As Elizabeth Price’s solo exhibition comes to a close, exhibition curator Pavel Pyś reflects on the artist’s recently completed trilogy, SLOW DANS, two parts of which—FELT TIP and KOHL—are on view at the Walker. Drawing on references to clothing design, coal mining, and new technologies, Price’s trilogy examines the possibilities of life under advanced capitalism, especially in relation to issues of social class and gender. The following essay will appear in the monograph Elizabeth Price: SLOW DANS, co-published by Artangel, Film and Video Umbrella and the Whitworth, The University of Manchester, set for release later this month.
In the late 17th century, a new form of trompe-l’œil painting emerged in Europe—the quodlibet, which translated from Latin means “what you please.” The genre is characterized by portrayals of haphazardly arranged everyday items— papers, playing cards, and ribbons—often shown pinned to a background or scattered on letter racks. It might seem odd to invoke a form of playfully naturalistic painting in relation to Elizabeth Price’s practice. After all, what might this type of historic painting have in common with 21st-century digitally-produced moving image? Yet, with its emphasis on objects and their relationships within a specific surrounding space, the quodlibet serves as a useful point of departure for considering SLOW DANS, a new trilogy by Price that addresses themes of labor, technology, gender and politics.
Elizabeth Price studio production shot. Courtesy the artist
Just like many of the objects that Price references in her works, quodlibet paintings show common minutiae – letters, seals, prints, writing materials and domestic implements of various kinds. Throughout SLOW DANS, Price generates conversations between her own repertoire of everyday items, many of which she has collected over the years or simply stumbled upon by chance. Presented across multiple screens, each object gains significance and acts as an entry point into a moment in time and its concomitant social, cultural, political, and historical specificity. FELT TIP, for example, narrates a story rooted in the post-Fordist 1970s, told through an analysis of men’s neckties from that period (collected by the artist over the course of 15 years), and informed by Price’s encounter with a second-hand copy of Reimut Reiche’s publication Sexuality and Class Struggle (1968), an austere Marxist text analyzing the sex lives of the working class—Price’s copy marked with playful, pornographic, and argumentative comments in purple felt tip pen by an (assumed female) reader. Just as the quodlibet produces meaning by rhyming objects, so too Price elaborates upon these as proxies for core concerns with workplace gender dynamics, changing technologies, and the shift from blue to white collar labor. Her use of materials short-circuits assumptions around their inherent value—a museum collection of photographs of winding towers, the tall metal structures that are positioned above the mine shafts in collieries around Britain reproduced in KOHL, FELT TIP’s neckties, and the fabrics in THE TEACHERS all share the same significance. While Price’s work can in no way be equated with one of the purposes of trompe l’oeil painting as offering mere ocular pleasure, SLOW DANS offers moments of playfulness nonetheless. Beyond the humor underscoring some of their narration, imagery of ties and collieries bleeds between the trilogy’s discreet parts, forming connective visual threads. Similarly, the artist’s characteristic merging of image and sound produces an associative interplay, creating a rhythmic tempo and urgency.
Scattered across a table top or pinned to a wall, the objects shown in trompe l’oeil paintings appear just so, displayed for the viewer’s contemplation. We often see these from above, with the plan view conveying a sense of command—after all, we survey these by looking down. The sense of authority that this perspective affords is suggested throughout SLOW DANS: flattened neckties are scanned, while the black-and-white photographs from collieries appear inverted, as if negatives viewed on a slide illuminator. Such imagery brings to mind the unseen researcher, scouring over archival materials, and, in some way, we share space here with Price herself, who presents us with reproductions of appropriated materials she sourced while developing the work. The efficient organization of materials is also described by FELT TIP’s female narrators—also known as “the Administrative Core”—who speak of an emergent technology that allows for the storage of digital files in human fingertips. Another downward movement is taking place here: a closer look at a top-down hierarchy and structures of managerial control. Tapping keyboards, mouse clicks, and whirring hard drives bear witness to the office and its processes, where the “Administrative Core” performs its function of facilitating the downward transfer of information from the executive level to the store below.
The notion of unseen depths has anchored previous works by Price, such as WEST HINDER (2012), which plunges the viewer into the murky English Channel, as well as A RESTORATION (2016), which considers the excavation of the Cretan city of Knossos, led by the British archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans (1851–1941) at the turn of the 20th century. The suggestion of what lies underneath in SLOW DANS is a layered one. Delving deeper permeates KOHL, a ghost story centered on a flooded network of abandoned coal mines. From these pits emerge ghostly apparitions known as “Visitants,” which rise and seep through building foundations. Dark floral elements that switch between FELT TIP and KOHL suggest carboniferous swamps (the perceptive viewer will recognize their patterns in some of the neckties), while the work’s title points towards the liquid black cosmetic kohl, typically an eye shadow made from charcoal. In FELT TIP, an equivalence is struck between the depths of the coal mine and the computer cache, a correspondence forged between seemingly opposites: highly material solid rock and immaterial digital files. As an image of a coal mine flashes across the bottom screen, the “Administrative Core” describes it as “the cache, sometimes called the store, sometimes the repository,” a place where older files are held, as opposed to the more valuable ones, which are mapped onto their DNA. Throughout SLOW DANS, the cache is not only a metaphorical device employed for the sake of narrative but a tangible and actual part of each piece. All of Price’s moving image works are created in a contemporary digital editing program where a progressing timeline allows for the composition of a sequence of images and sounds. Each of these resides in the hard drive and becomes visible only if referred to on the timeline. In effect, while watching Price’s videos, we are witness to a constant drawing from the depths of the cache. Just as KOHL refers to ghostly apparitions, similarly spectral information exists on Price’s cache—even unused material remains there, within “a kind of sleep, dark space of stuff, which may be disturbed and enlivened.” When on view at the Walker Art Center, FELT TIP’s reference to the repository became almost site-specific, directing the informed viewer’s mind’s eye directly underneath the gallery floor, towards collection storage; itself a store of visual information, cared for according to its own hierarchy of labor and processes. The “Core’s” characterization of the cache as a site for older, remote, low-value, and rarely circulated material is pointed when thought of in relation to artwork storage, a place detractors of museums frequently (and humorously) describe as “‘where art goes to die.”
