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”.

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