Seth Howe: At the Still Point of the Turning World
Essay by Michael Wilson

In November 2020, officials with the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources surveying wild bighorn sheep from a helicopter in remote San Juan County came across something unexpected. A hollow, nine-and-a-half-foot, triangular metallic prism had been installed, unannounced and uncredited, in a sandstone slot canyon. Following widespread media coverage, the anonymous structure was removed and handed over to the Bureau of Land Management. Initially described as a monolith, it elicited comparisons to the work of Minimalist sculptor John McCracken and the portentous alien structures of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Following its discovery, other similar forms appeared at sites around the world, sometimes accompanied by explicitly artistic or promotional manifestoes, but most often without stated purpose.

While the “Utah Monolith” would seem to occupy a very different conceptual position to the sculptures of Seth Howe, the two share more than just a vertical format, metallic composition, and sleek, machine-made look. Howe’s series Cylinder Stacks, for example, also resonates with arid American landscapes, having been inspired by the steel feed and fuel tanks of the Chihuahuan Desert near Marfa, Texas—a site with an established place in art history through its identification with Donald Judd. Presented as variations on Howe’s earlier sequence Square Stack, these pillar-like forms are configured to set the viewer in motion around them, producing a kaleidoscopic or, better, zeotropic effect through which the work’s surroundings are visually fragmented and reconfigured as the viewer circumnavigates.

The active physical and perceptual involvement that Cylinder Stacks and Square Stack demand is key to Howe’s project as a whole. His sculptures are meant to be looked through and even around rather than simply at. They are filters for our vision, not stopping points, and address sight as a conscious act rather than functioning as a steppingstone to separate or isolated metaphors or meanings. By prompting the viewer to consider the visual as itself a component of time and language, they transcend the confines of independent ‘subject matter’ while remaining open to concerns shared with modernist architecture and design, phenomenology, and perceptual psychology—as well as with other art. Coolly geometrical, they are, nonetheless, addressed to human bodies and real-world experiences.

In addition to their perforated designs, in which the absence of given sides or sections is as significant as their adjacent tangible parts, many of Howe’s sculptures feature polished or mirrored surfaces. Both these features ensure that the works’ settings are fully and dynamically incorporated into their finished (really never-finished) forms. In Stack Series, an additional role is played by interiors of flat, saturated color, which again throw the intervening actuality into sharp relief, or correspond with it in unpredictable ways. (Even after Judd, for whom it was a key ingredient, this element remains a secondary one in formal abstract sculpture, so accustomed are we to thinking of it as a mere decorative ‘coating’ divorced from the true substance of the work.)

While Stack Series and related projects never let us forget the places in which they exist—even if the places in question are the most pared-down of gallery interiors—they also focus our attention on the functioning of the eye and the mind to which it is connected. In this respect they recall, in addition to the Utah Monolith, another, even more strikingly close visual match: Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville’s storied Dreamachine. This outwardly simple device is a hollow perforated cylinder designed to be placed on a turntable. By hanging a bulb in the center of the spinning tube and “viewing” it with closed eyelids, the user experiences a flickering pattern of light that exerts a hypnagogic effect comparable to that of psychedelic drugs. (Howe’s photographs of works from the Stack Maquettes series freeze the same sort of motion in blurred images that seem to transmit a kind of spectral hum.)   

While the Dreamachine was invented at the tail end of the 1950s, slightly predating the Minimalist aesthetic on which Howe draws, its unusual play on perception nonetheless forms part of his work’s broader context. Gysin’s device has an explicit connection with his era’s counterculture but hinges nonetheless on a fascination with the mechanics of vision. Howe’s work functions within its specific moment but also beyond it; a still point around which the world turns, it looks to both past and future. This is perhaps clearest in Variation Series, a set of nine six-sided forms. One of these, The Hexagon Sculpture, is a twelve-foot aluminum tower that was installed in the Fashion Institute of Technology’s glass-fronted lobby gallery. The work’s alternating arrangement of panels and gaps allowed the city to thoroughly incorporate itself into the work, producing a never-stable, always- “now” image.

In his digital prints, Howe freezes and flattens the planes of his freestanding sculptures onto paper in sets of geometric shapes. In Synchronic Rotations, works from Square Stack are made to resemble perspective elevations, again returning the project to its architectural point of origin. While the prints’ forms themselves are opaque, their composition admits white space in such a way that they appear light and airy, again suggesting views through rather than of their ostensible subjects. And when seen in sequence, they also record, like photographs by Eadweard Muybridge or cells from an animated film, an object or observer in motion. Howe extends this project in Diachronic Rotations by layering multiple sequential images from the same series in a single print. Synchronic Cylinder Rotations, in turn, features shapes from the Cylinder Stack sculptures, again simulating and exploring a progression through space and time.

At first look, Howe’s work can seem austere, even cold, in its precisely tooled materiality and graphic precision. Yet it is this outward formal control that allows the viewer to consider the work’s varied contexts with clarity. Like the Utah Monolith, Howe’s projects draw attention to and underscore the mystery of their physical environments. And like the Dreammachine, they also point inward, targeting the subtleties and surprises of human consciousness and perception. Remaining securely in place, they set us in spellbound motion.