Glen Seator, 1956-2002
by John Perreault
This is not an obituary. The New York Times already did one with a fairly large photo of Glen Seator's "B. D .O." from the 1997 Whitney Biennial. The letters stand for "Breuer Director's Office." You probably know the piece: Seator reconstructed the demolished office of then Whitney director David Ross and tilted it at a 45 degree angle, so that standing on one of its corners, held up by guide-wires anchored to the floor, it was the first thing you saw when the elevator doors parted on the Whitney's grand 4th floor. Instant fame. Well, Seator had done a few pieces before then.
In the obituary, Ken Johnson did a neat summary of Seator's truncated career, although I don't know where he got the idea that Seator was often compared to Robert Gober and Charles Ray. To my eyes, Gober is too surreal and Ray too Pop to be touchstones, as it were, for Seator's art. Instead I would propose a more appropriately historical line-up: Hans Haacke, Donna Dennis, Lawrence Weiner and Gordon Matta-Clark.
Haacke: "Fifteen-Sixty One", Seator's replica of a check-cashing establishment, commissioned by, inside, and fronting the Gagosian Gallery in L.A., has all the sly and proper politics of Haacke's best work. That part of the Beverly Hills Architectural Review Commission Code is included in the catalogue should be clue enough; value-added is the view from inside the gallery of all the bare struts and wood that holds up the interior visible only from the street. Since the latter is a viable sculpture in itself, "Fifteen-Sixty One" is a double two-for: outside the gallery/inside the gallery; outside the built-structure; inside the structure. Seator, by the way, had to go through hell and high water to get approval for the false and temporary 1561 street address, a process which I think of as yet another component of the piece.
Furthermore, I can't see the photographs of this piece without thinking of Seator's SUNY Purchase teacher Donna Dennis, who once displayed a replica of a chunk of a subway station in the lobby of the Brooklyn Museum.
Weiner: One now may think of Weiner as a kind of minimalist author, specializing in words on walls, but in the Sixties he famously once removed a rectangle of wallboard from a museum wall, exposing the understructure. I can't prove it, but Seator’s early studio-based wall alterations spring from this one piece.
Seator's big-time room alterations, such as his 1993 P.S. 1 "Auditorium Installation" in which he lowered all the ceiling lights to within several feet of the floor, and his 1997 "Approach" for the Capp Street Project in San Francisco in which he rebuilt the street outside Capp Street inside the gallery, are, in part, the extension of a Sixties genre practiced by Bruce Nauman, Robert Morris, and several others. When Seator expanded his ambition further into architecture, one can't help but think of Gordon Matta-Clark. But Seator, instead of cutting buildings apart, removed rooms and tilted them or, if not tilted them then as in the infamous Mary Boone office piece (the 1998 "Sculpture with French Desk") re- or de-contextualized them. Both the Capp Street work and the Mary Boone sculpture make me think of Dennis Oppenheim’s famous Stock Exchange relocation piece in which he took loads of debris from the floor of the Exchange and relocated it on the roof of a building uptown.
My touchstones are not meant to make Seator seem less original, for he was very original indeed. Instead they are given to anchor properly him in an art history that goes back a little further than last year's art season.
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Just so you know---and because there are rumors that Seator died in a car crash like Pollock---according to the Times he died in a fall from the roof of his small house on Duffield Street in Brooklyn. He apparently was up there to fix the chimney. I have been to that house maybe three times: once for dinner, when he was still with his longtime boyfriend, with whom he had sold vintage clothes to make ends meet, gathering them from points unknown and selling them in a flea market on Canal Street; then two years ago, boyfriend gone, when the place was gutted in preparation for extensive renovations; and finally last year, when Glen was back from his residency at the Getty in L.A. His living space and studio still weren't finished, but it was all getting spiffy and I remember thinking: This is like his artworks or vice versa.
I also remember being amazed that the entrance hall had once been an enclosed pass-through so that its early 19th century owner's horse could get to the horse shed in the back yard. Many tradesmen lived on this block then, now in the shadow of the Manhattan Bridge, cut-off from everything, even DUMBO to the north. Seator, of course, was interested in the history of the house and of the neighborhood. Tools found during the renovation indicated it must have belonged to a leatherworker, at some point and from some other source he learned that the neighborhood made room for blacks as well as immigrants from Europe.
