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Box Project
By Regina Hackett
Early in the evening on July 15 at the Lawrimore Project, crowds gathered to see John Sutton, Ben Beres, and Zac Culler pop out of a box.
The box in the center of the room was huge, and the audience was packed in tight double rows on the outer rim of the space. To be more comfortable in the heat and secure our body bubbles — popped by each other's close proximity — we could have fanned into the empty aisle between us and the plywood crate but didn't, respecting a word-of-mouth warning against doing so.
When the walls fell suddenly backward, they landed above us in a diagonal. The message from artists to audience was clear: Back up.
If you're an artist no one notices, you're the tree falling alone in the forest with no record of your thud. Necessary as witnesses are, however, they get in the way.
That's why Miles Davis turned his back on jazz club customers in the 1950s. He wanted to concentrate on his sound instead of the people who paid to hear it.
That's why Vito Acconci masturbated beneath the sloped floor of the Sonnabend Gallery in 1971 ("Seedbed"), shutting out the audience as he implicated it with his amplified muttering.
That's why Michael Heizer works in the Nevada desert, threatening with a gun anyone who shows up at his sites uninvited.
SuttonBeresCuller, on the other hand, mark the divide between us and them in order to activate it. They wouldn't have moved us back if they weren't certain we'd surge forward afterward to find out what they'd been doing in there since the Lawrimore Project opened on June 22 with the box as its conspicuous dead spot.
Photo Courtesy of SBC and Lawrimore Project
About the Lawrimore Project: Its drab exterior belies its ambitions. Even though Scott Lawrimore took over the building from a sign company, there's no flashy sign announcing his presence.
Annie Han and Daniel Milhalyo — an architectural/artist team who go by the name Lead Pencil — designed the space, which is unlike any other in Seattle.
The first room, initially filled with SutterBeresCuller's box, is raw, with a stained concrete floor, four skylights, and concrete board walls. Beside it is a mint-green waiting room, where slides projected above the door catalog artists' work.
There's a bathroom, with a Marcel Duchamp mustache cut into a mirror.
Past the raw entry room, there's elegance: a series of conventionally white-walled galleries with bamboo floors, including a video room and an outdoor sculpture garden. Because he was raised in a trailer park, Lawrimore's office stands on concrete blocks. The office exterior is Hello Kitty pink, a shade Lawrimore matched from his wife's vibrator.
Lawrimore is focusing on video, installation, photography, and performance. Nearly all his artists, heavily from the region, lean toward the conceptual instead of the sensuous. He represents no painters. Willem DeKooning famously said, "Flesh is the reason oil paint was invented." Lawrimore doesn't care.
Back to the box.
"We kicked around a lot of ideas," said Beres, "duplicating the gallery itself in smaller form, some kind of island within an island, getting nowhere until Zac said two words: Chinese restaurant." The Lawrimore Project, which SuttonBeresCuller helped build, is just outside the International District. Each night, somebody packed in Chinese food or they all trooped over.
"It's where we were," said Beres.
"The Three Dragons" is their version of "The Beanery" from 1965, Kienholz's homage to surrealist down time, a hole-in-the-wall, stop-time sanctuary from war and rumors of war, racism, poverty, and dread. But unlike the retreat of "The Beanery," "The Three Dragons" slides seamlessly into real time, with real enough Chinese restaurant architecture, real chickens cooked and hanging in the smudged front window, garbage and a cigarette butt out the back, and real people eating inside.
Photo Courtesy of SBC and Lawrimore Project
On opening night, one couple talked over fried rice and spring rolls while another had recently departed, leaving dirty dishes and a cheapskate tip. In the other Lawrimore galleries are large, glossy photos documenting past SuttonBeresCuller performances. They've been working on Seattle streets (and sometimes waterways) since they graduated from Cornish College of the Arts in 2000.
Photo Courtesy of SBC and Lawrimore Project
Is green space dwindling? SuttonBeresCuller came to our rescue with their portable "Trailer Park," now in the sculpture garden. They trucked it around town, complete with a bench, grass, and a small tree.
Beside the garden on wheels is their living room on a flatbed truck ("There Goes the Neighborhood") which they drove around King County, parked, and watched TV while sitting on a sofa. Passersby who stopped to talk became collaborators.
When the Whitney Museum sponsored a barge carrying a forest designed by Robert Smithson to be towed around Manhattan, SuttonBeresCuller designed their own cartoon-yellow island, hopped aboard, and launched it onto Lake Washington, stopping traffic with the clownish wonder of it all.
The Lawrimore Project is their first gallery, and they are its first show. Lawrimore's challenge is to prove that rigorously conceptual artists operating below the national radar can both score commercially on the local scene and rise above it.
"I don't have any illusions that Seattle is going to be the next Los Angeles," said Lawrimore. "But we're building something bigger here, and I want to be part of it."
