of packing peanuts within minutes. In another corner, three Rigid air-mover fans blow at a sizable mountain of more peanuts.
The wind makes a maelstrom out of the mountain. The peanuts swarm through the air furiously, colliding with each other or dancing across the walls. But the frenzy stops almost as soon as it starts, for the fans are timed to shut off after a few minutes. The peanuts calmly float down and the mountain is still. All the while Roomba robot vacuums inch their ways about the room, pushing peanuts from one corner to another.
Serendipitously, the artist was in the room when I went to visit. Blue-eyed with wavy brown hair, he checked the wiring of the electric board and replaced a fan. He was kind enough to speak to me about some of the thought-processes behind "Front Room." After checking the Roomba robots for their batteries, he explained that the robots were actually developed by the military for tasks like spying and mine surveillance. Gesturing to the flashing saucers on the ground, he said, "See, they're not actually cleaning anything. Maybe just a little dust. They're just pushing the peanuts around from one place to another." Steinhilber moved on to explain how his art was (literally) intertwined with the museum's own security cameras and electrical system. As he led the way out of the room, the cycles of chaos continued -- the security cameras blinked, the fans whipped up perfectly timed cyclones of peanuts and the Roombas silently shoved peanuts from one place to another.
In the second gallery space, a wide screen plays a video on loop. Again, this piece is called "Untitled." At first glance, it's peanuts, peanuts, peanuts everywhere. But then glimpses of a thermos, a wicker chair and a charred piece of toast flash through the white. Steinhilber flooded his Washington, D.C. apartment with what must have been hundreds of thousands of Styrofoam packing peanuts. Then he turned on the blower and plowed through. The resulting video is a dizzying tsunami of white flying objects with occasional hints of domesticity. In front of the screen, an eight-foot black plastic object ("Untitled") lays on the ground. Shaped like a sea slug, it has a power cord coming out one end and a blower tube coming out the other. Periodically the blower tube punctures the silent visual rapture of the video with a loud, grating "Whhiiiir!" The blower blows air out of the sea slug, and the smooth surface suctions in on itself, revealing the sea slug to be a bag filled with -- that's right -- packing peanuts.
To my shocked delight, the artist sat down on the floor and propped himself up on the art piece. As I cautiously lowered myself down next to him, Steinhilber explained that the piece was made of a trash compactor bag filled with the peanuts and the blower from his video. He elaborated that his apartment building used such a bag to collect all the garbage of the residents, calling it "the intestines of my apartment building." As he grasped at a lump of packing peanuts through the shiny black plastic, he mused to himself, "It's like rigor mortis." He then turned towards the TV. The rectangular screen and its pixels silenced and tamed the storm of peanuts, and he smiled as he settled into his lumpy couch of peanuts.
"Front Room" creates a relationship between man and art that no painting can ever achieve. Steinhilber creates chaos and then contains it in rooms, screens and trash bags. By thrusting people into his different types of disordered space, he makes art viewers into art participants.
Front Room: Dan Steinhilber will be on exhibit at the Baltimore Museum from Oct. 1, 2006 to Feb. 18, 2007. The BMA is located at 10 Art Museum Drive. For more information visit http://www.artbma.org.
