ON DAVID KENNEDY CUTLER
When we pretend that we’re dead.
I know David. Or rather I know Davids. We are friends, and with friends it is conventional to devote some part of a catalog essay to the origin story—to the salad days of bountiful youth. Here I could write about Paris where David and I met 20 years ago. I could describe the art, or the wine, or the portraits we painted of each other. I could detail all the seemingly inconsequential moments that might have birthed monumental shifts in our lives, just as tiny seeds grow into shelteringoaks. I could, but I won’t. Those memories are like a bottle of wine that is still too young to drink (even for a nineteen year old at the foot of the Eiffel Tower), or like a letter in a time capsule that won’t be opened for another sixty years. I will leave it at this: our roots were in Paris and writing this essay is an attempt to sketch the shape of the tree.
The first time I saw David’s work in a gallery was at D’amelio Terras in 2008. For that show, David exhibited a large-scale sculpture entitled The Greatest. The work consists of a pile of splintered planks, as if it were the shipwrecked raft of the Medusa or the embattled barricades of the French Revolution, oscillating between Castawayand Les Miserables. At the base of the debris, four grimy black-and-white flannel shirts—cast into personified movement—struggle upwards like soot-covered street urchins clambering towards the sky. At the top of the heap, a lone pink flannel shirt hangs aloft—far above the others—glistening and exalted. Ten years later, in his exhibition Off Season, the specter of that flannel shirt hovers still. Flannel appears and disappears in the work, weaving in and out over time in an enactment of fibers making fabric or colors creating the pattern plaid.
Flannel is a staple, as ever-present as bread. David wears it. His companions wear it. His sculptures wear it. It is subject, costume, abstraction, symbol, and pattern. I don’t think one can fully understand David’s work without considering his use of flannel, but I need to sort through my own subjective nostalgia before I can get into that pile of shirts. I grew up in the 90s, so this may veer into cringe territory. That is my first disclaimer. Another is this: I am not a fashion historian. Though it is interesting to note that David’s wife is. As an aside this is an intriguing biographical fact considering his reliance on clothes and costume in the work, the same way that I make work about photography and fell in love with a photographer. The chicken or the egg? I’m getting off topic. So, with all disclaimers aside, here is the story of flannel as I remember it.
In the early nineties, a small group of bands from Seattle became famous. Tad. Skin Yard. Green River. 7 year bitch. Just kidding. You know who I mean. Nirvana. Soundgarden. Pearl Jam. In the Pacific Northwest, the heavy rotation of flannel was a byproduct of the logging and fishing industries in which the fabric was a functional uniform. Flannel shirts were ubiquitous in the local thrift stores where one found their clothes. So the bands wore flannel and then everyone wore flannel. The shirts became symbolic two-fold: for an allegiance to the temple of grunge (aka the Temple of the Dog) and for sympathy with blue-collar America. David then is both a child of his native Vermont (for whom wearing flannel is an L.L. Bean-given birthright) and also a child of the nineties (with all the philosophical connections to my so-called grunge).
The shirts are skins. Plaid patterns cloak the artist, the companions, and the sculptures in a broadcast of meaning. In Off Season, and in his practice at large, David suggests that clothes—flannels, aprons, jeans and Vans—are membranes worn in a gesture of unspoken language. Clothes are textless signifiers. The medium is the message, and fashion is an assertion of cultural membership. What then is flannel’s message? “I am not a shirt that you wear to the office. I am the fabric of labor. I work, but I do not work for The Man.” The birth of grunge came at a moment of heightened distrust in the American white-collar class. Nirvana released Bleachin 1989, at the end of the Reagan ‘greed is good’ years, at the collapse of stock market on Black Monday, and at the fall of the communism—the only real competitor to capitalism. To camouflage your body in flannel was to cloak yourself in the skin of John Lennon’s Working Class Hero. These are shirts that say, “I am not The Man.”
