Seth Price-Circa

I had visited the Seth Price Circa 1981 exhibition in the institution of contemporary arts in London which consisted of film art. I personally have never looked into film and video art exclusively and therefore my visit to Seth Price’s exhibition was both a fresh and baffling experience. The atmosphere of the rooms were naturally dark as opposed to the normal bright lit rooms in a normal museum which enables a full immersion of each films shown on separate screens. What I noticed from walking down the hall was the style of his film pieces which is commonly a combination of reused materials from a diverse range of media such as dated adverts or simply pictures from online to make a single idea.

One exhibit placed on the main hall was a piece called ‘Two for one piece’ I found amusing for its corny style of an Americans 60s/70s commercial break. I wore the headphones provided and fully immersed myself on this relic of an advert listening to the cheesy catch phrases and somewhat exaggerated acting. I could imagine anyone who had lived in that nuclear American lifestyle and had been old enough to remember to feel somewhat nostalgic. I felt it despite only being born years after that era.

Price’s work explore the concepts of recycling past material of media to create his art and use this to reflect on subject matters such as marketing and mass produced goods. But other aspects I found in his exhibition were that of a reflection of dated technology by using raw synth backing tracks. This is found in his piece called ‘industrial synth’ which uses a combination of footage of retro text based games of the 80s and strange abstract animations that all fit together to give a feeling of an 80s era arcade. Seth Price’s exhibition as a collection emphasises a great deal of how tenuous a static image can be on screen when subject to video production as he rarely focuses on a single scene or point in time. The exhibition as a whole was a refreshing look into an unfamiliar practice of fine arts but not something I feel I could be inspired to integrate into my own practice.