Seth Price - a provocative, moving novella about what it means to be a creative person under today's digital regime. In the course of a gripping, headlong narrative, Price's unnamed protagonist moves in and out of contemporary non-spaces on a confounding and enigmatic quest, all the while meditating on art in the broadest sense

Seth Price, Fuck Seth Price, Leopard, 2015.
excerpt

www.distributedhistory.com/From one of the most influential artists of his generation comes a provocative, moving novella about what it means to be a creative person under today's digital regime. In the course of a gripping, headlong narrative, Price's unnamed protagonist moves in and out of contemporary non-spaces on a confounding and enigmatic quest, all the while meditating on art in the broadest sense: not simply painting and sculpture but also film, architecture, literature, and poetry. From boutique hotels and highway bridges to PC terminals and off-ramps; from Kanye West and Jeff Koons to George Bush and Patricia Highsmith; from the playground to the internet to the mirror, Price's hybrid of fiction, essay, and memoir gets to the central questions not only of art, but of how we live now.

This week New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl offered some pretty sensible advice to all those who are maddened by the obscene action in today’s high-flying art market: chill out. “Sensing that people will one day look back on this era as a freakish episode in cultural history, why not get a head start on viewing it that way?” he wrote. “Detach and marvel.” Hear, hear! That’s not to say it’s always an easy business, but I’m working on it.

Having said that, let me address, for a moment, the brave and sober art historians of the future who will take up the challenge of understanding this freakish moment: ladies and gentlemen, pick up the crisply written book that artist Seth Price just released on Leopard Press, Fuck Seth Price. It presents the contemporary art world in all of its manic, horrible glory: its commercial market flooded with money, its inhabitants buffeted by existential doubts, its artists under siege by the digital.

The book concerns an unnamed male artist who, Price writes on the first page, one day “found himself carrying out strange and horrible acts: murder and abduction, most disturbingly, but also other furtive activities that he couldn’t quite make sense of.” By this point, we’re told, the artist had pretty much stopped making art, having minted a tidy fortune by making abstract paintings that he carefully calibrated to appeal to collectors. (Sound familiar?) And so begins a little flashback.

One day in the early 2000s, the artist was sitting in one of those then-new high-end restaurants which specializes in elevating a previously cheap, retrograde cuisine (red-sauce Italian-American, in this case) into a pricy, hip one. (New Yorkers can picture any branch of the Carbone empire.) He “found himself wondering whether abstract painting wasn’t due for a spaghetti-and-meatballs recuperation,” Prince writes. His thinking continues rapidly:

Someone, he realized, needed to come along and devise a painterly abstraction that embodied cultural sophistication and ‘nowness.’ It had to look classically tasteful and refer to well-known historical byways, but it also had to be undergirded by utter contemporaneity, either of sensibility or of production method.

The artist brainstorms a few possibilities and then combines them in a materials list which handily brings to mind dozens of artists today (including Price himself): “Foxconn worker’s accidental Coke spills on Nigerian mud cloth, scanned and randomly manipulated in Photoshop, printed on Belgian linen stretched over a vacuum–formed frame.”

Price coins the term “post-problem art” to define the style of abstract painting which has come to the fore in recent years, a period when paintings have sold like hotcakes and “everyone was in agreement that the market was the only indicator that mattered now.” That, of course, is hyperbole, but only slightly, since a whole ecosystem now exists that is made of collectors who vociferously acquire and trade works by young artists who have almost no critical or curatorial track record. Price sums up the prevailing mood with brutal precision:

It was no longer necessary to deem a piece interesting, provocative, weird, or complex, and it was almost incomprehensible to hate something because you liked it, or like it because it unsettled you, or any of the other ambivalent and twisted ways that people wrestled with the intersection of feelings and aesthetics. You almost didn’t need words anymore: it was enough to say, ‘That painting is awesome,’ just as you’d say, ‘This spaghetti is awesome.’

We have all heard that language before—maybe even coming out of our own months.

