Seth Price: Dispersion James Stanfield

I found Seth Price’s Dispersion while wandering the artist’s website. The essay is easy to read, and it's presented as a fully illustrated, and appropriation drenched, booklet/internet document.

Sometimes images in Dispersion act as layout devices, sometimes as literal illustrations of the text, and still at other times they act as visual non-sequiturs, but at all times the images reinforce Price’s penchant for leveling all imagery found in the popular archive.

What is the popular archive? It is hard to say - as Price does not spend much time describing it. I take it to mean a collection of all the images that have ever been produced. In Dispersion’s case Price is describing all audio and visual signs - made since the invention of the printing press - that can travel in a mass-produced media document. He sees these as objects to be collected and reused “with or without modifications, regardless of intellectual property laws.”

Price says:

The last thirty years have seen the transformation of art’s "expanded field", from a stance of stubborn discursive ambiguity into a comfortable and compromised situation in which we’re well accustomed to conceptual interventions, art and the social, or “relational aesthetics”. The impulse to merge art and life has resulted in lifestyle art, a secure gallery practice that comments on contemporary media culture, or apes commercial production strategies.

End quote.

Instead of continuing this practice Price offers up the restaging of familiar techniques of distribution - using recognizable and previously distributed images - as a way of creating an art-like experience outside the confines of the gallery. It is uncertain if this action is art, since it attempts to escape the confines of artistic practice by more fully merging its sensibility with whatever media is being used. So Dispersion argues for less of a rupture between artistic interventions and distributed media.

The most gruesome example offered in Dispersion is “the Daniel Pearl video”.

Quote begins here.

Even without the label PROPAGANDA, which CBS helpfully added to the excerpt they aired last spring, it’s clear that the 2002 video is a complex document. Formally, it presents kidnapped American journalist Daniel Pearl, first as a mouthpiece for the views of his kidnappers, a Pakistani fundamentalist organization, and then, following his off-screen murder, as a cadaver, beheaded in order to underline the gravity of their political demands.

One of the video’s most striking aspects is not the grisly, though clinical, climax (which, in descriptions of the tape, has come to stand in for the entire content), but the slick production strategies, which seem to draw on American political campaign advertisements. (Price)

End quote.

Here a violent, political action was taped and then edited for consumption. The edits mimic media graphics in either a naive or mocking way. There is a willingness on the part of the executioners to exploit the same graphic language used in American propaganda. This video's tragic content is too powerful to rest as art, but its advert-like appearance makes it confusing. Its edited and reprocessed existence feels like a media critique - like something that uses contemporary art making strategies.

In Dispersion there is a still from the Daniel Pearl video printed next to the text. The three images following this still are various appropriated portraits. Two of these portraits would normally not be understood as gruesome, but since they are printed near the image of Daniel Pearl’s decapitation video they both gain a slightly eerie connotation. These two images’ titles are Computer Technique Group, Cubic Kennedy, 1960’s and Computer Technique Group, Return to a Square, 1960’s. It is in this grouping that Price’s way of creating experience through bits culled from the popular archive begins to emerge. It is the residue of shock (Daniel Pearl video) mixed with the residue of history (assassination of Kennedy) and underscored with the residue of perpetually obsolete technology (Computer Technique Group, 1960’s) that creates an art-like experience for the reader. The general tenor of this mixture is one of pathos and melancholy.

Why is this experience just art-like and not simply art? I believe Price’s own phrasing is best:

One suggestion comes from the philosopher Sarat Maharaj, who sees the question as "a marker for ways we might be able to engage with works, events, spasms, ructions that don’t look like art and don’t count as art, but are somehow electric, energy nodes, attractors, transmitters, conductors of new thinking, new subjectivity and action that visual artwork in the traditional sense is not able to articulate." These concise words call for a art that insinuates itself into the culture at large, an art that does not go the way of, say, theology, where, while it’s certain that there are practitioners doing important work, few people notice…

End quote.