Cul-de-sac is French for dead end — and Kessler uses the term literally and diagnostically. Each week, for the run of the project at a given institution, he hands the museum’s platform over to a different local individual or group to present their own work, issue, or initiative to the public: activists, seniors’ theater troupes, musicians, researchers, neighborhood organizers. There is no curatorial filter beyond an open invitation. The premise is that contemporary social and political life — climate change, social inequality, the “clusterization” of communities into mutually unintelligible groups on social media and at the ballot box — has run itself into a dead end, and that the antidote is not more theorizing but more literal contact between people who wouldn’t otherwise share a room.
The recurring prop across venues is a small refrigerator holding a miniature ice-sculpture replica of Caspar David Friedrich’s Das Eismeer (The Sea of Ice) — the same fridge-installation Kessler built as its own standalone work — stocked with beer. Visitors are invited to open it, take a drink, and in doing so literally melt the romantic-painting motif with their own body heat each time the door opens, while standing around talking to strangers. As critic Bernard Vienat writes, the gesture inherits Joseph Beuys’s notion of social sculpture — art that lives in the encounter between people rather than in an object — but replaces Beuys’s lecture-performance model with something closer to a standing bar: “Kessler lets the viewer take on this role, freeing her to speak with a beer in hand in the museum space.”
The project began at BMoCA in Boulder, Colorado (2017–2018), where it ran weekly and generated its own newspaper, Kessler’s Cul-de-Sac News, as a low-cost print record of each session. It continued in 2019 at Künstlerhaus Bregenz (Palais Thurn & Taxis), Austria, where local participants including a seniors’ theater troupe (“Seniorentheater Vlbg. Spätlese”) presented under the banner Unterbrechung (Interruption) — the German title making explicit what the French one implies.
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