Through Dec 21.
The world is a laboratory, and we are the rats--it's almost just that simple. The way we are constantly negotiating with the external world, the way we register and internalize the tiniest shifts in information--this is fertile material for artists such as John Sutton, Ben Beres, and Zac Culler, who lay these interactions bare by putting simple actions into occasionally absurd frames, revealing the world in all its complicated splendor.
The connected questions that these artists ask and answer have to do with what it takes to activate a space, and what it takes to get people to participate. To this end, they've performed a number of what might be loosely called experiments, some of them in a tiny studio at Cornish (including one that required flooding the space with water), and some of them out along Broadway (such as one in which Beres encased himself in plaster and invited passersby to chip him out--which some did with a slightly surprising amount of vigor). What has distinguished Sutton, Culler, and Beres is that their experiments have the friendly, detached air--without the somewhat mean-spirited revelation that a lot of contemporary performance and installation encourages--of curious scientists observing our behavior, somehow without making us feel like rats.
Their current show, which functions almost as a retrospective--except that the artists are still very much at the beginning of their careers--is coolly professional, at times almost too much so, which is precisely what happens when you take certain kinds of performance work out of the world and put it into the gallery. The magnificent Trailer Park, a bit of idyllic greenspace mounted on a trailer that traveled around the city last summer, feels a little neutered, and the photographs of the trio's various performances seem abstract in the aggregate, instead of the specific investigations that they are.
But these are balanced by the immediacy of other projects, such as a Robert Therrien-style oversized bureau that you can duck under and stand upright inside--a function which, if you were alone in the gallery, you might not figure out, unless you were particularly adventurous. This sort of impulse is something the trio frequently explores--how you know what you can and can't do, and how you're rewarded when you cross boundaries you might not think to cross. In this case, at the opening, your reward was the vertiginous view above you, through a glass partition, of a little white-fur-lined compartment in which an androgynous girl in a red dress played with a spool of red thread, sometimes picking thoughtfully at a tangle, sometimes chasing the spool across the glass like a cat. On the other hand--and I liked this very much--in another corner of the gallery there is a basketball hoop and a basketball on the ground near it; what signals that this isn't an interactive gambit is the way the ball is carefully spotlighted. (I guess the reward here is that you don't make an ass of yourself.)
For the opening reception, the artists hired, in the style of Mexican artist Santiago Sierra, a pair of day laborers to assemble a pile of wooden houses out of precut wood. As it happens, one of the laborers didn't show up, and the job was offered--about six hours of work for $100--to a guy they found wandering around outside. The expected questions of authorship and abuse are certainly present, but what's most interesting is the imitation of how supply and demand works, with the question of who, exactly, is creating the demand left tantalizingly open; when I asked Beres what would happen to the completed houses, he shrugged.
This show swings between cleverness and moments of startling insight, between wrestling with influences and breaking away from them. And what eventually happened to the houses--and whether or not the artists anticipated this I have no idea--was that people started to help themselves. I took one myself, but before I reached the door, the house had come apart in my hands, and the whole cycle of production and consumption and its ambiguous consummation had asked and answered some pretty tart questions about our responsibility for objects and their makers. Such as: Do you get what you pay for?