I thought of Seator as a friend, although it was often difficult to get what he was driving at. He could be impossibly vague. Contrary to what the reader might think, it's harder to write about the work of an friend then one might suppose.
So who was Glen Seator? I think he was making important art. Most recently he was scheduled to create a collaboration with the designer Bruce Mau, sponsored by the Schindler House in Los Angeles. The Schindler House has been rescued and restored by MAK (the Austrian Museum of Applied Arts). I had pitched the project to Artforum and it was a go. I actually flew out to visit Seator when he was in the heat of it, but by this time Mau had bowed out. It was never clear why, but Seator was determined to forge ahead.
The Schindler House is a little gem of architectural history, a kind of flimsy survivor from early modernism. It really wasn’t meant to last, but there it is, all angles and cubes, a monument to Austrian-emigrant Rudolf Schindler's experiment in living as much as to the advent of modernist architecture in America. It was designed and built in 1921/22 so that Schindler and his wife and another couple could live communally. The open-air bedrooms were on the roof.
When I visited, Seator and his ancient dog and an assistant from London were holed up in a collector's house in the Hollywood Hills. Seator was house-sitting; visible from one of the balconies was the famous Hollywood sign as large as life. Seator seemed to love L.A.: he had met both David Hockney and Dennis Hopper. This was in July of 2001.
At this point he was trying to do some of his own fund-raising, and the project had morphed and expanded. It was now going to be huge wallscapes, those enormous fabric photo-murals that decorate choice intersections in L.A., but also, if you need to see some examples up close, Broadway and Houston in New York. They usually advertise bottled water or men’s underwear in clever ways that expose as much youthful flesh as possible.
Seator was most enthusiastic about one site in particular on Hollywood Boulevard. The wallscape was going to be a realist digital mural of the rooms behind the hotel wall it covered. There were also going to be panoramic digital photographs in buses, depicting the streetscape passing outside, plus book; not a catalogue, mind you, but a book full of essays by artworld heavyweights (Jonathan Crary was mentioned) and, of course, documenting Seator's work from day one. Plus a conference at the Getty.
But then MAK pulled the plug. There went Seator's project---just like his cell phone the month before---right down the toilet. But this was no weird accident. And my Artforum piece, having self-transformed three times and suffered through three deadline extensions because of the project changes and delays, now seemed irrelevant.. The Schindler Foundation even returned their Warhol Foundation Grant. We never found out why the project was cancelled, or, at least, I didn't. I assumed it was financial. Seator thought big, and thinking big is costly.
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Now that Seator is dead, his oeuvre, alas, is closed. But we can begin to make some serious evaluations, or fortify ones that were in the making. I think it is safe to say, for instance, that he was right to resist being categorized as some sort of realist sculptor. He was more interested in the special dislocations and relocations he then in any realism he produced. To hear him talk, detail was all: the right Formica or stud; the right angle or kind of plaster. But the details were in service of the spatial and perceptual ruptures he perpetuated.
What are the masterpieces? The artworks so much his own that there is no turning away from his talent? The works that will be of some influence? I've already mentioned the P.S. 1 installation, the Caap Street street transplant, the Whitney office sculpture, the Mary Boone gallery entrance, and the check cashing store. To this I would definitely add the 1996 N.Y.O. + B. (New York Office and Bathroom), a huge tilted structure made to replicate the office and bathroom and the space between of the Kunsthalle on East Fifth Street in New York, where it was shown.
Is there an exhibition space big enough for a Seator retrospective? The check cashing store is in storage somewhere in California. The Guggenheim owns the Mary Boone piece, and the Whitney has the Director"s Office. Is this a project for the DIA foundation up the river? But how do you represent the tons of concrete it took to make the Caap Street project---and the jack-hammer action it took to remove it? Did he leave enough information behind for some one to do at least one of his wallscapes?
copyright John Perreault 2003
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Glen Seator:
"It's not about fame or money; it's about getting it right."
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