Visual art exhibitions and events with a platform for critical writing
Jerwood Space, London
14 January – 15 February
Reviewed by: Peter Suchin
A few days after Elizabeth Price's show opened, London's Barbican Centre staged a full-length performance of Erik Satie's Vexations. The sheet music for this piano piece contains only a couple of simple musical phrases and the instruction that these should be repeated 840 times. Such extravagant, seemingly idiotic, repetition also surfaces in Price's practice: viewing her work is like listening to Satie; the potential boredom invoked through the repeated carrying out of a simple activity turns out to prove illusory. "Repetition", as Brian Eno observed in his Oblique Strategies, "is a form of change".
A number of Price's works involve commonplace or insipid tasks. Boulder, a ball made from hundreds of layers of packing tape over an eight-year period is presently several feet thick, whilst Trophy, 2000 – ongoing, a silver-plated competition trophy engraved with the titles and dates of the exhibitions in which it is displayed, exemplifies a mock celebratory echo of its own contingent existence. The actions of the artist may be, these works appear to suggest, a pointless, time-consuming and perhaps thankless activity. But in a world increasingly determined by functionality, the idea of doing a thing for its own sake rather than for financial or other gain requires purposeful reiteration. Tautology and the circularity of dead-end meanings are, in the present context, replete with significance, even if at first sight this aspect of the work is hidden by the decoy
of its own superficial futility and lack of craft.
Price keeps colour to a minimum here. Blackness seeps through almost everything in the gallery, as though the objects employed – newspapers, money, handwritten notes – have been cancelled out of existence. It is their reinvigoration in a ghostly form, however, that makes this show much more than the sum of its fragmented, terse and wilfully perverted parts.
Peter Suchin
Graham Hudson, Tina O'Connell and Brighid Lowe are the other selected artists for Jerwood Artists Platform in 2004. For more details www.jerwoodspace.co.uk
Writer detail:
Peter Suchin
Venue detail:
Jerwood Space (The)
171 Union Street, LONDON SE1 0LN
No one has commented on this article yet, why not be the first?
To post a comment you need to login
Back to top