Seth Price at Galerie Gisela Capitain

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Technologies alter reality is truism so true it becomes unthinkable. Price: "Meaning is a technology invented by writing." Ripple effects and, Us, a fish who cannot see water. The map invents territory. Meaning invents shamans, invents art. Painting invents heavens, perspective, invented the afterlife of your image. Painting invented the first user interface. Google Images invents Dispersion. Is this why Price is always noodling in new image tech? Searching for the printing/painting method that will finally rearrange painting if not us. It would seem futile if 100 years ago inventing flatness hadn't rearranged art totally, my god. The painting interface had invented an anti-skeuomorphism. Now Price maybe inventing some Sci-fi style floating keyboard. But visions for the future comically misalign with the banality of what takes place. Looking out into the heavens of virtual reality is impotent to our necks craned down to a stupid black mirror in hand. UI is more powerful than storytelling, than meaning, than art. Like our demise at a climate crisis, it will be less flashy, rearranging our maps will be banal. In the meantime painting will be great fantasy of meaning's user experience.  

See too: "...Has Price gone 'painting'? In hindsight despite all the technologic and cultural baggage, Price's containers were always forcing that enigma of painting into the vessels... Price's continuous plastering optical illusions on. ,,,Which here Price's fascination with images: the point being any sufficiently advanced imaging technology might be indistinguishable from painting's magic."

"... His long term subject and maybe Price's longterm point is proving that this is actually an axiom of art, left clutching ink resembling but not quite actualizing a human."

Seth Price at Petzel

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The real technology here is that Price found a way to avoid pinning his artist-butterfly subjectivity by letting some robots in. An android Price built to avoid fully naming, exposing, the artistic myth, Seth Price, fully. We trust gesture and painting as the concretized mind of the artist - and this techno means allowed Price what he's always been after, the squid's escape. Q, what we're left holding. A, disappearance duh. His long term subject and maybe Price's longterm point is proving that this is actually an axiom of art, left clutching ink resembling but not quite actualizing a human.

Seth Price at Friedrich Petzel

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Has Price gone "painting"? In hindsight despite all the technologic and cultural baggage, Price's containers were always forcing that enigma of painting into the vessels everyone was only speaking of conceptually despite Price's continuous plastering optical illusions on. Because Painting we believe is interminable, mysterious, whereas the vacuum-form is a product and thus taken as limited, understandable. Painting instead is held at a permanent distance of an oracle. Products we believe are empty. And Price with all his Rorschach tricks (ultra-HD videoing of Squid chromatophores as an almost explicit version of the both the inky comic character and psych test) attempting cultural products as the same enigma.
Which here Price's fascination with images: the point being any sufficiently advanced imaging technology might be indistinguishable from painting's magic. It will produces something alien, mysterious. Halter is right to bring up Gulliver's Travels in relation to Price, the book intended as a spoof of travelogue's desire for exoticism that also came at time when access to scientific technology like microscopes had become common, travel and tech magic depleted into something for parody. We'd been keen to be left with a joke, but when this tech eventually obsolesces into banality, we should prepare for simply being left with abstractions, hands clutching inkblots.


See too: Seth Price at 356 Mission, Seth Price at Stedelijk Museum, Seth Price at Museum Brandhorst

Seth Price at Museum Brandhorst

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There's just so much institution to this documentation. You feel the presence of the museum, the space, the frame architecture. The thing pulse, veritably breathes with capital, symbolic blood. The cavity, the bone white rib cage and the diaphragm HVAC, ventilated, for our aspiration, our hopes on the brown track running through us. Our institutions that resemble the bodies they are - space for lungs, lights for nutrients, passages for "digestion."  Passing us meals of contemplation, eventually defecates them for our plates and we eat their excitement.



See too: Brian Calvin at Le Consortium, Jef Geys at Essex Street, Gaylen Gerber at Emanuel Layr

Seth Price at 356 Mission

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Text saved Price's cutouts and vac-forms' vacancy by filling them with the aerosolized thought preceding it, dispersion to fill the empty packaging, naming the very thing Price's objects were at that moment doing. As the joke become boring Price again preceded the malaise attaching to it a novel with the critique already in hand explaining - in Price's elegantly mechanical prose - that Price had become a deterministic automaton in highly codified and symbolic trade-show of art where the good could be synthesized and produced like any other commodity as long as one understood the game that Price could all too knowingly lay out very well in the very-non-fiction auto-narrative look back on his then ripening career producing the good, highly collectible objects that looked just vacant enough to be salable all too clear to the viewers of this exhibition and those thoughts already thought for you, again the title to hang about you, Fuck Seth Price.