Elizabeth Price
dal 1/5/2003 al 8/6/2003
Segnalato da
1/5/2003
Elizabeth Price
Mobile Home, London
Each work in the exhibition presents a found text. These include a text of a local newspaper, the transcript of a live radio broadcast; and the placard from a protest. These texts are familiar to us, in type at least, and are similar to each other. One thing they all share is that their normal interval of currency has expired.
Å’Denness
Opening Party: Friday 2nd May 7-9pm
Mobile Home is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new work by Elizabeth
Price.
Each work in the exhibition presents a found text. These include a text of a
local newspaper, the transcript of a live radio broadcast; and the placard
from a protest. These texts are familiar to us, in type at least, and are
similar to each other. One thing they all share is that their normal
interval of currency has expired. However, through their re-presentation
here, each text is employed to articulate an ensuing course of action.
This action is, in part, that of the artist; and the works each disclose her
own encounter with the texts, and the undertakings which they have
precipitated. Œdead body dial 999¹ is a version of issue no.17024 of the
Hackney Gazette, 31 August, 2000. It was produced in response to a suicide
note reported in that issue. Like much of Price¹s recent work this project
was generated by finding an anonymous or remote instruction. Often the
instruction cannot be fulfilled in a straightforward way, and so the work
unfolds in trying to resolve an appropriate course of action to meet the
demand of the task. Price¹s initial course of action in this piece was to
re-type the entire textual content of the Gazette.
In this, as in much of her work, the project develops through a process of
repetitive manual or administrative labour. In a kind of dumb-comic
inversion of artistic virtuosity, Price considers how to proceed by
undertaking a task of maintenance. She inhabits and acts out the logic of
her subject. In this case, she absorbed the entire text of her local paper,
an act formalised by the process of re-typing it; and on the completion of
this process she returned the text to the tabloid¹s multi-column format. In
fact, it was returned to the precise arrangement of issue no.17024. (The
resulting version differs from the original in that it employs a single font
and includes only the textual content of the newspaper). This dead-pan
re-iteration of the newspaper text, meets no task, but documents the period
of Price¹s dogged attention to the instruction, and precisely discloses the
reality of the site, where she encountered it.
LIVE is a text derived from a live radio broadcast (20 July 2001). It
documents 45 minutes of a phone-in discussion held on the morning after
Jeffrey Archer¹s conviction for perjury and perverting the course of
justice; and constitutes an attempt to faithfully transcribe it. The
conversation is very animated, and so incorporates a whole range of
non-verbal enunciations, which Price includes. The resulting text
articulates her attempts to find an accommodation for the varying
conversational uses of sniffs, sighs, splutters or laughter, amongst other
sounds even less well differentiated. The presentation of the text employs
the conventions of the dramatic script and so a re-enactment is prompted.
Directions for this are offered, and a set of visual props is provided.
A similar chain of events unfolds in ŒDenness¹, employing a photograph from
the sports-pages of the Independent Newspaper (22 November 2001). This
documents a demonstration following a contentious cricket decision, which
takes the form of a re-enactment of the moment and gesture of the disputed
judgement. A boy stands in for the batsman Sachin Tendulkar, and near by a
man performs the action of the umpire: ruling Tendulkar Œout¹ with a gesture
of the right hand, pointing sky-wards. From this extraordinary protest,
Price borrows and distributes a single prop.
The works presented articulate Price¹s response to three texts. Her reply is
in each case terse, but the deadpan tone belies a mordant wit. Through the
evidence of her own response, the claim of each text is re-made and
re-distributed......
Wednesday  Sunday 12pm  6pm
mobile home
7 vyner street
london e2 9dg
t: +44 (0)20 8983 4567