Trompe l’oeil painting was often conceived for a specific architectural space. Many of Price’s works are also always conceived around architectural or spatial principles: THE WOOLWORTHS CHOIR OF 1979 (2012) juxtaposes the ecclesiastical choir with the titular supermarket store, while USER GROUP DISCO (2009) happens in a fictional museum’s “Hall of Sculptures.” Similarly, KOHL establishes its place in colliery chutes, while the “Administrative Core” of FELT TIP occupies the office environment on its upper screen. The idea of the executive realm is extended into THE TEACHERS, its Rorschach blot–like folding and unfolding imagery reminiscent of book pages (also the site of THE TENT (2012), an area not too dissimilar to that of the screen, established as the location of SLEEP (2014). Looking down at the very architectural plan view of the Walker Art Center’s Perlman Gallery, which held an exhibition of Price’s work, catalyzed both the artist’s spatial and conceptual approach to FELT TIP. While spending time in the Walker’s archives, Price discovered that the Perlman Gallery is the connective point between the 1971 Edward Larrabee Barnes building and the 2005 Herzog & de Meuron addition. A tall space with a ceiling height of more than feet, the room was once divided by another story. Through research and conversations with Walker employees, Price realized that if one were to use the Perlman Gallery’s footprint to section vertically through the building, multiple levels of labor would be revealed: the director’s office at the top, with curatorial, security, and permanent collection storage directly underneath. FELT TIP’s two divided screens reference the missing story, with the upper part’s interior loosely modeled on the 1970s design of the Walker director’s office (a space of rational thought), while the lower screen forms a stand-in for storage via visual references to the computer cache and coal mine (or, in the artist’s own words, the “belly” or “groin”).
Although rooted in realistic imagery, the quodlibet generates a sense of illusion, blurring the boundary between reality and fiction. Price mines this seam, purposefully merging truth and invention. Her use of appropriated imagery—archival ephemera, photographs and slides, scanned materials—and references to actual places (such as the decommissioned British collieries named in KOHL) serve not only as a means to locate her narrative, but also to allude to familiar issues revolving around labor and social class. The notion that the viewer is presented with something “true” is reinforced by the cool and detached computerized narration of the chorus that affirms its status through plural pronouns (“we are”/”we know”’). The use of technical vocabularies and institutional jargon also adds to such an impression. In THE TEACHERS, the chorus speaks of a group of academics, which has chosen to be mute and communicate only through “sibilant utterances.” They originate from a “national advisory committee for higher education,” a designation that sounds actual, yet in reality is completely fictitious. Price has described her moving image works as “expanded PowerPoint presentations,” and their experience might remind the viewer of being instructed or taught a lesson. Yet, the sense of objectivity subsides as the trilogy’s narrative unfolds: “Visitants” rise from the deep, the “Administrative Core” ceremoniously cuts (or castrates?) the neckties, while academics gabble unintelligibly. By combining archival imagery (and its associated notions of what makes an “official” narrative) with material culture (the “unofficial” stand-ins for “lived experience”), Price privileges neither perspective, instead dwelling on an in-between space, seeking the historical in the personal, and vice versa. Fiction makes possible the maneuvering between the two.
While KOHL and FELT TIP reference particular historical moments—the demise of British coal mining and the shift from manual to office labor, respectively—THE TEACHERS is firmly rooted in contemporary wrangling over the future of chronically underfunded higher education. Considered in its entirety, SLOW DANS is Price’s most urgent work to date, with each of her chosen references and narratives gaining a politicized resonance given the times we live in. It is impossible to view KOHL without considering its ecological implications, especially at a time of climate change denial. While not expressly Price’s intention, the mysterious seeping “Visitants” bring to mind groundwater pollutants, which contaminate human bodies and radically disrupt endocrine systems. Although delivered with humor and wit, the “Administrative Core’s” concluding furious statement in FELT TIP—”things haven’t gone our way… NO”—orients the work in relation to the galvanized #MeToo movement and a larger institutional shift towards emphasis on equality, inclusion, and justice. Though structured as a science-fiction story, FELT TIP speaks to the increasingly porous divide between the human body, digital technologies, and artificial intelligence: at the time of writing, Microsoft and the University of Washington unveiled an automated system to store and retrieve data in manufactured DNA. The Bartleby-esque mute refusal of the academics in THE TEACHERS speaks to the bleak frustration of being hamstrung and trapped by institutional and corporate structures. Ultimately, SLOW DANS pointedly assesses the possibilities of life under advanced capitalism. The trilogy begs questions of our future in the context of rapid technological change, resource depletion and the undervaluing of human agency.
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