MONUMENT
BY GINA MOBAYED
Sullivan+Strumpf Sydney, 2017
Alex Seton is an artist who uses his work to question what is happening around him. He is sensitive to the present state of humanity and informed about the politics that lead there. On any given day he’ll discuss the old world and the new; palaces burned to the ground in the 19th century to a beautiful glass bottle he dug up the day before. His mind and his practice are host to a generously wide span of ideas and information across time. Seton is not a pessimist but he is curious about the darker shades of the world we inhabit. He is a little obsessive, and he must be; he has challenged and mastered one of the most ancient and loaded materials of this, which we call the ‘civilised world’—marble. His capacity for process—idea to form—is quite an exceptional one and often his practice couples the unlikely; failure with hope, melancholy with wryness, wit with tragedy.
Monument, a solo exhibition presented at Sullivan+Strumpf in 2017 is a luminous example of that aforementioned capacity and those unlikely couples. The new work is a topical shift for Seton. He had been exploring Australia’s treatment of refugees and the politics surrounding the horror of it, over time, since 2014. Monument sees him broaden his enquiry of humanity and he brings a more personal narrative in to the mix. The works present explorations of time, memory and the human condition through objects that are both in cahoots and in contrast with each other. The exhibition brought to mind Carpo’s writing on monuments and that “they deal with notions and representations of history and time... contemporary monuments have long stopped celebrating great deeds, as their speciality is to register grave errors...”.1
The exhibition presents several works of marble, a medium Seton has mastered. He came to make these works through two journeys; following the history of marble back to Carrara and drawing on his own lived experiences to date. Having visited the studio several times, I see Seton, in creating the works in Monument, physically working through failure to make good, adding his wry humour to alleviate the bitterness of the inevitable.
In his travels as a young artist, Seton’s visit to Carrara, Italy led to his introduction to the ‘field of dictators’, where hundreds of monuments are strewn in a field, of great men now forgotten. Their irrelevance marked by the varying ways they were breaking down under the elements, slowly becoming unrecognisable.
The first trio of work encountered in Monument are three large-scale sculptures rendered in marble, The Monobloc Throne, Sometimes the Dead are More Alive than the Living, and a glowing pile of shards—offcuts from the large marble blocks Seton began to carve from. The work looks and sounds like a commentary on mortality, but there is more to it. Sometimes the dead are more alive than the living is a human form, a skull. It is impossible to identify whose form this may be, or if we even care. The ‘throne' is simply an everyday plastic chair and it sits empty, bating the skull’s stare it faces. This trio is imposing; silent and monumental. Imposing as it is, one quickly realises that Seton is playing with and questioning the very idea of the monument too, as well as who those monuments uphold in perpetuity. By refusing an identity for the human form, and leaving the throne empty, Seton begins to equalise the space the monument has occupied in our minds, and history for so long.
He doesn’t leave it there. The inscription on Sometimes the dead...reads, ‘Keep on Keeping on’, a saying his grandmother used to share with him (most commonly known as the British Paints motto). It’s amusing to read such a simple turn of phrase and a throwaway line inside this exhibition. But it has more to say than ‘plug away at life’—a humanist perspective that prioritises those living now. It references the disposability of that every day plastic chair of The Monobloc Throne portraits. We’ve all sat on one, it too is in various stages of suffering under the elements and always, almost ready to be tossed. This kind of chair is purchased with its end in mind and so too were the Bentwood chair’s Seton shows upstairs, back in the late 1800s. It’s just that today we don’t remember.
Seton is good at keeping a lightness and humour in his work, despite the weight of his conceptual realm. In turning away from the large-scale sculpture in Monument we meet a video projection and watch Seton tunnel through a solid block of limestone. Left Turn at Albuquerque is a stop-motion animation that pulls us right into the present. We see the artist pick his way through the solid form, simplifying the very process that drives his marble sculpting; Seton’s work is a reversal of most artistic processes. He cuts, grinds and drills away at the material to reveal the form he wishes us to see. Instead of presenting the many gruelling hours it took to actually tunnel through, Seton speeds it up and slaps on a reference to Bugs Bunny. Eschewing far from the destination we first imagined and at the mercy of what could be a tragic wrong turn. Or it could be wonderful, if we keep on keeping on.
The pairing of marble and new media is not new to Seton. Often his video works reveal an intimate knowledge of the alchemy of stone. To build a solid limestone structure, to know exactly how to tunnel through it without collapse or mishap is difficult to accomplish. It is also an honest way for the artist to reveal his labour and affirm his presence in this exhibition.
Upstairs there is an installation of domestic-scale work. The chairs, Thonet’s elegant and iconic No. 14s and No.18s appear seemingly as a contrast to downstairs’ everyday plastic Monobloc. But really they are referents to the same thing (mass production) they are just separated by time, and time has a way of re-contextualising everything. Seton has replaced genuine breakages in the bent wood with marble, at the exact point of impact. Repairing the object with his hand evolves a broken chair to a work of art...possibly an act of rarefaction but more likely too, a middle finger to the hierarchy inherent in the value we place on all objects. Two skulls, exquisitely rendered and human scale keep the idea of remembrance hanging in the air of an exhibition set over two floors. Bachelard’s writing has always comforted me and here it reminds us that “In its countless alveoli space contains compressed time. That is what space is for”2. Whilst this is in reference to a broad exploration of intimate spaces, the gallery is one such place for Seton. Sacrificed in the making of his own memorial, 2017 is a beautiful example of this, two blocks of marble fused together in a contrast of hues. The
Wombeyan, fleshy pink and throbbingly alive against the cooler grey of Chicago and Yass marbles. Crawling along until he gets carved pink is a yabbie that Seton fished out of the waters himself. The only remarkable thing about it is that it had a claw missing, and that its memory is now living in perpetuity.
Many of the objects in Monument are ones we know so it feels good to let your eye take its time to travel over the veiny surfaces that gleam back at you. Whilst Carpo considered that digital technology will uproot the need for physical space to hold memories and acts of remembrance he posits that this is only possible for some deep-rooted memorial traditions, not all 3. I agree, there can be objects that deserve to stand as monument to our memories. But it feels right that Seton has left the throne empty and the bust atop a plinth, a nobody. His use of marble is an undeniably relevant starting point to question the idea of the monument but too, how remembrance can be posited against truth. In using contrast, Seton has found a powerful way to prod at our all too convenient methods of evolving the truth, and he doesn’t leave himself out of it.
1 Carpo, Mario ‘The Postmodern Cult of Monuments’, 2007. Future Anterior: Journal of Historic Preservation, History, Theory and Criticism
2 Bachelard, Gaston ‘The Poetics of Space’, 1958. Presses Universitaires de France
3 Carpo, Mario ‘The Postmodern Cult of Monuments’, 2007. Future Anterior: Journal of Historic Preservation, History, Theory and Criticism