Stephen Sutcliffe
2021I Am (For the Birds)
Stephen Sutcliffe
On his desk at the Brynmore Jones Library at Hull Universty Phillip Larkin kept a framed photograph, like an executive toy, of Guy the Gorilla with whom he identified as a fellow prisoner in drudgery. Guy was a famous exhibit at London Zoo. “His appearance was fearsome, yet his nature was very gentle; when small birds flew into his cage, he was often seen to lift them on his hands and examine them softly.” Guy died in his early 30s in 1978 of a heart attack during an operation on his infected teeth. His tooth decay had been caused by the fact that visitors were allowed to feed him sweets. Famously, in 2018, a fake excerpt from Michael Wolff’s biography claimed that White House staffers created a ‘Gorilla’ channel for Donald Trump to watch.
I Am (For the Birds)
Despair
Stephen Sutcliffe
Glasgow-based artist Stephen Sutcliffe's film Despair (2009) is inspired by and titled after the 1934 Vladimir Nabokov novel, a story of mistaken physical resemblance, murder and identity theft. Nabokov's themes of power and delusion, doubling and gameplay are anchored in Sutcliffe's collage through a prismatic treatment of visual material and sound. Sutcliffe quotes a parade of society portraits, photocopied handouts from a lecture series entitled 'Theories of Montage,' and Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 1978 adaptation of the novel in a dense sequence punctuated by baroque music composed by Jean-Baptiste Lully for the seventeenth century French king, Louis XIV.
Despair
Twixt Cup and Lip
Stephen Sutcliffe
This sound and video collage, produced in conjunction with a museum exhibit about Yorkshire playwright and novelist David Storey, draws from BBC outtakes, Edwardian-nostalgic commercial design, and other sources of mid-century British middlebrow to consider the vagaries of class mobility.
Twixt Cup and Lip
Writer in Residence
Stephen Sutcliffe
Writer in Residence take the form of a TV-style interview and continues Sutcliffe's interest in collage as a means by which to shake certainty and to surreptitiously undermine. Sutcliffe poses the melancholic hallucination that is Adrian Leverkuhn's meeting with the Devil in Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus (1947) in direct counterpoint to the conception of positive existentialism presented by Colin Wilson in his novel The Outsider (1956) - a philosophical standpoint that was, in turn, developed through Wilson's own critique of Leverkuhn's meeting with the Devil.
Writer in Residence