The painter admits that his engineered style is cynical, but then makes a nice leap: that the work is actually about cynicism, that it’s about the process of selling out and the vagaries of taste. “What if you believed in not believing?” he muses. “Executives or world leaders entertaining this question would rightly be classified as sociopaths, but in the world of art these questions were okay.”

Naturally, as the highs of his new career achievements fade, this leads him to some self-questioning. “Am I supposed to just be a part of this system that generates taste and money, and go on making things until I die?” he wonders. That pervasive dread, I think, explains the fascination in recent years with artists who in various ways have opted to drop out of the art game, like Lee Lozano, Cady Noland, and Charlotte Posenenske. (“It is difficult for me to come to terms with the fact that art can contribute nothing to solving urgent social problems,” Posenenske declared.)

Not many do actually drop out, but Price’s artist does, and though it’s never quite clear what he’s up to, he seems to spend his time writing and performing various macabre activities which he is largely unable to control and of which we only ever catch slight glimpses. All the while, his thoughts continue, ingeniously touching on all sorts of present-day issues, both savory and not.

The artist reasons that since painting is confined by its strict limits (a thing hung on the wall) and tied closely to fashion, the future omust belong to sculpture, which is open to changes, evolving with technology. And, yes, bigger is better. “When devising publicly significant artwork, a good rule of thumb was to aspire to the condition of a handgun: simple, familiar, and loaded,” Price writes, noting that Serra and Koons seem to get this—Serra, especially, who has pushed his work into the realm of architecture.

As Price asks, with a heap of rye wit: “[W]hy were we building bigger and better exhibition halls if not to showcase the limits of human potential, dispatches from the zone where unbounded and well-funded creativity met hitherto unknown capacities for technological ingenuity?” So crank it up!

Incidentally, that question echoes very closely something that the artist Robert Irwin said to me a few years ago, albeit a great deal more skeptically: “We’re building these cathedrals to art today, really almost to the level of absurdity, so you ask yourself, what does it contribute?” He answered with his characteristic optimism: “I’m of the opinion that we are constantly discovering the world and that the point of art is that act.” I suspect we would all happily cosign that statement.

On a day to day basis, though, the book suggests that the job of being an artist, for many leading figures today, consists in large part in managing a business, negotiating control with outside interests (there’s a nice exegesis on the parallels between Koons and Kanye), flying to the openings of oligarchs’ private museums, feeling guilty about the decadence, and deciding when to compromise. Price at one point writes of his artist: “He asked himself whether there was really anything wrong with getting into bed with power and wealth if that was what it took to make great art.”

That feels like an increasingly pressing question, and one that some artists, like Koons, Kapoor, and Serra, seem to have answered quite definitively for themselves. But Price also offers other questions, and they linger. What effect is the rise of digital technologies having on art, our sensibilities, and even our way of thinking? What exactly does great art entail? And, if and when it appears today, can we can even recognize it? Price: “At its best, art was a faith without religions, a gnosis without spirituality, a system without need of names.” So what is that we are actually believing in? - Andrew Russeth

Seth Price, How to Disappear in America, Leopard Press, 2008.

Published as a catalogue for Seth Price's 2008 exhibition at Friedrich Petzel Gallery, "How to Disappear in America" alludes to 1960s countercultural handbooks providing instructions for dropping out of mainstream society. Price's book, which consists exclusively of information found on the internet, includes advice for using current technology and focuses on the practical concerns of evading capture by law enforcement.

In December 2009, in the midtown studio of artist and Leopard Press cofounder Wade Guyton, a group of artists, artist assistants, curators, critics, and friends gathered to listen to the artist Seth Price read from his book How to Disappear in America. Except Seth Price didn’t, in the most literal terms, “write” the book—it’s an instructional guidebook compiled largely from various websites that provide tips for living off the grid, including how to torch a car, how to clear a campsite of human traces, where to sleep in the desert, how to kill a dog that’s trailing you, why gay bars are good places to hide out, and such insights as “If you have a helicopter looking for you, bury yourself in mud and leaves and you stand a chance of not being detected by your body heat.”
Price’s intervention transformed the original material, presenting not only the paradox of disappearance as the goal in a culture that aspires for the opposite (take, for example, the distinction between Price’s title and the now-defunct HBO series How to Make It in America), but also the bizarre authorless frontiers of the internet itself.

