oems is a collage of pages scanned from notebooks Seth Price kept between 1999 and 2003. These selected texts, handwritten in different styles, mix decontextualized quotations, hijacked proverbs, fragments of dialogues, sketches, theoretical and humanist thoughts. Acerbic, parodic and often funny – à la Richard Prince – these are inspired and fatalistic refl ections on contemporary society: think Pascal, version No Future, revised by Johnny Rotten. For Price, quoting Novalis: “Journals are really communal books,” to be shared. Even if these “data presented schematically w/o explication” remain obscure, unreadable. In spite of the presence at the beginning of a fake and disconcerting alphabetic index (listing, among other things, “Chaos, History, Personal, Occult, Psychism, Qabalah”…), no link appears –and we know why between one page and any other. The layout doesn’t seem any more chronological. At the very last page, he affi rms: “and as in pornography, there is a semblance of a beginning, the shambles of the text, and no end,”. Poems is apprehended then like a looped fi lm, a moving train, or the fragments of a conversation overheard by chance. The artist, who is also a fi lm director, writer and music producer, is accustomed to sampling, working from fragments to be recomposed. An archive is for him a way of appropriating and resuscitating the “dead ends” of low popular or underground culture: everything that remains neglected or pushed aside by the market or the powers that be. He shares what he calls “the conceptualists’ dependence on documents and records”.

Thus in 2001 he published, in the framework of his Distributed History Project, a video and a mix tape around the Indus movement; he also compiled in 2002 a CD of videogame soundtracks downloaded from the internet sites of fans that he then sent out in huge mailings by the post. Hacker style, he reflects on alternative modes of (post)productionand (re)diffusion. Since 2003 he has published, with Bettina Funcke, Wade Guyton and Joseph Logan (members of the Continuous project collective), forgotten or out of print art revues in facsimile and has recently started a Dictator series. Low res or low fi , the reproducible, the rough, trash or cheap effect, are an aesthetic in demand. Thus the scans (sometimes revealing postits on torn and badly framed pages…) are here of a pretty bad quality, rendering the whole as nostalgic as undateable. “An archive allows for an experience of history that is quite personal”. Reflections of hisinterests, his obsessions, certain subjects (militant) keep coming back, like x-rays: the relations among domination, sex, TV, cinema, rock, punk, goth, black magic, animals, architecture, comic books, advertising, consummation in general…but also cross-references to visionary and decadent writers such as Shakespeare, Swedenborg, Strindberg, Huysmans, Rimbaud, Bataille…or diverse allusion to leftist resistance, from Ghandi to Jane Fonda. These themes are approached with the same distance (without pretension), and the same humor as those detected in the cover’s image: those of an observer, who, on the road, perceives the big city, far off, and returns to it.These small prose poems, or cadavres exquis, are like memento mori allowing him to “stave off mortality”, just like the recent thermoplastic sculptures of his own hands. The scrapbooks of Price reveal, as do illuminated manuscripts of the XXI century, an apocalyptic and engaged vision of the world: a real UFO to decode.
ANNE DRESSEN, Paris.

Seth Price
Poems
Published June 2004

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