Bill Seaman

‘What is the time of these objects and places?’ With this question Seaman opens the dense, poetic text that accompanies Wittgenstein’s Handles, a large-format print made in dialogue with AI. The image gathers objects conjured through prompts, what he calls ‘this prompted archive of readymade-like arrivals,’ and sets them in layers of placement and displacement, overlay and return. Like Duchamp’s readymades, these objects are found rather than made, yet here they are ‘remade by language,’ the result of a process Seaman describes as both ‘a somewhat dubious artificial prompting’ and ‘a seemingly miraculous conjuring.’ Drawing on Wittgenstein’s ‘language-games,’ the work treats every return to a memory as a small remaking of it, a looping back that shifts slightly each time. It also nods to Rothko’s pursuit of the sublime, while insisting that ‘there is no color here’: this is a different kind of sublime, one that points at thought and the ongoing now. As the artist puts it, ‘the meaning is the use, but we can only point.’