Yet grunge was not a movement of class warfare against the power elite. Instead, its icons advocated complete resignation from system and society. I mean Kurt killedhimself. Dead. I don’t read that suicide vis-à-vis pop psychology—as the result of drug addiction or depression or early childhood trauma—rather I see his shooting as a brutal indictment of the market and a bloody defense of artistic purity. “I would prefer not.” That’s what grunge was about. That’s what the shirts are saying. That’s also the mantra of Herman Melville’s eponymous character in Bartleby, the Scrivener. In the novella, Melville writes of an entrenched bureaucrat who one day decides no more. “I would prefer not,” Bartleby says.[i]Bartleby has the heart of a slacker, not lazy so much as mutinous. Sadly, things don’t end well for him. An abdication of corporate servitude is a slippery slope into an abdication of life itself—that’s what happened to Kurt afterall—but for Melville (or for the thousands of teenagers transfixed by the death of Kurt Cobain) an unwillingness to play by the rules is the only revolt possible in a capitalist system that has you by the throat. Or as the band L7 would put it, “We pretend that we’re dead.”[ii]
In Off Season,David’s companions are the Bartlebys. Flopping around useless—these dummies are the molted skins of past Davids, the flannel-clad ghosts of fallen grunge icons (Kurt, Chris, Layne, Hillel, Scott), and the crumpled embodiments of nineties slackerism. When David commands, “Let’s build a shelter,” they would prefer not. When David suggests, “Let’s gather food,” they would prefer not. They will not be ruled, nor will they legitimize a corrupt system by playing along with his games, even if it means that the only alternative is to lie down and die. We pretend that we’re dead.Yet these clones are Davids too, or David is them. So one cannot help but to extend the metaphor of Bartleby to David and to the superstructure of the exhibition. Think about it. David chose to show at a gallery in the off-season and to produce his most ambitious work to date as a performance piece that very few people will ever see. I would prefer not.
I feel that choice, and this entire show, in the primordial pit of my soul—its complicated relationship to authority and its idealistic affirmation of artistic integrity. I grew up in the nineties too, going to John Waters’ movies and $7 Fugazi shows. I’ve watched myself over the last 25 years sabotage any opportunity for profitability in favor of better work. I bet you could trace that entire trajectory back to some seminal moment in my bedroom listening to Bleachon tape, full-volume in headphones. I’m a negative creep.The omnipresence of the flannel shirts in David’s work suggests that the early nineties had an outsized effect on him as well, and I would argue on all those who came of age during those years. Demography is destiny. A collective consciousness forms between peers at a seismic moment. There is a small group of people—born between 1976 and 1980—who by many sociological studies are neither Generation X nor Millennial, including David and myself. Us cusp people have a foot in both the pre and post Internet world. We are the digital tweeners who entered young adulthood in The Year that Punk Broke—a fault line that can be traced all the way forward to Off Season.
The early nineties is the breakpoint between the analog and digital worlds. Bleachwas released the same year that the World Wide Web was invented. David and I are both tech tweens—born in that group of people old enough to know the world without the internet, social media, or cell phones, yet young enough to be early adopters in the digital revolution. I wrote letters, but was the first person I knew with an email address. I shot film, but got a camera phone as soon as they were released. This liminal timing forged a dual-consciousness, a bifurcated digital and analog self in all who came of age at that transitional moment. In Off Season, David’s companions are an outward manifestation of this split personality, and this duality runs through all the exhibition’s sculptures and performances. His works require real objects—kale, bread, potatoes, shoes, and shirts—but then through scanning, the physical items transmogrify into digital memes, able to be copy and pasted ad nauseam. Kale emoji. Bread emoji. Potato. Sad face. Happy face. Hand. Hand. Scissors. Shirt. Kale. Kale. Bread. Shoe. Hammer. Blank face. Blank face. Blank face.
This analog/digital divide is at the core of the exhibition’s conceptual framework as well. On one hand, the premise of Off Seasonis a literal—analog—excursion. David is physically in a remote location—surviving—writing dispatches back to polite society. He is Ernest Shackelton crossing Antarctica, leading the men, and eating his dogs. From this analog perspective, the piece defines art as a bodily expedition. Making artwork is a metaphor for a survivalist journey across the unknown. It is Ahab’s battle against whiteness in Moby Dick. The blank canvas is a vast ocean to be crossed, and an empty gallery is a snow-covered continent to discover. Yet on the other hand, Off Seasonalso suggests contemporary—digital—corollaries. The exhibition evokes an eagle nest cam or a Minecraftlivestream on Twitch. From this digital perspective, the metaphor is the same as Abromivic’s Artist is Present—creating artwork is a performance, all the world is a stage, and all the people are its audience. Art is click bait; viewer is follower. As a digital tween, David is especially suited to draw the parallels between these two realities—physical past and virtual future. Shackleton as Kardashian. Bread as Bread Emoji. David as his own twitter bot.
