All things may long to persist in their being, as the title of Ben Butler’s installation tells us in a borrowed bit of Borges. But, according to Butler, they will not only fail to persist, they will also fail to know other beings, and to be known.
Butler’s wood skeleton of some enormous, anonymous, long-gone beast that has come to rest on the floor of Suyama Space makes mock of the pipe dream of penetration, of being inside another to the point of total comprehension. It has one very important moment: the moment when, no matter who you are, you are kicked out. It happens to everyone.
In literal terms, the sculpture is a piece of architecture rendered according to strict, gradated ratios between width and height, so that a hallway that starts at about 12 feet tall and 8 feet wide gets smaller and smaller as it curves around the room until it becomes a half-inch tall, millimeters-wide Lilliputian spiral not even big enough to accommodate a pinky toe in its upside-down U-shaped opening. Throughout the entire length of the curve, the form is open on both sides. It is also open on the ends, like an inviting tunnel—except there’s a point at which you no longer fit. You’ve walked, then slumped, then crawled, in some kind of devolution, and now you are exiled. You can only scale the rest of this thing with your eyes. Which makes you want to go back in.
