LUX / Blog
Editorial
29 Jan 2010
Click on the images below to watch some excerpts from videos by Elizabeth Price and scroll down to read an exclusive essay on Price's work by critic Gilda Williams. Part of our new writing series introducing film and video by artists recently taken into the LUX Collection.
Elizabeth Price, excerpt from At The House of Mr X (2007), HD video, 20 mins, colour, sound. At The House of Mr X was commissioned by the Stanley Picker Gallery
Elizabeth Price, excerpt from User Group Disco (2009), HD video, 15 mins, colour, sound. User Group Disco was commissioned by Spike Island
Elizabeth Price, excerpt from User Group Disco (2009), HD video, 15 mins, colour, sound. User Group Disco was commissioned by Spike Island
Elizabeth Price, excerpt from Welcome [The Atrium] (2008), HD video, 8 mins, colour, sound
Elizabeth Price: Modern Dance
Gilda Williams
Mike Davis’ book Dead Cities (2003) vividly describes a post-cataclysmic San Francisco in which humans have been suddenly wiped out, leaving nature to regain the upper-hand. According to the scientists, vast quantities of human cadavers and their stockpiles of food would first be devoured by rats, cats, roaches and flies; their numbers would soar astronomically until supplies ran out.
Soon these vermin would be reduced to eating each other, and be eventually overrun by big dogs organized into efficient hunting packs. Later the dogs would be superseded by bobcats, mountain lions and wild cattle until finally the locusts would prevail, gorging themselves on the luxurious new vegetation growing under the shadow of a rusting but still intact Golden Gate Bridge.
Elizabeth Price’s futuristic world is one in which, likewise, humans have departed; here, however, their traces remain eerily intact. Flora and fauna have not run rampant but remain respectfully at bay, the bushes still apparently pruning themselves in the manicured gardens of At The House of Mr X (2007).
Elizabeth Price, still from At The House of Mr X (2007), HD video, 20 mins, colour, sound. At The House of Mr X was commissioned by the Stanley Picker Gallery
In this video, the empty and perfect, art-filled high modernist interior (a real London site that is open, with some discretion, to the public) seems to confess that it was never really meant for human habitation in the first place but was always secretly intended exclusively for the comfort of bronze expressionist figurines, Plexiglas abstractions and emerald-green Mies van der Rohe dining chairs.
Mr X was an avid collector of modernity; Price’s overlaid text relishes in high-cultural name-dropping, forming a list dripping with Bauhaus-inspired fetishization (the Marcel Breuer occasional table; the Achille Castiglione table lamp) recognizable as both tour-guide brochure and luxury brand shopping list.
Mr X was also the entrepreneur behind Mary Quant and Outdoor Girl cosmetics; these shared the house’s modernist aspirations of jewel-like colours, beauty, and a tacit improvement on nature, all of which collide in Price’s narration and suggest a Brave New World of exquisite residential architectures and brightly lit (if absent) young female faces.
Both require intense, unseen upkeep resulting in an idealization of form that prides itself on departing from the imperfections of actual human life. The house of Mr X is presumably a self-hoovering, self-curating, self-sustaining world in which humans haven’t merely disappeared, they’ve grown into redundant, messy extras in a perfect world better off without them.
The cars in Elizabeth Price’s forthcoming video West Hinder (due 2010) have also learned they’d do better without the interference of their human drivers. The story is this: in December 2002, a ship sailing in dense fog across the Channel and carrying 2862 luxury cars sunk into an area called West Hinder, a no-man’s sea unlegislated by any country.
Price envisions the cars’ unforeseen underwater resourcefulness, rebooting their water-logged, state-of the-art computer systems to adapt to life on the sea floor, reversing the evolutionary process whereby sea-creatures crawled onto earth millions of years ago and adapted to life on dry land.
Unlike the technologically backward hulk of the Titanic, which spent the 20th century stupidly rotting on the freezing ocean floor, these cars have learned from the 1990s self-help manuals read by their capable inventors and turn their woeful misfortune into a new lease on life, corralling their supernatural forces into a synchronized Busby Berkeley-like watery dance.
This is not Stephen King’s infernal, vintage 1958 Plymouth Fury, Christine, the vindictive car who uses her hidden powers to haunt her former tormentors: honking rudely, blasting headlights, and eventually running her enemies down. No; this colony of 21st century top-of-the-line BMWs and Mercedes-Benzs are obviously a better breed of automobile altogether, able to apply the high-level management skills of those who created them to forge a life-like Hollywood existence in this underwater dreamscape.
Elizabeth Price, User Group Disco (2009), HD video, 15 mins, colour, sound. User Group Disco was commissioned by Spike Island. Installation view
Late Modernist systems of human achievement are everywhere in Price’s videos but it’s a Modernism gone feral: functional domestic objects have become amputated, nut-cracking fragments of female legs (User Group Disco, 2009); spinning chocolate machines are lathered in hot mayonnaise, unfit for human consumption yet reeking of caloric potential (Welcome [The Atrium], 2008); taxonomic systems of classification, once indispensable to organize and retrieve information, are superseded by the almighty Search Engine, which finds your random Search Term pronto despite the unclassified chaos that is the Internet.
Elizabeth Price, Welcome [The Atrium] (2008), HD video, 8 mins, colour, sound. Installation view
Words emit emphatic messages onto the screen without human hand or spoken voice; objects spin and music is played without human assistance: we have all, evidently, been rendered unnecessary. In Price’s universe, humanity has disappeared but not fallen into ruin; its unmanned trappings prove as everlasting as God once was, humming along efficiently without us, eternally maintained by indestructible, firewalled computer systems; self-regulating, optimally climatized museum spaces; and insurance claims filed in perpetuity.
Their creators, the now-absent humans, have been superseded like the rats and roaches in Davis’ post-apocalyptic San Francisco by the sleek, superior, hyper-designed appliances and furnishings populating this Hall of Sculptures, as the artist calls it. In Price’s 21st century sci-fi, Modernism created a world perfect in its conception and seductive in its gleaming surfaces, but humans are like unkempt houseguests who have overstayed their Welcome and been invited to leave.
It is a world also endowed with a sterling sound system which, at the close of User Group Disco, triumphantly blasts the relentless beat of the 80s dance hit, Take On Me, presumably self-remixed to achieve superior sound quality. Price’s depopulated modern world – with its abandoned luxury homes; its endlessly expandable, visitor-free museums; its underwater dancing car parks – seems to function better without us.
Gilda Williams is a London correspondent for Artforum and Lecturer at Goldsmiths College. From 1994-2005 she was Editor and Commissioning Editor (from 1997) for contemporary art at Phaidon Press. Her book The Gothic (2007) is published in the Whitechapel/MIT Press series, 'Documents of Contemporary Art’.
Click here to read more about works by Elizabeth Price distributed by the LUX Collection
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