—Christopher Bollen

THE BELIEVER: Did you pick the texts for How to Disappear in America arbitrarily, or were you cognizant of building some sort of narrative?
SETH PRICE: There was definitely a kind of urgency and high-stakes paranoia to a lot of the texts. That gives it a narrative sense. There was one text that was relatively down-to-earth that a skip tracer had written, like, “Look, I hunt people professionally, and I know all their mistakes. Here are my tips.” So you can trace some shifts in tone through the book. But I spliced them all together and took out the headings, cut things out, rearranged it, and wrote a kind of intro. And I had a free hand with dumb quips. There are a lot of places in the book where a paragraph ends with a stupid phrase like “’Nuff said,” or “Natch.” It was the salt on the dish. - www.believermag.com/issues/201305/?read=interview_price


If I were to put one item in a time capsule to represent this moment in America, it would be Seth Price's How to Disappear in America. Printed as a catalogue for Price’s 2008 exhibition at Friedrich Petzel Gallery, this little red book is a Richard Princian-object of appropriation, a textual remix of information found exclusively online, the ~90% majority of which is an exact reproduction of a countercultural guide to falling off the grid by one “Fredric L. Rice,” first published in 1997 on Skeptictank.org under the title Vanishing Point: How to disappear in America without a trace.
The appeal of Rice’s writing to an artist like Price is obvious: earnestly designed with utility in mind, recontextualized, Vanishing Point reads like Nabokov 2.0. Rice’s character is revealed through his lush prose. He has a strong moral center (“If you're thinking of hiding from a moral responsibility—such as child support—I want you to stop reading this right now and shoot yourself.”) and is extremely pragmatic (car chases never end well). Rice’s goal is to help you disappear, to “Run from Authority (or The Establishment, The Man, The Fuzz, The P.I.G., ‘Them’),” though, as he opens, you should be prepared, too, “for a spiritual awakening.”
As a guide, How to Disappear in America is already dated—this was made before 9/11, before Obama’s drones and Snowden’s leaks—but its portrait of America is still pointed. “It's getting harder and harder to hide in America,” Rice/Price write, “There used to be defacto ‘underground’ or ‘freedom loving’ people—hippies, if you will… These days, however, in our increasingly paranoid and dangerous society, offering assistance to strangers is a bad idea: It gets people killed… Also, it’s best to avoid going to McDonald's or other fast food places if you have a habit of doing so.” - Fiona Duncan

Seth Price’s exploration and manipulation of music, writing, publishing, plastic, curating, discursive performance, exhibition formats and video- and film-making

LISTEN: 8-4, 9-5, 10-6, 11-7 (2007)
Eight-hour mix as part of ‘Title Variable’ (2001-ongoing)
‘… the magazine [Semiotext(e)] was selling well, so I thought, why not publish the pure theory in the form of these books, the Foreign Agent series? This was around 1983 and I was familiar with several French theorists who hadn’t been introduced in America – Baudrillard, Virilio, Guattari, even at that point, Deleuze. I went to a number of publishers who all laughed and said, that won’t sell. So I did it myself. We came up with this format, this little black book that goes so nicely with the downtown, leather jacket, art crowd. We wanted them to be short, suggestive, hip, cool … something you could just zip up in your pocket and of course it became a kind of fetish, or cult item. That’s fine by me, as long as people don’t fetishise the language that’s in the book. I really don’t care how someone first connects with theory, so long as they connect. They open a book somewhere, read a page, see something that interests them and then maybe they go further and something happens to their mind. Their mind becomes energised by thought.’1
Seth Price’s recent solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Zurich included seven of his signature ‘Vintage Bomber’ pieces. Executed in a range of colours, each work consists of a sheet of vacuum-formed high-impact polystyrene bearing the trace of a bomber jacket and a mark of the year of manufacture: here 2008. Five of these works were presented in a line as a chromatic fade, from black to grey to silver to white. Hung high up on the white gallery wall, they looked chic and inert.

