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MARTIN SEXTON
Martin Sexton is a London-based artist and writer who began his career as a science-fiction writer. Without a formal background in fine art, Sexton considers his point of view to be more akin to that of a writer. Or as John-Paul Pryor of DAZED Digital has described, Sexton is “a raconteur of both constructed and real mythologies.” Sexton calls his works ‘futiques,’ a portmanteau alternatively evoking the terms future, critique, and antique. Sexton’s futiques are filmed in the past, screened in the present, and bear portents from the future. The layering of multiple temporalities in Sexton’s videos, along with his narrative strategies (primarily scrolling first-person text) lend them an ambivalent presence: who, or what, exactly can we consider the author?
Martin Sexton has participated in group exhibitions at: Tate Britain (London), Benaki Museum (Athens), Wolfsonian Museum (Miami), Venice Biennale (2003, 2005, 2007, 2015, 2017), Poetry Library South Bank (London), Hydra Museum (Greece), and The Economist Plaza (London) with the Contemporary Art Society, and MOMENTUM (Sydney & Berlin). Solo exhibitions include: Sex with Karl Marx (2015) at the Gervasuti Foundation, collateral event of the 56th Venice Biennale, curated by James Putnam.
Sexton’s first encounter with MOMENTUM was at MOMENTUM Sydney in 2010, where curator James Putnam included Bloodspell (Mexican UFO) (1972-2012) as part of The Putnam Selection, a program of seven films by British artists. In 2012, Sexton donated “Bloodspell (Mexican UFO)” and “Indestructible Truth (Tibet UFO)” (1958-59) to the MOMENTUM Collection. Together, these works fall within Sexton’s series of “Truth Machines“. When the MOMENTUM Collection was shown at the Musraramix Festival in Jerusalem in May 2012, Sexton traveled to Jerusalem to represent the artists in the collection.
“With my writing practice I somehow feel the books or poems I want to read do not yet exist, so somehow like the fabulist of old – I have to write them in order to read them. The same conditions apply to the art that I create – with this one exception – that if they do exist in poetry or literature but NOT in art – then I must create them. Sometimes my practice converges and takes the form of say a sculptural poem or an invocation or play. I have to confess that the notions of Time & Love play powerfully within me and inhabits much if not all of my explorations.
BLOODSPELL (MEXICAN UFO)
1973-2012, Video (found footage), 10 min 46 sec
With its low-fi analogue aesthetic and jerky zoom shots, Martin Sexton’s “Bloodspell (Mexican UFO)” (1973-2012) at first appears to be a travelogue constructed from grainy home videos, only to turn into a transcendental journey into science fiction. Characteristically of Sexton’s videos, however, our cameraman himself does not appear. Instead, a scrolling first-person narrative describes a remote Mayan temple controlled by the cosmos.
The lasting enigma of Bloodspell comes towards the video’s end, as the camera transitions from its documentary role into a tool of abstraction and mysticism. As the music swells and kaleidoscope-like patterns drift across the screen, we watch a flying saucer land on top of a Mayan temple. Without comment or guidance from the narrator, Sexton leaves us to probe our own potential for belief or disbelief.
INDESTRUCTIBLE TRUTH (TIBET UFO)
1958/59-2012, Video (found footage), 13 min 44 sec
Indestructible Truth (Tibet UFO) (1958-59) begins with a text written in the first person that describes the narrator’s experience with the Lama of Mahayana, who appears to him as a child in a garden and promises transcendental wisdom. Despite the work’s title, which lays claim to a greater truth, the narrator doubts himself for “accepting such folly. How could one have this direct, short path to liberation?” Film and text are employed to test the limits of both mediums’ claims to truth-value. As the narrator is mired in self-doubt, he counters with, “But now, reflecting back, there is this film.” The film footage, which purports to have been shot in Tibet in 1958, is simultaneously document and self-conscious construction.
After claiming to have seen a UFO, the narrator quotes the Swiss psychonanalyst C.G. Jung: “We always think that UFOs are projections of ours. Now it turns out that we are their projections. I am projected as the magic lantern of C.G. Jung. But who manipulates the apparatus?” Much as this paradoxical formulation applies to UFO sightings and other otherworldly phenomena, it applies just as well to what we have before us: the film proffered by a protagonist neither seen nor heard. [Jenny Tang]