I did not believe what I was reading, Modern Art Notes on 2/28/03 and posts about this show, fission/fusion, and on Dan Steinhilber in specific. One word:

D-U-C-K-S-A-U-C-E



Tyler Green describes the piece in Modern Art Notes:

"Steinhilber has adhered (invisibly) hundreds upon hundreds of tiny restaurant-sized duck sauce packets to an eightish-foot by fourish-foot rectangle on a wall. The packets are laid on in imperfect rows in such a way that they completely obscure the underlying wall. The way the light falls on the packets reveals a previously who'd-a-thunk-it variety in the orange that is duck sauce."

Is this for real?

Look at my Big Eye post on January 28, 2003, right here on this blog! JUST before this one!!! See this link from Spring 2000!. Frank Gonzales online thesis show.

Once again, I am certifiably freaked out. here is Steinhilber's ducksauce Steinhilber should be freaked out. Does he know he's done it again? Look at Tom Friedman's toothpaste painting. If you saw Steinhilber's installation at Signal 66 here in DC in 2002, one of his pieces was a huge untitled work, an abstract painting done with toothpaste on canvas that was so derivative of Tom Friedman's work (also "untitled" I may add) that despite it's minty aroma, left a bad taste in my mouth.


Steinhilber seems to pretty much tow the company line when it comes to "the transformation" of everyday commercial products into "formal constructions" that "engage in a dialogue with painting and installation" according to the blurb on him in the Fission/Fusion catalog. I thereby find it IMPOSSIBLE that he has not heard of Tom Friedman, who is hot enough to have a snappy little Phaidon book out about him with lots of pretty pictures. I feel more and more that is an ethical issue-does Steinhilber know he's presented works almost identical to other artists, in the case of toothpaste and ducksauce? I am familiar with Picasso's famous mantra about his work "If there's something to be stolen, I steal it." Keeping that in mind, at least Picasso tells us he's not above stealing others ideas-he's honest about that. If Steinhilber knows about these other pieces, what is he trying to accomplish by showing them with out any reference to the other artists?

I feel like a ratfink because I like Steinhilber's work; in fact I absolutely adore most of it. His AU thesis in 2002 where he put water filled notebook page protectors on the walk into AU's Watkins building structures. This show was followed by the show at MOCA where watercolor paint was added to the water. The piece where the colored water was injected into bubble wrap knocked me out. These waterworks seemed so smart and honest and personal to me.

If I see him do one more piece like toothpaste or ducksauce, I am going to be really, really sad. I mean how could this guy who has just finished being a full time MFA grad-student not know the Tom Friedman piece? Gonzales and Friedman are not household names, but Friedman has had a solo exhibit at MOMA, that's pretty damn noteworthy and noticeable. Steinhilber's been getting some decent recognition in this town (and nationally if you count Basel-Miami) , so how is it that the 'press' has not been a little more up on tracking down other artist purveyors of this borderline concept art that flirts with minimalist and formalist painting?


I think the major word here is 'interpretation'-and what is galling me is that there is no mention of these Steinhilber works being a derivation or interpretation if they are-and that infuriates me. People are going to show the work and apparently Mr. Steinhilber is not going to ever both to mention in his titles or blurbs or talks with curators that he's playing off of Mr. Friedman's and Mr. Gonzales's work (if he knows that he is). Really, for that matter, do the newspapers, gallery owners, art-dilettantes all get around enough to see the derivation? Is the art viewing public so busy and so distracted that they can't recall Friedman's one man show at MOMA? Is no one else going to say anything? I find that odd.

On March 13, 2003 in the Galleries column, I have to say, Jessica Dawson hit what I am trying to say on the nose, except she was talking about Mary Woodall's photo's at Connor Contemporary Art where Dawson is nice enough to mention another artist to Ms. Woodall by mentioning parenthetically about her photo's " (They have also, it must be said, been done. Japanese artist Naoya Hatakeyama comes immediately to mind. He shot his "Slow Glass" series through wet windshields in 2001.)".

This is what is freaking me out so much, people rant on about there not being anything 'new' in art. Has anyone stopped to consider what it means if there is nothing new in thought? It may sound childish, but I have invested a lot of time and money into art in my life, so it rankles me. If Frank Gonzales, Dan Steinhilber and Karen Joan Topping all come up with the brilliant idea to glue DUCKSAUCE packets to an art gallery wall, what the hell does that mean? It changes my perspective, has the audience that went to Fission/Fusion seen ART or a social phenomena. Apparently there are a bunch of us out there obsessed with Ducksauce. Or maybe there are overloads that look like ducksauce packets that are planting this collective image in our mind and they are going to take over the over the human race - a la Arthur Clarke's book Childhood's End. Conscious of the other guy's work or not it's weird, a toothpaste and ducksauce coinky-dink is too much for me.


I'm an artist myself and I go to enough gallery openings and know enough artists to know that when you show people your work or slides, or even just describe an un-built concept, in conversation these DC art dilettantes start off with "your work sounds like so-de-so", or "did you see so-n-so's show at blahdeblah's in NY" or "that idea reminds me of this English artist from the 80's snark de snark". Granted, most of the time, looking up one of these so-de-so names is barely interesting to me and makes me question if the person that thought to mention it in reference to my work ACTUALLY looked at or thought about MY work. I almost always try to follow these leads up because you HAVE TO. So if the DC insider art scene is so lame that there is not a gallery owner or newspaper columnist ready to tell Steinhilber about the Gonzales or the Friedman piece, that is pretty freakin lame. Let me be the wake up call before it happens again.

I wish I could have got this posted when Fission/Fusion was still up, but that did not happen. This is a BIG subject that still needs more attention than the little rant that I've written here. Anyone have a spare $10, 000 that would allow me to work on it for 6 months or so? Or, to be honest, I'd love to hear from all of these art guys to see if they find this spontaneous generation of art as freaky as I do. Artist's working together on shows is interesting, but artists that have never heard of each other coming up with the EXACT same presentation or concept is weird-which makes it SUPER interesting, right? This is not a thesis, a textbook entry, I'm asking the art community to link together their memory of particular artists and particular shows here in DC. You are only going to be able to follow me if you have seen what I've seen. From my side it seems that the subject of memory or collective memory in art just got bigger, I dub it "spontaneous memory" or de-ja'-rt.