Vacuum forming is primarily used for packaging mass-produced consumer goods. It involves melting a form of hot plastic around a solid object and then allowing it to cool into a rigid mass applied by vacuum to create a single form or a reusable mould. Although the synthetic material used by Price is contemporary, in terms of sculptural casting it’s an old-fashioned process. A fairly laborious means of encasing unique and malleable objects such as the vintage jacket or – in other similarly formed pieces – the shape of a woman’s breast, a clenched fist or a Gerbera flower.
In an accompanying video projection piece, Redistribution (2008–ongoing), Price presents himself discussing the vacuum-forming process and its aesthetic and cultural resonance. He is as precise and transparent about his artistic intention and theoretical methodology as he is about his symbolic use of materials and objects. Redistribution itself is encyclopaedic in reach and waywardly academic in tone. The video follows the format of, and is intercut with, visual footage from a public lecture that Price delivered on his work in 2007. This is edited together with examples of the artist’s previous works and found footage. Unified by Price’s narration, the display of images is set against infinitely spiralling abstract digital television broadcasting backdrops. Price’s manipulation of material is seamlessly coherent and authoritative. The content and composition are, however, often idiosyncratically self-reflexive or descriptively florid, lending a note of earnest authenticity to a strangely hyper-real product.
Price weaves a narrative of his work’s production – objects, moving image, music, writing, collaborative publishing and curating, spread across film, video, digital, print, live, discursive performance and exhibition formats – and of its distribution through myriad social and economic networks and audiences, from small-scale publishing or open-source Internet downloads to high-end commercial or public gallery exhibitions. This is set against a backdrop of historical and contemporary technological development, socio-economic shifts and materialist ethics.
You learn, for example, that Price studied film and video at school – liberal arts, semiotics rather than sculpture2 – and that in figuring out the art world (we’re given to assume this is New York) he set about defining himself against what he saw as the two key strands of existing film and video production: namely, cinema and performance. Subsequently – and this is a very basic synopsis – through looking at and working through imagery from the Internet, Price recognized and sought to explore how video became just one material among many existing within this realm, on the same diagrammatic level as design and media.
Expanding on the theme of ‘material’ and ‘plasticity’, Price makes broad cultural links between the current perception of the infinite potential of video and the Internet – its elastic materiality – and the development of plastic in Europe and North America in the 1950s. The apparently boundless adaptability of plastic in the postwar era represented an optimistic expression of re-creation, heralding a new era of consumer choice. Of course, as Price points out, endless formal mutability or a plethora of choice can become confusingly open-ended, and, making the link with contemporary digital anxiety, he argues that the use of digital tools gives a plasticity to content with recorded material being constantly reused and manipulated. When the tendency is for everything to open out in all directions, at all times, the problem is trying to establish a meaningful relationship between any two things; the inability to do so indicates psychosis.
Returning to the development of his work, Price discusses his preoccupation with video and digital manipulation, expanding on the use, effect and circulation of images. Discussing the attraction and challenge of using found material, he draws parallels between the power of the insistent visuality of grisly photographs of accident scenes taken from Internet death sites used in his work Digital Video Effect: ‘Holes’ (2003) and the intimate home movie footage shot by Joan Jonas in the early 1970s of Robert Smithson, Richard Serra, the dealer Joseph Hellman and (a silent) Nancy Holt sitting around talking about the state of sculpture, money, art and economy used in his work Digital Video Effect: ‘Spills’ (2004). In both examples Price points out it wasn’t a question of taste, morality or appropriationist ethics that made choosing to use this material difficult, but that the content of the material was so strong.
So how, then, as an artist do you deal with this material, make sense of a collision of registers at once so historically epic, momentous and banal? How do you address the anxiety of influence, for example, or the intensity of scopic desire and then communicate meaningful connections between the two?
