Seth Cluett

Seth Cluett (b. 1976 in Troy, NY) explores everyday actions at extreme magnification, celebrates minutae by amplifying impossible tasks, and explores the working of memory in forms that rethink the role of the senses in an increasingly technologized society. As an artist, performer, and composer whose work ranges from photography and drawing to video, installation, concert music, and critical writing, his “subtle…seductive, immersive” (Artforum) sound work has been characterized as “rigorously focused and full of detail” (e/i) and “dramatic, powerful, and at one with nature” (The Wire). Boomcat described his 2011 CD Objects of Memory on the Line Imprint as a “beautifully tremulous and thoughtful exploration in electro-acoustic sound.” The recipient of grants from Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Fund, Meet the Composer, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, he has presented work in thirteen countries on five continents at venues such as MASS MoCA, The Kitchen, GRM, Palais de Tokyo, STEIM, and Dundee Contemporary Arts. Recent work is documented on Line, Radical Matters, Sedimental, and Winds Measure recordings. Last fall, Cluett joined the faculty of Contemporary Arts at Ramapo College of New Jersey where he teaches courses in audio engineering as well as electronic and experimental sound practices.

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Lauren Rosati on the work of Seth Cluett:

Seth Cluett’s intermedia artworks variously consider the recording as trace, index, and inscription. Incorporating sound, drawing, performance and composition, they examine memory and mediated experience.

For the project 100 Circles for the Head (2010), Cluett repetitiously sketched circles on graph paper in one set of one hundred, two sets of fifty, and four sets of twenty-five, documenting the act in a series of audio recordings. Absent an instructional score for reenactment, the constitutive parts of 100 Circles for the Head—drawing and audio recording—behave as both score and performance, simultaneously inviting and representing the operation of recording one hundred drawn circles both graphically and phonographically. Unlike more recent drawings, for which Cluett delicately outlined stones from the driveway of his childhood home, tracing a memory, in this work there is no template: the artist circumscribes an absence.

The simple gesture of marking a circle, and the attentiveness required to repeatedly complete this task, recall the neo-avant-garde’s interest in Zen procedures. Yet much of Cluett’s work draws on the legacy of conceptualism, whether denying a sonic encounter, providing a set of instructions, or accumulating iterations of a regular form. In this sense, the accretive, rule-based work of Sol Lewitt can be seen as an important point of reference.

Cluett—a scholar, composer, and visual artist—is also an obsessive collector of ephemera and catalogues related to group exhibitions of sound art since the 1960s. His attention to curatorial practice, and to the way in which an artwork’s meaning shifts according to the context in which it is presented, is evident in the presentation of his own works for exhibition. 100 Circles for the Mind (2010), for instance, is an instructional piece that requires a performer to draw one hundred individual circles and record the process on a three-minute endless loop cassette tape. The drawings, drawing implement, and cassette case are then displayed alongside the tape, cut into one hundred equal pieces, rendering the sound of the performance unrecoverable and the notion of the recording as a permanent register obsolete. The artifacts on view thus elicit a sonic unfolding, which occurs in the mind.

This non-cochlear sound project is one of several by Cluett to foreground the role of memory and imagination in storing and eliciting sonic material. For neighborhood memory (2010), for example, a walk is recorded on cassette tape at irregular intervals according to what the pedestrian deems memorable. Played back once, the tape is then unspooled and coiled around pins on a US Geological survey map marking the route and rendering the recording, once again, unlistenable. In one version of the performance, the pedestrian walks around a square block thirty-three times, a reference to the speed of an LP spinning on a turntable; even when concerned with the repetition of a square form, Cluett thinks in circles.

While much of Cluett’s work combines strategies of experimental music with the radically dematerialized art object of conceptual art, other projects operate as aural non-sites, displacing the sound of an outdoor site indoors. Doleros (Auditory Tourism at Ringing Rocks) (2008), installed at Diapason Gallery in Brooklyn, included found objects and recordings from Ringing Rocks Park in Bucks County, PA, a site notable for its dolerite deposit which produces resonant bell-like tones when struck with a hammer. Another installation, Homesickness (2010), relocated shingles from the roof of Cluett’s childhood house in upstate New York to a gallery environment and paired them with recordings of rain from his previous residences.

As sound artists increasingly rely on equipment, software, and gadgets to amplify their practice, Cluett’s work is pared down and slowed down, exploring the relationship between action and recorded trace, between sign and index.