Was Ist Los?
Seth Price, 2006


For the British, British men in particular, men of possibly the Edwardian period, or in any case men of a certain social class at some point prior to World War Two, an almost unconscious game of conversation was to defer the verb to the very end of a sentence; a display of breeding, a showing-off, a decor hole: "Let's don't us down the garden path lead". Keep deferring the verb.

We're familiar with artistic explorations of banality, emptiness, depletion, etc., which seem to focus their passive aggressions on the image. But every image is facile. Something quiet and restful. How to make an art that is not interested in the image and its politics? It may be true that images are one of the pivotal regulators of contemporary society, whether in advertising, in art, or in the cultural programming that falls some place between. Should there not be, however, regulators of modern life which fall outside the realm of the image, which have instead to do with codes and processes lacking any visibility? Or might it be true that everything reduces to images?

Well, like most liberals I prefer questions to solutions. The mission of a virus is not to kill its host, but to preserve its host, and thus itself. In any case, subversion is not an activity in and of itself; nor can it be an end or goal. As ever, the artist's work is an analysis of the artist's relation to the work, the artist resists art, the artist resists the artist, and other extrapolations along those lines. Resistance from an unusual quarter. As in the following anecdote:

Recent radical labor activity has tended to come from an unusual quarter: migrant workers who have reached the US from areas to the South: Mexico, Central America, South America. In many cases these workers cannot necessarily speak English, and may not actually be American citizens. They may in fact have no intention of becoming even long term residents, hoping to put in only a few years of work before returning to their country of origin with full pockets. How is it that radical left politics now finds itself springing from this constituency? It may be instructional to turn to earlier moments in left US social history. One finds the same patterns in the currents of the Socialist 1930s, although in that case the new immigrants were from Europe. The point is, in this country much of the most fervent agitation on the progressive labor side of things has come from foreigners, whether it be those who weathered the Eastern European 1950s, or the Latin American 1970s and '80s, or whatever. Truly a home grown radicalism falling in line with everything we expect from the United States. OK, basically what happened is, America's Latin American misadventures of the 1970s and 1980s produced a new wave of radicalized immigrants from below, bringing revolutionary organizing strategies and demands that will remain here even after they have departed.




Press Release

When you stop talking and doing, and close your eyes, what comes to mind? Voices? Images? Feelings? Like landscape seen from a plane, these phenomena hover on the sublime verge between fascinating and boring. Well, this may be true of anything viewed from a distance. The stars, the sea, mountains, the horizon... And social phenomena? Same. On any forgotten record, it's in the "filler" songs that you find the blank, thoughtless strivings laid bare, the production patterns of another day, secrets of the ornaments.

Look further back, to a time when age 25 was referred to as "the mid-point of life", to when cattle were the only capital. One senses something of the mesh of fear and regimentation and suffering and bloody sacrifice from which civilization was meant to escape. This is the coin of the realm, a currency of loins and coins. Consider, likewise, megaliths, dolmen, tumuli; all the brooding architecture of early man. It may be that this is not "architecture" at all, but faith embodied, which is to say, magic. Magic is a process that always uses the most advanced technologies at hand: in the stone age this meant fire, fur, bone, blood; in the middle ages, the crucible, the alembic, the chalk circle. Today it is images, a thickening web of images that amounts to a magic circle through which the citizens of this age have passed, never to return. What a time you chose to be born!

The question, then, is how to paint one's subjectivity in the codes of culture? In response, one would like to be able to curl up and go to sleep. After all, there's no such thing as culture, it won't be still, there's no "stand back, let me get a look at you!" And here lies the reason religion was invented by man: a system to remember for you. You have only to recall one thing, and know that there is a power that manages the rest in your stead. Do not mistake this for a throwback, a revival, or a regression. What is proposed here is every bit as modern as global capitalism and the information economy: a Utopia that stands abreast, yet apart. The fact is, over the course of her history America has become more religious, not less, despite the influences of science and government. Why should it be so? Because science may answer anything and everything, true, yet still it cannot tell us why there is something, rather than nothing. And the duty of government is to establish law, but other than that, government--arguably democracy itself--is a price to pay, an inefficiency, a hindrance to the market. "Labor and production", those specters of the twentieth century, no longer have a thing to offer us.

Is man so perverse that he would continue to eat acorns after the discovery of grain? To those who decry Utopia as a futile project, or worse, one whose failures brought us the horrors of the last century, consider that we are in a Utopian moment, that each moment is a golden image. We no longer face the Fascist threat, the World War, all the dirty shadows of the last century. Much current public sentiment is based on an outraged sense that there has been committed a horrible, criminal insult, but the twist of the knife is that the entire bohemian twentieth century is itself the insult. Bohemianism thrives under a capitalism with a belief in its own future; hence the well-known, post-war Californian variety, perhaps also the European variants. But we have entered a new kind of nature, a nature composed of images. And there can be no criticism of nature; it is always taken just as it is.

Remember that most of your body lies on the inside, in utter darkness from birth to death, at least if your luck holds. It would be a death of sorts if, at some point in our future, we were to lose this idea of center, core, heart; if networks expanded to dissolve every community and tradition. The last day of all time would then be strangely comforting: finally, an end to all this. A calm whisper in parting: "Goodbye, Doctor", a pulsing, regular rhythm, the time-lapse image of decay turning into birth. If one could tell an unborn child that it soon would be forced to leave its only world, the child might struggle frantically against the thought: birth must be a death. But of course it is the other way around.



Seth Price

-� 1990 Set Price

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