About
The disturbance of all the senses known as Modernism, stretching over the century from Manet through Duchamp to Rauschenberg and (maybe) Johns, from Flaubert through Woolf to Saramago, still drags us in its massive wake. Post-Modernism has been succeeded by nothing more than post-Post-Modernism. Modernism itself, with its embracing of human achievement a propulsive engine of scientific and artistic progress, saturates the fabric of our world as though there was never any pre-history, as though our minds have been wiped clear of any antecedent.
That other future-in-the-past, the one created by sci-fi, inevitably looks quaint as imagined then, as hoped for, as worked towards (all active states difficult to countenance now in the post-modern po-faced stasis we inhabit). We look back to ideas of the future as they are preserved in museums, in libraries or archives, heaven forbid in formaldehyde or, most particularly, in 'ironic' quotation marks.
Post religion, post everything the pervasive feeling is of an apocalypse that never happened, a Rapture that we were not summoned to⦠a doom that is still distant because we have stopped being aware of moving towards it. We are biding our time, waiting for a Messianic being we yet cannot put any trust or faith in a Robot saviour and labour-saving device that (in an echo of the transformation of 'Maria' in Fritz Lang's âMetropolis') is nevertheless born of the Human, our need for control; to better ourselves to the point of self-annihilation. A new slavery willingly adopted.
ââ¦Someone to claim us, someone to follow
Someone to shame us, some brave Apollo
Someone to fool us, someone like you
We want you Big Brotherâ¦'
David Bowie âBig Brother' 1974
In Seir's new body of work techniques are used that mimic others' yet whose true process is concealed. Thin fabric is stretched over more solid canvas, hiding the paint that has been applied behind it, the information re-coded on to the screen, a projection from beyond the wall. Rather than fields or panels in the late Modernist aesthetic (California Hard Edge / Post Painterly Abstraction / Washington Colour School) these are doors to another world, open but un-entered. Existing on the threshold between this world's uncertainties and knowledge of its secrets. Meanings, if we struggle for them, resist us. In the movement from piece to piece, any response is met by its opposite: soft/hard, organic/geometric, seductive/impassive. Or call it a dialectic, with the synthesis left up to us. As the title of the show instructs us: play dead. A strategy for survival. Keep breathing.
Robin Seir was born in Goteborg, Sweden, in 1986. He has studied at Central St Martins and Chelsea Colleges of Art, and is currently attending the Royal Academy Schools postgraduate programme.