As part of helping with the CAST Saturday Club, yesterday I got the chance to experience Elizabeth Price’s User Group Disco that is currently installed at CAST. It’s an incredible piece; Price sets up her videos to be entirely immersive, with the room entirely blacked out and the sound playing so loudly that you can almost feel it in your body. User Group Disco is a complex work, mainly comprising footage of highly polished crockery and cutlery (and a couple of other domestic items such as a record), filmed up-close, often spinning, with chiaroscuro-esque lighting. Above these shots Price layers audio (everything from Take On Me to far more alien, industrial, percussive sounds) and writing, scrolling across the screen in a graphic, digitised font. Price compiles the writing from gathered texts (which vary work to work) into one line of narration which, in User Group Disco, mimics and hyperbolises the language of advertising and of large corporations (WE ARE HUMAN RESOURCES). The piece speaks to so many themes and ideas (the domestic, consumerism, capitalism, alienation, the digital, taxonomy, objects…) that I’m sure everyone will read it and take away something different. What struck me was the way the objects were made alien and ominous – it felt as though their inner unknown ‘thingness’ was slowly but surely uncovered and grown throughout the screening – the footage spun faster and faster, the text moved across the screen at an ever-increasing pace, and the sound built to an indecipherable crescendo.
I feel there’s a lot I can take from Price’s work in relation to my own exploration of ‘things’ and ‘thingness’. Her process, while a lot more digital than mine (currently) is, is reminiscent of the way I work: gathering, collecting and then curating and assembling into something new. The way she uses gathered texts, cuts them apart, and then stitches them back together seems a more developed version of what I have started to do with my gathered quotes. Whereas currently my gathered quotes seem to be sitting tentatively alongside my work, perhaps manipulating them a little and bringing them more directly into the pieces might make them into a more effective added layer of thingness.
I also noted down the following extract of text from User Group Disco:
Some notes on taxonomy
A taxonomy is an ordered system of classification
Initially taxonomy was the science of classifying living organisms, but later the word was applied in a wider sense and may refer to a classification of things, or the principles underlying classification itself
any system for organising knowledge, whether it is a database or a museum must be founded upon a coherent taxonomy
in order to function properly that taxonomy must be consistent with the user group’s conceptualisation of the subject
a taxonomy is not simply a neutral system
for categorising specimens
it defines what data are to be recorded
and how like and unlike specimens are to be recorded
and it implicitly embodies
a theory of the universe
from which those specimens are drawn
*image and audio intensifies*
*red background* LET US SHOW YOU
*image (very close up/abstracted and monochrome) of a spinning record*
Let’s start with
This
This thing here
Which is already too old
Not to present us with riddles
It is a black pane of composite mass
The colour of oil
Delicately scribbled
With utterly illegible writing
Enclosing a missive
From the terrible twentieth century
And in its very formulation
Capturing the sounds of creation
The first and last sounds
A judgement
Upon life
And furthermore a message
From that
To us
Who have come thereafter
It is covered with curves
Structured like a spiral
Vast in circumference
And prodigious in depth
With perfectly smooth sides
Which might be mistaken for ebony
But for the bewildering rapidity
With which they spin round
And for the gleaming and ghastly radiance
They shoot forth
A wide waste of liquid ebony
All whirling and plunging
With a rapidity never elsewhere seen
Throughout this text, which appears line by line in scrolling digital font on the screen, the pace and volume increases and the images grow more and more abstract. The words and phrases are wonderfully on the border between directly relating to what is on screen (i.e. when the record comes up and it starts talking about the ‘black pane of composite mass’), and also abstract as to be alluding to many different perceived pasts of the object (‘which is already too old/not to present us with riddles’). This is exactly the impact I’d like any writing I might include to have in my work. Although it is unlikely I will be working with moving image, and that therefore I can control quite as many alignments of text with visuals, it is definitely still good to bear in mind how the placement, and physical treatment, of the words I chose impact the image. For example, I have recently been having the quotes as self-contained, printed on their own sheets of paper, but by treating them in the same way as the drawings (soaking in water, rippling them etc), this elevates them away from just some wall text, to a sculptural piece in itself. But might it be good to break up the text/piece separation? Bring the text physically onto the same piece of paper? This would definitely be something worth experimenting with.
As well as the placement of the text, the way Price talks about taxonomy is also hugely interesting to me. In moving towards a collecting and curating approach to my work, I am already in the realm of taxonomy and classification. Price speaks of breaking down, and even ‘rotting’, taxonomies, and again this is absolutely something to consider in relation to my own work – what taxonomies am I suing when I curate my work? Certainly, I want to move away from pre-established, hierarchical taxonomies, but what do I want to move towards? More research into taxonomies, even just the history of them, would definitely help to start answering this. I also watched the artist talk (linked below), in which Price talks more about this. My notes are jotted down below.
- Interesting how she uses spinning almost as a mode of abstraction/activation of the objects
- Spinning – evokes ideas of creation, both in terms of pottery, but perhaps also more broadly – laws of physics, how planets are formed etc. interesting then to tie the record into this in this way – was there a record that was sent out into space as a record of humanity?
- Evoking alien and other-worldly qualities through the domestic and everyday
- Sinister and ominous but poking fun at establishments etc – like the objects are watching, rising up, pushing back against the boxes that we put both ourselves and them in
- Digital typeface
- Links to my own current want to incorporate text into my work – I think she gathers text?
- Unsure how she works with gathered text – I don’t know if she reworks it in any way but she definitely makes decisions about where and when alongside the images the text will appear. Is this something I could start considering? Will text be physically incorporated into the works? Or alongside e.g. on the wall? Or in some kind of written publication? Will I write my own text or curate gathered texts in the same way as price?
- Works with found things, never pointing her camera at a human. Assembles a narrative from this, often delivered/enhanced by text delivered graphically – ‘a scrolling text that rolls across the screen’ – this is also found and compiled but heavily manipulated – ‘it’s not me that’s speaking to you through the video, it’s many other voices, sourced through these documents that speak to you through the video’.
- Melodic and percussive soundtracks – creating a melodramatic experience of these objects and their narratives
- Price speaks about herself as knowing the ‘narrative voice’ is formed of many, but it not necessarily being obvious so, as in user group disco, sometimes they will say ‘we are many’
- What does bringing multiple voices do to the work? As opposed to just the voice of the artist? Or also keeping the source of narration anonymous? (also how to deal with copyright etc?)
- Often site-specific works – alluding to sculptural areas in museums etc – setting the site for a drama – not necessarily literal though – a world of ideas, institutional and ideological
- User group disco used many different sources of text, whereas the car piece she limited herself to only looking at the car press releases
- Interested in manipulating the material to express something not part of the original content – like working with a sculptural material, bending it into something new (text-wise I believe?)
- Car piece very speculative – giving the cars the narratorial power, a new life-force under the sea – at the end of the film the cars dance
- Layers of time and provenance – ‘complex provenance’ – the layers through which they have passed ‘before they wash up in my video’ – e.g. digitised archives
- Production and post-production are not separated as they are in industrial film making – everything happens simultaneously – dragging things onto the timeline (in final cut software) and sifting them – gives an archaeology of material within the editing software (old, buried images etc)
- Narration as characters almost – not necessarily viewpoints she’s sympathetic to
- ‘a porous taxonomy where categories might bleed’ – idea of categories ‘rotting and bleeding’ – ‘confound rational systems of organisation […] with irrational ones’ – moving through these
- The voice becomes tied to the place created in the work
- Taxonomy as a system of organisation, and thereby hierarchising, everything in the world
Anna Harris 