SuttonBeresCuller – blowing in a blocked wind

John Sutton, Ben Beres and Zac Culler teamed up ten years ago as students at Cornish College, building a brick wall to block entrance to the faculty parking lot. Their current exhibit at Lawrimore Project gives them a chance to look backward to assess their accomplishments.

The Answer, My Friend…, 2009
Acrylic, electric fans, 56 cubic feet of circulating air
88 x 34 x 34 inches

Every fan whirs away, generating nothing. It’s not easy being the joker in the pack, the sane man in King Lear’s court, the forward momentum surrounded by inertia. Even artists who play it straight are surrounded by what opposes them, be they those rarities encased in success or the more common breed, hearing the echo of their actions bounce off the walls of empty rooms.

Nobody called, nobody came in, nothing happened, nobody cared if I died or went to El Paso.

Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, talking to himself in The High Window.

SuttonBeresCuller cannot claim to be talking to themselves. The admiration that is strong in Seattle increasingly extends beyond it. One stage performance which I didn’t see earned them the honor of a take-’em-out review by Jen Graves.

Their response is in the current show. On beach stones they incised every single word.

A Dissent, 2009 Sandblasted Mexican beach pebbles.

Crouching down for a better look, I found shallow, hoax and my name, the last because her piece included an attack on me, for this review. (Its headline is unfortunate. Critics employed at newspapers don’t write their own and yet, if their reviews live at all, they live on their headlines.)

Incised words on stones are a sweetness-and-light stable in gift shops. The art world has even more reason to look favorably on piles of precious things, trained to do so by Felix Gonzalez-Torres. A Dissent is both funny and effective. Change the joke and slip the yoke, what Ralph Ellison called “a kind of jujitsu of the spirit, a denial and rejection through agreement.”

In 2002 at the now defunct ConWorks, SuttonBeresCuller offered a giant pencil suspended from the ceiling which audience members could push in order to draw. When Lawrimore Project opened in 2006, SBC installed it as a stand-alone sculpture.

What a difference a day (or two) makes. Here’s their current version:

In her review of the current show, a backpedaling Graves noted the work is marked by frustration and exhaustion. To make art about exhaustion is not the same as producing exhausted art. But I digress as well as sympathize. Backpedaling is frustrating and exhausting too.

Barely in Need, SBC panhandling performance. 2003

SBC’s most ambitious foray into public art, an attempt to turn an abandoned gas station into a park, has been blocked at every turn. And yet, four years in, they’re still at it, with a model of the ultimate result in the show. (My story about the ecological complications here.) They may be insane, but they are not exhausted.