Peter Seddon's work as a researcher, artist and intervention artist has been informed by interest in historiography; both in the sense of histories of art, and wider political/social/cultural histories. It is also informed by an interest in image/text and theories of language. His practice crosses genres with complex historical referencing.
Peter Seddon, an artist, educator and critical practitioner, retired from the University of Brighton in 2013 following a career which had shaped fine art at the institution, developing and leading the courses in critical practice and developed doctoral studies in art practices.
His own work as an artist and researcher covered covered artistic practice, curation and curatorial intervention. He used the term ‘historiographical practice’ to describe not just an interest in history and the genre of history painting, but also an interest in the various mechanisms of representation, by which these histories are read, distributed, made, exchanged, exhibited and developed over time. Rather than being ‘mixed media,’ his practice is best described as ‘mixed genre,’ much in the same way as the writings of W. G. Sebald can be viewed as multi genre literature.
Peter Seddon, with his wife Jill, led the PMSA National Recording Project for Sussex, a review of the public sculpture of the region, and part of his wider interest in relating art practice to the practices of collecting and curating. His research examined the potential of museum interventions, expanded practice and was informed by his interest in historiography; both in the sense of histories of art, and wider political/social/cultural histories. It was also informed by an interest in image/text and theories of language, something he reconfigured through a ‘mentoring’ programme of collaboration, consultation and critical conversation with Andrew Wheatley, curator and director of the Cabinet Gallery, London which sought to evolve a working method that brought together visual images, writing, and researching into something he termed ‘historiographical practice’.
This practice crossed ‘genres’ and his historical referencing made use of computer, digital cameras, large format inkjet printers, stencilled vinyl text and the materials of the stationary/office/graphics supply store. In his work Peter Seddon has recognised a shifting, rather fluid set of meanings when the term 'curator' is used in the art world and it is this that the curatorial research explores. What seems to be the inexorable rise of the curator as a creative personality in his or her own right (an art director for fine artists perhaps) is a reflection or symptom of wider current change. The situation contains two contradictory impulses: on the one hand, we have what curator and gallerist, Andrew Wheatley, has referred to as the curatorial strategy of didactic/thematic exhibition making becoming ‘ a bankrupt professionalised rhetoric in visual art administration'; on the other hand there is a notion that the art of curatorship is an act of subversion against the rationalisation of bureaucrats.
The Historiographic Imagination and the Site of Memory in Museums
Peter Seddon’s practice in this field culminated in a succession of examples: the civilwar@rochdale.uk exhibition in Rochdale Museum (2003), interventions into the Brighton Regency House by artists John Murphy (2004) and William Kentridge (2007), the William Kentridge exhibition at Brighton University Galley (2007), the exhibition Tête-á-Tête at Nîmes Musée des Beaux Arts (2007-8) and the Marcel Broodthaers retrospective exhibition at Milton Keynes (2008).
All were examples of using artworks, items within sites of special historical resonance, layered memories and museological approaches to exhibition making and curatorship. ‘Historiographic imagination’ has informed both Peter Seddon’s studio practice and also recent work in ‘curatorial interventions’ that result from a strong attachment to the ‘art of the museums’.
This is a practice based on critical understandings of complex multi-layered histories, building on that experience to develop cultural well being both inside and outside the museum. Peter Seddon tries to ‘map’ past imagination using interdisciplinary approaches derived from art history, history, cultural geography, museology and art practice. The methods and outputs of this research are not only text-based but utilise a variety of visual forms in areas such as exhibition curatorship, curatorial intervention and visual recording. In this way Peter Seddon hopes to trace the changing flow of historical representation surrounding an object or image and at the same time create something which itself is also a contribution to that very process of history and representation.
civilwar@rochdale.uk was an exhibition together with a publication, held at Rochdale Art Gallery, 17 May – 29 June 2003. It was commissioned by Penny Thompson visual art curator of Rochdale Municipal Art Gallery and Museum, conceived as part of the 100th anniversary celebrations of the founding of the gallery and was supported by two AHRB awards.
Its mixture of text, curatorship and visual research lead to the establishment of a series of seminars with invited eminent figures and practitioners on ‘curatorial intervention’ as an artistic strategy. It also lead directly to further research in subsequent outputs in Nimes Musée des Beaux Arts.The exhibition was a complex, elaborate ‘collage’ of prints, paintings on paper, wall text, and Victorian paintings of Civil War subjects borrowed from a number of municipal gallery collections, mostly from the North of England. The wall text, They had tongues like angels but cloven feet, repeated above the visual works, was intended as a metaphor for the difficulty of practice both that of my own and others. This phrase (attributed to Cromwell when describing certain elements in his New Model Army) is suggestive of the inter-relationship between image and text, ideas and materials, and between different sorts of knowledge. Since the publication is a set of polemical texts about the subject matter and approach of this practice rather than a catalogue of the exhibition, there is no need to elaborate further on it here; except perhaps to point the reader to the essay Concerning Angels and Cloven Feet in the publication civilwar@rochdale.uk which gives the background and informing rationale for the exhibition and practice from which the exhibition was derived.