Beyond the digital/analog split, Off Seasonembodies the broader ethos of grunge. The philosophy of the early nineties can be summed up as late-capitalist existentialism. Not only is life doomed (i.e. you die), but along the way you’re also an unwitting slave to corporations. You participate in the corrupt system of capitalism with anything you do—working, eating, or shopping. You are The Man. You serve The Man. You are the servant. You serve the servants. Think of Off Season. David’s companions are puppets. Yet, the companions are Davids. Hence, David is both puppet and Master of Puppets (sorry, Kurt). The Man and the slave. In this closed-loop of capitalism, to be an artist is to be co-opted. Selling out is as inevitable as is death. However, despite this cynicism, there was a core of idealism at the heart of grunge that can’t be downplayed. In the nineties, caring was cool and artists shared a desire to make something unsullied in that short time before they inevitably sold out and/or died.
The dilemma then was to make something meaningful, but do so without being owned—to record commercial albums, but then sell them for $7, ala Fugazi; to play festivals, but then throw your tampon at the audience, ala L7; to become famous, but then kill yourself, ala Nirvana. Nirvana is the quintessential icon of the nineties for good reason. The band’s history perfectly represents each stage of art production—pure art, selling out, and then death. Kurt’s life was a perfect three-act plot. In Off Season, David rides that same razors-edge between corporate servitude and artistic idealism—to live in the luxurious Hamptons, but then eek out his living as a hobo; to show in a commercial gallery, but then give away the bulk of his labor. The wealth of Off Seasonis not for sale. The art is intangible, and this denial of capital is career suicide, ala Kurt. The work—action, performance, livestream and dispatch—is free and cannot be bought or sold, co-opted or commercialized. This is as grunge as it gets. Serve the servants.
Off Season did of course produce some concrete objects in the end, but even these reinforce a nineties existentialist reading about the absurdity of life. At the close of the show, there is a series of sculptures composed from the remains of the performances—objects mashed into their digital representations. Life and memory, signifier and sign, individual and avatar—all flatten into elegies for the off-season. The companions are sleeping now (dead?) and encased in glass sleds (coffins?). Shoes are organized into diagrams of the trudge, their wear indicative of the hard crossing. Flannel shirts are hung up and retired. Potatoes—eaten—are commemorated in sentimental portraits. Leftover bread is discarded in piles. These works are indexical byproducts of the cumbersome and nonsensical actions of the off-season—remnants that re-enforce the irony of the human condition. Life is absurd. We are biologically driven to toil ceaselessly in survival even though death is inevitable. I eat. I work. I build things. I clean. I love. But still… I die. My life will cease whether I do all those actions or not. There is only one way this will end.
Cue the laughter. Sure, there is an unavoidable tragedy at the center of any human life. However, that is the premise, the starting point. What follows—the shape of the life—is where meaning is derived. I’m wandering into Samuel Beckett territory. As Beckett said, “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” This is the crux of it. Life is tragic, and yet we endure. What else are you going to do? Then in the absurd passion play that unfolds, we might find some sliver of meaning or joy. I’m glad we’ve gotten to Beckett. The single most important text to consider in relation to Off Seasonis Beckett’s Molloy. However, though I know enough to say this with unflinching certainty, my ego does not extend far enough to allow me to get into an explication of Beckett here. (Get me drunk on a $2 Beaujolais in 1999 and I might tell you a thing or two about Beckett, but not here, not now.) So, let us take the famous sucking stone passage from Molloyand consider it in relation to Off Season and let Beckett speak for himself. In this passage, the eponymous main character describes his pastime of sucking small beach stones, and his dilemmas in that action, and his solutions to those dilemmas, and so on:
I took advantage of being at the seaside to lay in a store of sucking stones. Yes, on this occasion I laid in a considerable store. I distributed them equally among my four pockets and sucked them turn and turn about. This raised a problem which I first solved in the following way. I had say sixteen stones, four in each of my four pockets, these being the two pockets of my trousers and the two pockets of my greatcoat. Taking a stone from the right pocket of my greatcoat, and putting it in my mouth, I replaced it in the right pocket of my greatcoat by a stone from the right pocket of my trousers, which I replaced by a stone from the left pocket of my trousers, which I replaced by a stone from the left pocket of my greatcoat, which I replaced by the stone, which was in my mouth, as soon as I had finished sucking it. In this way there were always four stones in each of my four pockets, but not quite the same stones. And when the desire to suck took hold of me again, I drew again on the right pocket of my greatcoat, certain of not taking the same stone as the last time. And while I sucked it I rearranged the other stones in the way I have just described. And so on. But this solution did not satisfy me fully. For it did not escape me that, by an extraordinary hazard, the four stones circulating thus might always be the same four. In which case, far from sucking the sixteen stones turn and turn about, I was really only sucking four, always the same, turn and turn about. But I shook them well in my pockets, before I began to suck, and again, while I sucked, before transferring them, in the hope of obtaining a more general circulation of the stones from pocket to pocket. But this was only a makeshift that could not content a man like me. So I began to look for something else…
