Sutton and Connor Q + A

Q: In the Febreze Scenstories Project, you center the exhibition on a common consumer product. In the past you have used Bic Lighters and World Hand Dryers in your work. What drives your fascination with American consumerism and marketing?

A: I think I’ve always had an affinity for the appropriation of material culture—whether it is the imagery and uses of pictorialism in marketing, the graphic development of consistent brand identity …. or the strangeness of the objects themselves…how alien would our civilization appear to an archeologist working 2,000 years from now uncovering a Febreze Scentstory?

I’m not sure when and where that fascination of mine started, but I grew up in a very material culture oriented place. In high school some of my earliest paintings were of logos and signage. I think the taste for archetypal Pop imagery is a legacy you inherit as an American artist. The lineage of such artists as Indiana, Warhol, Wesselman, Ruscha, Burden, Koons, Art Guys and Tom Sachs was one that I have embraced and never really let go. Although the nature of art making continues to change…I think their emphasis on language and embrace of material culture was very influential on the development of my own ideas about what art, and by extension, an artistic practice could be.

I try to demonstrate in my work that you-can-do-this-yourself … and also try to let viewers participate in the work … not merely offering something for them to look at and contemplate— < for me> that has always been an inherently condescending relationship. I don’t really want to have an artifact leftover at the end of the day to be sold … I just want to engender the honest transmission of ideas. Is it a Utopian idea, fraught with contradiction …. but there it is.

Q: Explain how Scentstories reclaims and alters narrative structure.

A: The idea behind the commercial product is that the device offers you a sort of olfactory story: as opposed to one static, unitary smell, telling a sort of abstract ‘narrative’. The Febreze disk plays a story composed of smells, analogous to the way in which a DVD player plays both audio and video signals to tell a story.

For instance, one disk is titled On a Tropical Island. This particular disk features five distinct ‘chapters’: 1)sangria at sunset; 2)collecting coconuts on the beach; 3)mist from the falls; 4)gathering tropical oranges; and 5)picking baskets of pineapples. The thesis behind Proctor & Gamble’s product is that ifa story can be told through both auditory and visual stimuli, why not smell? What the product does, albeit unintentionally, is force the consuming public to greatly expand their pre-existing notions of what a story, and by extension, what language itself is. What I, as an artist, intend to do is to celebrate that incidental function through an act of recontextualization.

If I had the technology, a nice project would be some Scentstories of my own creation which would supplement the Proctor & Gamble catalog of titles. I was thinking an action movie Scentstory (like Lethal Weapon) would be nice...
ch1: Mel Gibson's beer breath
ch2: burning tires and burning human hair
ch3: Lysol disinfectant in dank police HQ
ch4: cheap perfume and armpit BO
ch5: sulfurous gunpowder smell-explosion

Q: As your audience experiences this alternative form of narrative, how might their subjective responses shape the outcome of the project?

A: Since the project is first and foremost a writing project, the responses of the viewer, if they decide to participate, complete the work. If no one participated I wouldn’t have anything to put on display. Their subjective responses are the project.

As to the nature of what to write, that is the exclusive prerogative of the participant… they can tell me to fuck off and that my project totally sucks and that’s okay. They can actually decide to write something narrative or anecdotal and that’s okay too. Since it is free writing, they define what they write. Proctor & Gamble have basically taken five vaguely associated scents, put them on a disk, and called it a “story”—not a medley, a melody, a poem, or an anthology, a “story”. Given that claim, I think a wide variety of responses are encouraged.

Q: Since your birthday, last July, you have been obsessively writing down everything you eat or drink. What did you have for dinner last night?

A: Oh, the food diary… I thought I might keep track of all that I consumed during my 28th year. This diary is being pursued in parallel with a log of the hours I’ve slept, and a log of the hours I’ve worked.

Like any good project, and here is where art is very analogous to scientific research, it has created more questions than answers…if you are recording things you’ve orally consumed do you have to include aspirin and medication? And of course how far do you go? So to answer your question, records show that I consumed a quart of beef fried rice and four 12-ounce Harp lager beers last night.