Citations and reviews
Tête à Tête avec Cromwell: A curatorial/historiographic/artist’s intervention using Cromwell opening the coffin of Charles 1st by Paul Delaroche, 1831
Musée des Beaux Arts, Nimes. 15 November 2007 – 3 February 2008
This curatorial/artist’s intervention into the space of a major French regional museum, unlike the earlier work at Rochdale, provided an opportunity to work directly around a single major painting from mid 19th century French art, and to work with and within the site and gallery where it is permanently installed.
The centrepiece of the exhibition was Delaroche’s famous painting of Cromwell contemplating the beheaded corpse of Charles 1st in his coffin after execution in 1649. Painted in 1831, it was the sensation of that year’s Paris Salon. Against it Peter Seddon presented projection of Cromwell’s own subsequently posthumously decapitated head taken from 1950s photographs and animated into slight, almost imperceptible, movement.
The ironies of this were many and multi layered but one of them related to Delaroche’s own much quoted remark on the invention of photography in the 1840s, “from today painting is dead!” Death and the echoing presence of afterlives dominated this exhibition which included images from English collections in Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge (Cromwell’s alma mater), Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight (Charles’s last domicile before his trial) and the Museum of London who gave permission to reproduce digitally a painting in their collection of the dead Charles with his head stitched back on. In a final flourish and acknowledgement of the macabre the Lord’s Prayer was printed in Latin backwards on the gallery wall opposite the Delaroche painting. The show itself was a reflection on historiographic concerns in politics and art from the 17th to 19th centuries; the very period which is the dominant focus of the Museum’s entire collection.
The work was made possible by an AHRC award of £16,400 plus some support from the CCVA and the faculty. Opened with a speech by the Regional Cultural Minister, it was the first time the Museum at Nimes had collaborated with an English artist using a work in their collection. The cultural context of exhibitions within which its sits however includes The play of the unmentionable at the Brooklyn museum by Joseph Kosouth in 1991, Give and Take at the Serpentine Gallery by Hans Haacke in 2001, and the Counterpoint exhibition at the Louvre curated by Marie-Laure Bernadac in 2004.
Peter Seddon's Tête-à-Tête presentation on You Tube
Publications
Through a mentoring experience with Andrew Wheatley of the Cabinet Gallery, London (2001-2003) a major aspect of Peter Seddon’s evolved practice was not only the presentation of exhibitions based on museological intervention but the production of accompanying associated books. These are emphatically not intended to be catalogues but rather discursive genre works in their own right. This particular one builds on and extends the approach taken in civilwar@rochdale.uk to include more collaborators and authors and is on a more lavish larger better-produced format.
Essays, diaries, conversations. ISBN 1901177386
The book consists of four reflective essays on Civil War history and its representation, a diary of a mentoring scheme undertaken between March 2001 and December 2002, and three recorded conversations between Peter Seddon and Andrew Wheatley Curator/Director of the Cabinet Gallery, London. This book was based on 2 years of research and critical research/practice mentoring provided by ETA (Empowering the Artist) in which a small number of individual artists, selected by open application, were mentored by a curator. It was with his encouragement that the idea of a discursive text-based artist’s polemical book rather than a catalogue to support exhibited practice was developed. The book utilises a number of genres to do this, scholarly essays, reflective diaries, transcribed interviews organised around a particular trope or device, in this case Cromwell’s phrase 'They had tongues like angels but cloven feet!'
The book was supported by an AHRB small grant of £5000 awarded in June 2001. The approach to archival research that it entailed and its relationship to exhibition making was further developed in a similar ‘intervention’ in the Musée des Beaux Arts, Nimes in 2007.
The book was the subject of an extensive comparative review (approx 3000 words) by Iain Biggs, University of the West of England, in the Journal of Visual Art Practice (The peer reviewed Journal of the National Association for Fine Art Education) vol 3 no 2, 2004, ISSN 1470-2029, pp155-160. It was also cited in a long essay on art and cultural agencies by Anthony Davies called 'Basic Instinct: Trauma and Retrenchment 2000-4,' in Mute magazine, Winter/Spring 2005, Issue 29, p76. ISSN 1356-7748.
Between Two Heads/Tête à Tête ISBN 978-1-905593-25-5
Between Two Heads/Tête à Tête: A book in both English and French consisting of four essays all dealing with the historiography of the British Civil Wars and its representation in history, myth, legend and visual art:
The book contains also contains an introduction by Peter Seddon and a preface by Pascal Trarieux, Curator of the Musée des Beaux Arts, Nimes.
The book covers its subject from the viewpoints of an art historian, a historian, an artist, and a curator. In this sense and viewed in connection with its associated exhibition it represents a practice and set of research interests that could be termed historiographical practice. The essays present a different more discursive form of knowledge than the more playful suggestive forms of exhibition-making. The text is in both French and English in one volume in order to create a dialogue across two interconnected cultural histories. This is further reinforced by the use of a particular image on every page, a repetitive trope that produces, as one flicks the pages, a suggested movement of Charles’s executed head. The design of the covers is also an embedded trope or device to suggest flipping over from one history, one country to another. The front cover becoming the back as English and French versions of the texts meet in the middle!
Between Two Heads/Tête à Tête, conceived and edited by Peter Seddon, as well as essays written by Seddon in William Kentridge - Fragile Identities and Circumstantial Evidence, can be found in books available from the Faculty of Arts online shop.
Peter Seddon's website:peterseddonartistcuratorwriter.weebly.com
