ART CITIES:Amsterdam- Seth Price
Through paintings, sculpture, video, and media work, Seth Price underlines the production strategies, dissemination modes, and valuation patterns that art most typically occupies or assumes. His appropriative work, which often comprises what he terms the “Redistribution” of pirated materials disrupts the operations of commodity culture and the information systems on which its ingratiating fluidity depends.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Stedelijk Museum Archive
Encompassing more than 150 works created between 2000 and 2017, the exhibition “Social Synthetic” at Stedelijk Museum offers the first comprehensive overview of Seth Price’s oeuvre so far. Ranging across mediums and disciplines, the exhibition includes: sculpture, installation, 16mm film, video, photography, drawing, painting, clothing and textiles, web design, music and sound, and poetry. Besides a large selection of works from the artist’s most important series since 2000, the show will feature a number of new works. Ranging from vacuum-formed bomber jackets to 16-millimeter projections of rolling waves, Price’s employ of interchangeable and nonspecific supports focuses on seeking out operations, allowing his work to avoid ossification as fixed images. One tactic involves collaborative performances with the art and publishing collective Continuous Project, formed in 2003 with Bettina Funcke, Wade Guyton, and Joseph Logan. The self under technological pressure, a key theme in Price’s work, is often expressed in terms of surface, packaging, and wrapping. Sometimes this manifests literally: a photographic study of the skin of a person obtained through the sorts of technology Google employs for mapping, vacuum-formed plastic reliefs showing body parts stranded in plastic, large wall sculptures depicting the negative space between two people engaged in intimate action, greatly enlarged from tiny internet jpegs. Sometimes the theme of surface manifests in more subtle ways, in terms of the abject, superficial, aesthetic of the web, or the contemporary fixation on repeating, all-over logos, as seen within clothing, envelopes, and stores. The “Vintage Bomber” (2005-08) wall reliefs were produced by forcing heated polystyrene over the cast of a bomber jacket to yield an empty shell that is both 3D icon and 2D image, while they may initially seem abstract, Price here considers the way a utilitarian object invented by the military becomes embraced and reworked, first by repeated waves of 20th Century subcultures, finally by the global fashion industry. His books include “Dispersion” (2002), a prophetic and almost instantly canonical essay on digital culture, “How to Disappear in America” (2008), a manipulated assemblage of found texts about vanishing from contemporary life and the autofictional novel “Fuck Seth Price” (2015).
Info: Curator: Beatrix Ruf, Leontine Coelewij andAchim Hochdörfer, Stedelijk Museum, Museumplein 10, Amsterdam, Duration: 15/4-3/9/17, Days & Hours: Mon-Thu & Sat-Sun 10:00-18:00, Fri 10:00-22:00, www.stedelijk.nl
