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Lot Essay
‘The material has always been super important for me. Surfaces, whether rough and industrial, almost brutal, or totally shiny, this idea of the perfect surface. I would say yes, I always had a problem with the image. I preferred working with writing, and music, and video. The iconic image is done so well with painting and sculpture already. That may have led me to avoid a certain kind of image making, and I ended up making these absences, but I was always interested in materiality.’
—SETH PRICE
A forbidding column of black that towers impressively over the viewer, Seth Price’s Untitled (2009) poses questions about the nature of consumption, the art object and the distribution of images in the twenty-first century. One of Price’s renowned series of vacuum-sealed sculptures, Untitled takes a sheet of polystyrene that he has completely covered in industrial-grade black ink and applies it over a twist of knotted rope, suspending the rope’s form in a kind of contemporary embalming process. Using plastic against its reputation for everything impermanent, throwaway or quotidian, Price deploys it in order to transform the rope into a remarkable relief, giving the work a stylish grandeur.
Price’s work stands very self-consciously in a Conceptual and Post-Conceptual tradition, and in its texturally rich, monochrome treatment of an everyday object, it recalls the black paintings of Robert Rauschenberg, or Piero Manzoni’s Achrome series, not to mention Conceptual artists like Iain Baxter who used vacuum-formed plastic in the 1960s. Price’s central intellectual concerns are laid out in his seminal and oft-revised essay Dispersion: the status of art in relation to the networks that distribute it – be they the traditional system of gallery, dealer, collector and museum, or the radical alternative to this offered by the Internet. Accordingly, in this Untitled, Price plays with the conceptual distinction made between the artwork as an authentic one-off, and the processes of reproduction that define the distribution of information today. Vacuum-sealing, an instrument of mass-production and identikit commercial replication, is here made to iconify its subject matter, creating an imposingly monumental, unique object that demands that the viewer engage with its tactile, sensorial qualities.
—SETH PRICE
A forbidding column of black that towers impressively over the viewer, Seth Price’s Untitled (2009) poses questions about the nature of consumption, the art object and the distribution of images in the twenty-first century. One of Price’s renowned series of vacuum-sealed sculptures, Untitled takes a sheet of polystyrene that he has completely covered in industrial-grade black ink and applies it over a twist of knotted rope, suspending the rope’s form in a kind of contemporary embalming process. Using plastic against its reputation for everything impermanent, throwaway or quotidian, Price deploys it in order to transform the rope into a remarkable relief, giving the work a stylish grandeur.
Price’s work stands very self-consciously in a Conceptual and Post-Conceptual tradition, and in its texturally rich, monochrome treatment of an everyday object, it recalls the black paintings of Robert Rauschenberg, or Piero Manzoni’s Achrome series, not to mention Conceptual artists like Iain Baxter who used vacuum-formed plastic in the 1960s. Price’s central intellectual concerns are laid out in his seminal and oft-revised essay Dispersion: the status of art in relation to the networks that distribute it – be they the traditional system of gallery, dealer, collector and museum, or the radical alternative to this offered by the Internet. Accordingly, in this Untitled, Price plays with the conceptual distinction made between the artwork as an authentic one-off, and the processes of reproduction that define the distribution of information today. Vacuum-sealing, an instrument of mass-production and identikit commercial replication, is here made to iconify its subject matter, creating an imposingly monumental, unique object that demands that the viewer engage with its tactile, sensorial qualities.