Page 40 - David Bermant Foundation

Above and left: JAMES SEAWRIGHT Mirror XVII198772”H x 72”W x 4”D“It consists of 144 mirrors. If you walk to a certain spot not too far from the piece, if you look into it, you’ll see yourself 144 times—if you can stand it, it’s an interesting piece.”—DWBJames seaWright’s reflections on DWB:David would tell people on the slightest excuse that when he was at Yale one of the most influential professors was a man named F.S.C. Northrop. I believe he’s a philosopher, but he put the idea in David’s head that the art of a given time should be the art that deals with the technology of that time. And he would argue that that’s exactly the wayit was with the Greeks and the Romans and the Renaissance; people like Leonardo, they were really leading technologists, and at the same time they were principal artists. And his whole spiel was that he wanted to collect that kind of art because he felt it was the most significant, and he wanted to putit in public places because that’s what the Greeks did. So he saw my work as falling into that category precisely, that it was dealing with modern technology, and yet it was something that was not surrounded by a lot of hocus-pocus, but was something that could be popular, could be actually appreciated by people without a lot of theoretical baggage.39