Field Trip: Paul Sutinen’s “Sculpture in the Form of a Building”

Recently I had the occasion to pay a visit to Paul Sutinen at Marylhurst University. After we talked he showed me where “Sculpture in the Form of a Building” and “Among the Pin Oaks” were installed behind the Mayer Art Building. We talked about the greyed patina the wood of “Sculpture” had taken on and how some of the boards were warping away from the structure. It’s perhaps even more beautiful now than it was when the wood was golden and new.

Via research I’m doing on another topic, I’d recently seen a photo of an early installation Sutinen had done in the unfinished basement of the Anne Hughes Gallery in 1976 consisting of rough wooden stakes driven into the dirt floor. It’s ominous and melancholy in equal measure as well as being formally beautiful in spite of its arte povera-ishness. Sutinen has a long relationship with wood, not as a source of content, but as a material means to an end…it’s reasonably inexpensive vs. say, stone. But its true as well that tree and house—respectively source and terminus (for much wood)—have been addressed/employed repeatedly in his siteworks and installations.

I asked Paul about the simple house form that has recurred in his work, because it doesn’t seem that the house form for Paul is expected to say anything about houseness. (See also, his “Sculpture in the Form of a Small Building in the Distance” at Nine Gallery in 2008 reviewed on PORT). “Sculpture has to take a form,” he said. And where does one go after the minimalist box? Paul said it occurred to him that his work uses found forms, that the saltbox house is just one of these found forms.

“Sculpture in the Form of a Building” was built at the time of the mid-career retrospective Terri Hopkins did of Sutinen’s work at Marylhurst’s Art Gym, Incidents and Ideas in 2000 (for which there is a great catalog). I was surprised and dismayed to hear that he is considering taking it down next year. “That would be ten years,” he says.

So may I urge you, on one of these bright days, to take a field trip down to Marylhurst and make your picnic on the lawn behind the Mayer Art Building. You’ll also see, if you look hard enough under the trees close to the building, his sitework, “Among the Pin Oaks,” two intersecting concrete block paths laid from trunk base to trunk base of four oak trees. Both worth the trip.