Roundabouts Now is thrilled to present a solo exhibition by Becky Sellinger. All Best, invites viewers to take a seat, have a laugh, talk to dogs and contemplate convenience culture in all its multifaceted horror and glory. An accomplished sculptor, Sellinger expertly wields humor to put a spotlight on the many absurdities we take for granted in our daily bread. Below please enjoy a text co-authored by Sellinger and writer H.R. Webster that fully explores the underpinnings of this prescient and brilliant work.

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All Best revolves around three interactive kinetic sculptures that playfully critique convenience culture and invite us to consider how industrialization and market logic infiltrate the everyday.        

Best Thing Since Sliced Bread is an automaton of a loaf of bread undulating under the bright lights of a puppet theater. In the early nineteenth century, bread became a mass-produced consumer product. The reproductive labor of caring for wild yeast cultures in the home (the term culture derives from the Latin colere, meaning to tend) was displaced by what Walter Benjamin called the “fantasmagoria of commodity culture,” magically appearing through industrial fermentation. Bread—a paradoxical symbol of both hospitality and currency—has served as a key player in twentieth-century political economies. Mechanized bread slicing, invented in 1928, was briefly banned in the US during the Second World War. Although one theory holds that the steel used in industrial slicers was needed for the war effort, the measure also spoke to the blurring of the domestic and industrial spheres “on the home front.” Bread, which had become a wholly industrialized product, saw its role shift as the needs of the political economy brought the domestic into the factory and the factory into the home. 

La Conquête du pain is a sculpture containing a continuous scroll of Peter Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread, which emerges from and disappears back into a two-slice toaster. Kropotkin, the Russian Anarcho-Communist known for popularizing the idea of “mutual aid,” asserts in his well-known “Bread Book” the right to wellbeing for all and calls for the collectivization of production of both necessities and luxury items. 

While the text scrolling through the toaster in La Conquête du pain comes directly from Kropotkin, the sculpture also speaks to the horror evoked in cinema by overabundant, homogenous commodity products. The Thief in Alejandro Jodorowsky’s film The Holy Mountain, whose punishment is to have a cast made of his body, wakes up to find himself surrounded by plaster replicas of the crucifixion in his image, and Scrooge McDuck cavorts on a pile of cash.

The first electric toaster was produced in 1893, just one year after “The Bread Book” was published in France. The quintessential machine-with-a-single-purpose, the widespread adoption of toasters in homes was predicated on the dislocation of bread-baking to the industrial sphere. In The Toaster Project, Thomas Thwaites’s 2011 book documenting his quest to build an electric toaster from scratch, Thwaites explores “the grand-scale processes hidden behind the smooth plastic casings of mundane everyday objects” and the “ever-widening gulf between general knowledge and the specialisms that make the modern world possible,” in an attempt to reintroduce friction into our relationship with consumer products. 

The scroll mechanism is a form of “crankie theater,” or moving panorama, a storytelling device popular in the eighteenth century. The mechanism, which winds the text up into the gallery’s architecture, recalls Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp being wound through the gears on a conveyor belt while working an assembly line in Modern Times. Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread is widely considered to have been inspired, in part, by the author’s experiences in the Jura Mountains of Switzerland, where anarchist clockmakers formed cooperatively run factories. Kropotkin and the clockmakers rejected the growing prevalence of Taylorism, or scientific management, which led to the hyper-specialized, assembly-line labor that Chaplin lampoons in Modern Times. 

Give a Dog a Good Name features two life-sized talking dogs that form the base of a bench. You are invited to sit on the bench while the dogs recite “Give a Dog a Good Name,” a chapter from Dale Carnegie’s best-selling book How to Win Friends and Influence People, which instructs readers to use praise to foster worker productivity. Carnegie’s book introduced readers to the growing field of market psychology, and has sold over thirty million copies since it was published in 1936, continuing to inspire a pernicious emphasis on applying market principles to all social interactions. 

Carnegie figures the managerial class as masters, providing their workers with treats in order to ensure their continued loyalty. Give a Dog a Good Name is also inspired by Victorian furniture, which often employed animal caryatids, or carved figures, traditionally in the form of women, tasked with holding up an edifice. From cabriole legs ending in claw feet to lion-head ornaments on bedposts, Victorians harnessed the new industrial production of furniture to make ornate decorations available to the new middle class. 

In Give a Dog a Good Name, the dogs not only hold up the bench, but they speak, calling to mind the uncanny consumer utopia of Disney’s Carousel of Progress, an animatronic stage show that debuted at the 1964 World’s Fair and was developed as a General Electric marketing tool. The Carousel of Progress depicts an American home full of “modern conveniences” where animatronic figures speak adoringly about the domestic technologies of the era. As Murray Bookchin writes in Post-Scarcity Anarchism, our “Needs are tailored by the mass media to create a public demand for utterly useless commodities,” but ironically, although the animatronic figures at Disney have stood the test of time, the products they shill were “carefully engineered to deteriorate after a predetermined period of time.” 

In conversation with the sculptures is a series of three lithographs titled Codex 1-3 that serves as a Rosetta Stone—offering viewers a tool to decipher the linkages between the works. Stone lithography, a traditional printmaking technique dating back to the beginning of the nineteenth century, is one of the earliest methods of mass-producing images. Etched onto a surface mined from Jurassic limestone deposits is a reproduction of a page from Dale Carnegie’s best-selling text.

In contrast to Dale Carnegie's belief that relationship-building is simply a tool for professional optimization, Peter Kropotkin argued that cooperation is necessary for the survival of any species, and he positioned mutual aid as the key to understanding evolution. These lithographs, which lampoon “innovations” in bread technology bred by market competition, also look critically at the Social Darwinist roots of Carnegie’s self-help sermon. “Survival of the fittest” is not, as textbooks would have you believe, a truism of evolutionary biology. The phrase was coined by Herbert Spencer, who, after reading Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, applied the phrase to his fundamentalist belief in laissez-faire capitalism. Oddly enough, Spencer also invented an early version of the paper clip.

-Beck Sellinger & H.R. Webster

Becky Sellinger escorted Miss Piggy and Kermit the Frog in a limousine for their appearance on The Tonight Show. Her first kiss was a sea lion. One time, she woke up to two clowns cooking her bacon in the nude. She slept in the same room as a human skull because she was locked out of her bed and breakfast. Sellinger is a conceptual artist, community organizer, art collector, and educator living and working in Kingston, New York. She currently enables young people to make things with their own two hands in the studio arts department at Bard College. She has taught at Pratt Institute, SUNY Purchase, and Virginia Commonwealth University. She was a visiting scholar at Syracuse University and has lectured at Haverford College, Georgia Southern University, and Tufts University. She received an MFA in Sculpture from Virginia Commonwealth University and a BFA in Sculpture from SUNY Purchase. She has been awarded residencies and fellowships at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2012), Artpark (2015), Fine Arts Work Center (2016-17) and Sculpture Space (2023). Sellinger’s exhibition record includes projects at Socrates Sculpture Park, Antenna Gallery, ArtPark, Practice Gallery, September Gallery, University of Kentucky, Hudson D. Walker Gallery, 48 Stunden Neukölln in Berlin, and Triangle Projects. Her work was recently acquired by the Golden Foundation and The Jewish Museum. Her collaborative project with Jessi Li, Sister Cistern, received a grant from New York State Council on the Arts for a monumental sculpture which is now on view at Stone Quarry Art Park.