Molloy goes on to describes his solutions, which are complicated by further dilemmas, which are followed by new solutions, which in turn are complicated by further dilemmas. This continues for some great length and then this:
I felt the weight of the stones dragging me now to one side, now to the other. So it was something more than a principle I abandoned, when I abandoned the equal distribution, it was a bodily need. But to suck the stones in the way I have described, not haphazard, but with method, was also I think a bodily need. Here then were two incompatible bodily needs, at loggerheads. Such things happen. But deep down I didn’t give a tinker’s curse about being off my balance, dragged to the right hand or the left, backwards and forwards. And deep down it was all the same to me whether I sucked a different stone each time or always the same stone, until the end of time. For they all tasted exactly the same. And if I had collected sixteen, it was not in order to ballast myself in such and such a way, or to suck them turn about, but simply to have a little store, so as never to be without. But deep down I didn’t give a fiddler’s curse about being without, when they were all gone they would be all gone, I wouldn’t be any the worse off, or hardly any. And the solution to which I rallied in the end was to throw away all the stones but one, which I kept now in one pocket, now in another, and which of course I soon lost, or threw away, or gave away, or swallowed …[iii]
Reading David’s dispatches from Off Season, I often felt like I was reading Molloy. This passage from the novel is a keen example of how Beckett lays out the bleakness of the existential condition, but like in Off Seasonthere is no whiff of cynicism or despair. Life is absurd yes, but also sort of touching—a doomed sweetness (like in a Daniel Johnston kind of way). Beckett concerns himself with the minute aspects of human cognition that become charming in their redundancies, obsession, and illogic. Yet, he is equally focused on the deeper questions of what this all means. What is thought? What is action? What is purpose? How about this: we are bound to a timeline that is not infinite, and yet it is not brief either; death is inescapable, but there are so many hours to contemplate it, to wait for it, to avoid it—hours that must be filled with… something. Thus we are torn: awestruck and sick in the face of our impending death, but left with a fairly long stretch of time to pass before the end arrives. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.
Time to get to work then—solving, subsisting, sucking. Surviving is not the act of living, but the act of forestalling death. This is the meaning of work, and this is the central theme of Off Season. Labor is the denial of dying and placeholder of meaning; art is labor. Death will win the end, but in the meantime we will invent new ways to forget, to complicate, to solve and resolve, to not give up, to not suffer, and to not die. At least not today. In Off Season,David suggests such fictions can supplant reality—the way a tattered shirt becomes a symbol for generational malaise. The off season then can be understood as any space beyond the prosaic suffering of the day-to-day; it is the cognitive space within the mind—as in Molloy—and the virtual space of the internet—as in the eagle cam. Yet at its core, the off-season is the afterlife. Somewhere out in the Hamptons, there is a Leonard Cohen afterworld—where the self dissolves and devolves—where Kurt is an angel (pregnant and skinless). Hallelujah.
The end. The show is over. No more show. Pack up your coats and go home. Wash away. There was a month of tinkering, fiddling, and reveling in the myriad ways a mind can solve a problem, but there will be no satisfying conclusion. The performance was complete, a self-contained metaphor for a lifespan. There was chaos and beauty, companionship and loneliness, meals and rest, boredom and work. Maybe David saved a few stones or potatoes to take home with him, but those too will eventually be lost after floating around between pockets and rooms for a while. The gallery is empty again. The live-stream has gone black. The off-season is over. No more the winter of his discontent. And then… someday… everyone you know will die. I’ll be dead too—some 60 years hence—and at my funeral you can crack open a bottle of perfectly-aged wine, and open a letter in a time capsule to read a thing or two about Paris. Vive la France!
[i]Herman Melville, Bartleby: The Scrivner: a Story of Wall Street(Hoboken, NJ: Melville House Pub, 2004).
[ii]L7, “Pretend we’re dead,” track 3 on Bricks are Heavy, Slash Records., 1992.
[iii]Samuel Beckett, Molloy (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1988).