Dispersion….
Seth Price, “Dispersion” (2001-2002), a document designed for the catalogue of the Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Art 2003 curated by Christophe Cherix, printed as a book with Green Naftali 2003, available as a PDF (Dispersion2008.pdf) via the artist’s own website: http://www.distributed history.com/ (accessed 19 March).
Who is Seth Price?
Seth Price was born in 1973 and lives and works in New York City. He has no art school training and originally worked in film. He is interested in the way existing information is dispersed, and much of his work takes existing forms of music, art, technology and the internet and shifts the context of this material to interrupt meaning, and to question authorship and artistic intent.[1]
“The monumental model of public art is invested in an anachronistic notion of communal appreciation transposed from the church to the museum to the outdoors, and this notion is received sceptically by an audience no longer so interested in direct communal experience.”
Seth Price talks of the artistic impulse as being utopian, yet it seems as if he is losing faith in the gallery or public place as a way of distributing and viewing art.
The gallery and museum have historically stood for utopian ideals. The gallery could be said to allow almost spiritual happenings to occur. Certainly artists like Barnett Newman and Wassily Kandinsky believed in the spiritual power of viewing a painting.
“In my view the ideal museum is a synthesis of art, life and nature. A sort of paradise, but without the snakes”[2]
“Art and religion speak a similar language. Both seek to be freed from the restrictions of life” [3]
If the gallery was a communal place that could free us from the restrictions of life, it would seem that Price may now believe that Gallery is now becoming its own restriction. Whereas once a gallery was a place to uplift art, to make objects kind of holy in their own right, today’s gallery works with those same principles whilst breaking all of the aesthetic rules relating to a holy object that it can. A pin on the wall can be sold for thousands of dollars. But the gallery is a safe place: it is the artistic intent; after all, that makes a work “art”. But why should anyone go to a gallery to see a pin on the wall? Because they believe in the strength of the artistic impulse (which is affirmed by the work being in the walls of a gallery). So perhaps now it is not through the object itself- but through that historical significance of the gallery and museum as places of communal viewing- that this higher utopian experience is achieved. The problem is that the direct experience might now be replaced by some abstract inbuilt knowledge of what a gallery is supposed to do.
The Internet as a new artistic utopia?
Seth Price searches for answers to this possible staling of the gallery and public experience with questions of internet as a medium of art.
“Perhaps an art distributed to the broadest possible public closes the circle, becoming a private art, as in the days of commissioned portraits.” [4]
The problem with this private art, as Price says, is that it will have to compete with the private consumption of the rest of television and media. Another problem is that with the anonymity of the internet we risk losing the celebration of what makes artists an important and unique part of society – creative minds behind a work; the recognition of that power in the process of appropriation and production. However there is no doubt that the internet does offer a new exciting way of experiencing- much more than Newman or Kandinsky could have imagined.
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