{"id":7645,"date":"2017-03-15T22:56:39","date_gmt":"2017-03-16T02:56:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/social.rollins.edu\/wpsites\/letters\/?p=7645"},"modified":"2019-07-17T14:52:19","modified_gmt":"2019-07-17T14:52:19","slug":"nga-alex-seton-ghostly-aesthetics-10-mar-2017","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/2017\/03\/15\/nga-alex-seton-ghostly-aesthetics-10-mar-2017\/","title":{"rendered":"NGA: Alex Seton & Ghostly Aesthetics – 10 Mar 2017"},"content":{"rendered":"

In my Contemporary Art Issues class here in Newcastle, the professor began our initiation into the course with a seemingly simple question: What IS <\/em>Contemporary Art?\u00a0 Many responded with the notion that contemporary art was art that was simply made in the here\u00a0and now. The only criteria that was needed was for the artist to have made that piece in the present. Although the argument is valid and understandable, I found myself considering that for art to be\u00a0Contemporary that it must not only be made in the present, but also react to the present.<\/p>\n

Alex Seton<\/a>, an Australian artist who works primarily in marble sculpture\u00a0and installation, embodies this notion that contemporary art should react to the present human condition.\u00a0His work is currently featured\u00a0in the Newcastle Gallery of Art in a solo exhibition titled The Island, <\/em>focusing on Australia\u2019s role in the Syrian refugee crisis. Although I often assume that the viewer needs to have all of the context of a particular work in order to have an appropriate response, this exhibition made me reconsider this notion and the ways that art can create feelings of empathy regardless.<\/p>\n

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When the viewer first enters the space, they are met with a modest and poetic installation of\u00a0 what appears to be hundreds of\u00a0paper sail boats arranged on the floor in a large circle. At first glance, the origami boats reminded me the hundreds of colored paper cranes at Hiroshima and all of the\u00a0people that those cranes represented. These boats were different though, the\u00a0choice of\u00a0clean white paper\u00a0prescribed this work with a\u00a0pure,\u00a0precious quality,\u00a0of something that\u00a0needed protection from someone with delicate hands.<\/p>\n

At closer inspection, the viewer realizes that the piece, Blanco Armada (2015)\u00a0<\/em>,\u00a0is actually entirely made of marble.\u00a0Most of his works throughout this exhibition use a similar type of trompe-l\u2019eoil technique as a way of\u00a0confusing the viewer while also adding another level of nuance to the significance of each work. Consistent throughout his use of this technique is Seton\u2019s\u00a0dedication to\u00a0reminding the viewer that the\u00a0weight of the situation is more significant than it seems and, like ancient marble, will\u00a0hang around for much longer than expected.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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In The Body in Contemporary Art, <\/em> Sally O\u2019 Reilly states:<\/p>\n

\u201cNo matter what our social, physical or emotional state, or political or religious allegiances, our common physiological experience enables us to empathize with the bodies of others.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

While viewing Seton\u2019s piece Someone died trying to have a life like mine (2013), <\/em>this was all I could think about. Seton\u2019s piece consists of 28 marble lifejackets, strewn about\u00a0the floor of a\u00a0dim light gallery as if abandoned by its anonymous users. Each grouping is illuminated by a small beam of bright light, individual spotlights\u00a0encouraging the viewer to\u00a0ponder\u00a0not only on the lifejackets themselves, but on the bodies that are no longer there. As the viewer begins to take notice of this absence and to imagine what became of the people who once clung to these jackets to save their lives, the viewer becomes overwhelmed.<\/p>\n

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Immediate connections transported me in space and time to places like the Ghetto Heroes Square in Budapest, where chairs are left abandoned after the ghetto was hastily liquidated in WWII to transport its inhabitants to the camps where they would eventually die. Places like Christian Boltanski\u2019s installation of Personnes (2010)<\/em> in Paris, <\/em>where mountains of clothing memorializes the lives of those lost in anonymity and death. Lastly, this piece took me to Poland in\u00a0June 2014 when I found myself face to face with mountains of abandoned prosthetic limbs inside the walls of the Auschwitz concentration camp.<\/p>\n

In this work, like in the ones aforementioned, the use of artifacts or even the allusion to artifacts, confronts the viewer with a situation that is more than just the objects before them. The object becomes a fragment of the body\u00a0it represents,\u00a0a synecdoche, a looming ghost that confronts us with the possibility of death\u00a0\u2013 both theirs and our own. Through this process, Seton utilizes the missing body and the fragments of that body to inspire empathy from the viewer and to trigger a response, hopefully in favor of rescuing those who these jackets represent.<\/p>\n

Seton\u2019s work, as it references both historical events and contemporary issues in order to provide commentary on the present human condition, embodies what I consider to be contemporary art. In cases such as this, the artist uses their art form not only as a vehicle for reacting to the current events that shape our world, but also to suggest a call to action in response to those events.<\/p>\n

Until Next Time\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In my Contemporary Art Issues class here in Newcastle, the professor began our initiation into the course with a seemingly simple question: What IS Contemporary Art?\u00a0 Many responded with the notion that contemporary art was art that was simply made in the here\u00a0and now. The only criteria that was needed was for the artist to…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":352,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7645","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-newcastle"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7645","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/352"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7645"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7645\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15429,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7645\/revisions\/15429"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7645"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7645"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7645"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}