The Beginning of the Middle

Twelve electric fans, arranged like a standing figure, run furiously
inside a large acrylic vitrine. All that energy, and for what? The air
never circulates out of the box. Is this SuttonBeresCuller’s sly
statement about being an artist in Seattle—a solitary figure all
locked up and whirring and whirring? The piece is called The
Answer, My Friend… How many roads must a man walk down?

SBC’s new show at Lawrimore Project is marked by frustration and
exhaustion. This is the beginning of the middle for these three
artists, who were hailed as historic almost the moment they burst onto
the scene after graduating from Cornish College of the Arts, and who
were chosen as Stranger Geniuses in 2005. At this point, they are past
their first rush of fame—and past their first backlash. Something
new, and more real, is happening.

To Make Ends Meet, leaning on one wall, is a stubby
revision of a giant pencil sculpture they showed in 2006 when Lawrimore
Project first opened. Back then, the pencil was as tall as the ceiling,
and it towered over a piece of paper on the floor—its own wishful
phony receipt of sale made out to the Whitney Museum of American Art.
It announced the fresh ambition of the artists (and of the new gallery,
too), but the Whitney has not yet bought that pencil, or anything else
by SBC—and the art market, along with the rest of the world
economy, has crashed. Now, the pencil (again built around a real core
of graphite) has been whittled down to the height of a stool and on it
is printed (as a reference to the type of graphite, but also a double
entendre) “Hard.” Hard to make ends meet. Hard to keep whirring in a
box. Hard when a decade takes a dive.

SBC has seen its share of success in the last three years. But on
either side of To Make Ends Meet are some explanations for
the frustration and exhaustion.

In one corner is a scale model of the monster project that has been
consuming most of their time for more than a year: the Mini Mart
City Park they’re building in Georgetown. They’re transforming a
vacant, highly polluted gas station site from the 1930s into a
community center and pocket park, and the process has been almost
farcically onerous. King County is involved. Community councils. The
EPA. And beyond the environmental-­cleanup factor (a tester who
came out and drilled 16-foot holes into the ground told the artists,
“This is a good demonstration of worst-case scenario”), the site
is unstable fill over an old riverbed in a liquefaction zone.
“Everybody has told us to stop,” Ben Beres told me when I
visited this summer. “But we intend to persevere, to exhaust every
possibility,” John Sutton said. “It feels really good to be working on
something that’s larger than us.”

SBC’s plan is to build the park and then give it to the city or the
parks department, to be run by a community group, like an arts P-Patch.
The project is a major public gift and has support from the New York
City–based granting organization Creative Capital as well as
local partners (the artists have sunk thousands of their own dollars
into it already).

The scale model of Mini Mart City Park is displayed on a
sawhorselike pedestal, with a winking, spotlighted puddle of oil
staining the floor below. Photographs of work already done on the site
play on a monitor on the wall. If they’re able to pull it off, SBC will
join the company of other artists who’ve made monumental, lasting
contributions to the local landscape: Robert Morris, Herbert Bayer,
Buster Simpson, Mark Dion—giants all.

But becoming giants means taking heat. On the other side of the
gallery from the park model is A Dissent, which references
an unpleasant brush with criticism. The installation has the same title
as a review I posted to The Stranger‘s blog on June 18, 2007,
in which I dissented (harshly) from the uproariously positive reception
of an SBC performance at On the Boards. The artists have turned the
review into a heap of stones, 535 stones to be precise, each one
hand-sandblasted with one of the 535 words of the review. It’s a Zen
exercise, actually. (Given that I never want to be part of any club
that would have me as a member, I’m ambivalent about being part of
their work. It’s not uncommon for artists to respond to critics, but in
a strange coincidence, artist Jim Riswold currently has a piece in a
Portland show that also reprints a negative review I wrote about his
work.)

The message here is that these artists intend to endure. A
Dissent is not reactive, it’s transformative. Throw 535 words at
them, and they will spend hours of painstaking labor changing them,
working through them. A Dissentdoesn’t come from
nowhere: It connects to Beres’s solo work—exquisite and highly
social prints of nervous, obsessively squeezed text.

Working socially—internally as three individuals and
externally as a trio—is the underlying condition of SBC. They’ve
been dubbed “the boys,” and in this show they use boyishness to
describe American naiveté toward war. Flight Path,
their most serious sculpture (a departure, really), is made of model
planes they sat around and assembled, like men separated from the
realities of war (grandfathers remembering and reassembling, or young
boys playing at their futures).

Flight Path is an MDF (wood composite) reconstruction of an
antiaircraft gun, painted gray and pointed toward the highest
concentration of U.S. military forces in the world. (Currently, it
faces Iraq and Afghanistan.) It sprays a shower of model airplanes at
the wall (they’re suspended on a system of strings), with the planes
getting larger the farther away from the gun (and the closer to their
target) they get. It’s a reversal of the way seeing works (things look
bigger when they are closer), but a demonstration of a different
truth—the weapons we abstractly send into other countries quickly
grow into realities when they hit actual bodies.

This is a big show. SBC has morphed the white-cube room of the
gallery into the bronze room, a whole space devoted to that most
serious (and self-important) of mediums. The light switch is bronze.
The wall outlet is bronze. It’s like the interior of a mansion or a
museum. Bronze surveillance cameras have polished “lenses” that look
like pure gold. A convex surveillance mirror made entirely of polished
bronze—it’s so gorgeous it may as well be a Brancusi—is a
funny perversion of the aspirations of abstractions like, say,
Brancusi’s or even contemporary artist Anish Kapoor’s.

At the far end of the bronze room, a sagging bronze frame hangs on
the wall (Masterpiece) with a solid bronze
stanchionin front of it. Even touching the cold bronze of the
“velvet” rope doesn’t quite make it believable. On the floor nearby is
a banana peel—a reference to critics on the blogosphere who have
indicted SBC as mere pranksters—with a big chunk of banana
dejectedly still inside it.

The artists seem more relaxed in this new work. Their labor is
conspicuous (it takes hours to cast those bronzes, just as it took them
days to build a Chinese restaurant inside the gallery in 2007), but
arch and self-­mocking. They are digging deeper into art history,
beyond old standards Duchamp and Beuys—these new works associate
with, among other artists, Gavin Turk (the bronze castings of everyday
objects), Charles Ray (expressionlessness), and Robert Rauschenberg
(their series of copies of a graffiti-­covered bathroom mirror
taken from the Summit Public House follows Rauschenberg’s send-up of
gesturalism, Factum I and II

).

And they’ve withdrawn their own performing selves—their
visages only appear in this show behind gas masks, in postapocalyptic
photographs of them paddling down the Duwamish River (these are some of
their best photographs)—to address, in an ironically more
subjective mode, what has really been going on in their lives as
artists (and Americans) in the last three years. They are settling into
the hard business of being artists and trying to be gracious about
it.

This show is not their most fun or free-spirited. But it is layered,
sincere, undefensive, frustrated, exhausted, and funny: complex. This
show is a great sign, a sign that they intend to do much more than just
survive their own fame.