Price’s video Digital Video Effect: ‘Editions’ (2006) consists of a montage of six of his previously editioned video works – re-edited for low-cost, unlimited distribution – including Digital Video Effect: ‘Holes’ and ‘Spills’. ‘Editions’ collages archival material with advertising, newsreels and digital computer animation effects. The aforementioned home movie footage of Smithson et al. discussing artistic control in the marketplace is juxtaposed with excerpts from Martha Rosler’s video Global Taste: A Meal in Three Courses, Element 1, 1985 (2002) – footage itself lifted by Rosler from television advertisements for nappies and Swiss cheese – including credits, reportage from the aftermath of Ronald Reagan’s shooting in the 1980s focusing on the media scrum, stills from Internet death sites and a digital animation clip of a rolling synthetic black ocean played on repeat. There is an almost painterly digital spillage to both the editing and a morphing overlay of animation and sonic effects (at one point a synthetically ecstatic ‘euugh, aaghh’) that Price uses to pull everything together.
Here Price’s manipulation of material manages to create its own field of distribution both within the work – for example, the confusing of notions of value from ‘mainstream’ to ‘bourgeois avant-garde’, of art history and economics, or in the visual field, the shifts from ‘real’ documentary to synthetic animation – and in Price’s reworking of his own works alongside others and the dispersal of the product itself as an unlimited edition. The production and reproduction of culture and value are shown here to be infinitely malleable. Meaning is formed through the constant fluid connections between points – strategically reworking and updating material, quoting others and yourself. This is not a political gesture. Appropriation is a given, as is access to an endless worldwide archive of found images.
In Redistribution itself Price moves on to detail Thomas Edison’s apparent mania for copyright, intellectual property rights, the uncanny valley, vacuum forming, how light industry is being outsourced from Brooklyn to China, bomber jackets, the Lascaux cave paintings, the circulation of images, music compilations, digital sampling, the economics of the music industry, journalism, making exhibitions, how everything on the Internet is provisional, connoisseurship, fine wines, poetry, major media capitals, nihilism, how everything these days frankly is provisional, art, making art, the ‘Daniel Pearl video’, public spectacle and private spectacle, infinite access, computers, Edison, the cinema and Western image culture’s displacement of violence from its own bodies, into the realm of images …
Within Price’s exhaustive but actually rather beautifully constructed thesis, ‘plasticity’ becomes a conceptual point of departure and provides a framework for an understanding of the work he produces and the formats he engages with. In the case of the Kunsthalle show, for example, Redistribution provides a meta-narrative to the exhibition. In turn the meaning of an exhibition – the exhibition’s role as a knowledge-producer, say, or the artist’s role as a deliverer, or rather perhaps distributor, of information and illumination – itself becomes a self-consciously discursive point of contention and engagement.
The objects that Price manufactures are unforgivingly blunt. Their materiality signifies a literal translation of ideas transmitted more fluidly through moving image, text or open-source systems. These objects are dependent on the historic and socio-economic context of the white cube. Here discourse is not provisional: it engenders a level of visibility and a weighting system of status and value requiring academic legitimization – endorsement or critique – and a market price.
Price has recently started producing large-scale wall pieces from natural wood veneer and acrylic. The material is cut to frame empty space, creating optically testing silhouette shapes conjuring simple action scenarios. For example, keys are exchanged, a contract is signed, a child is spoon-fed, a photograph is taken, something is whispered and a cigarette is lit. These oblique inverted images and their epic wall-mounted display create an odd cinematic aura. Empty Godardian gesture is here petrified in plastic. The present-tense narrative suggestion leads nowhere. It is the blank, generic quality of the images, originally sourced from the Internet and rendered here as negative space, that seems important.
The natural wood veneers are exotic and expensive – Walnut Burl, Ebony Makassar and Vavona Redwood. Covered in shiny diamond acrylic plastic, these pieces have the ‘look and feel’3 of high-end design products. Untitled (2008), from Enamel and Router-Cut Dibond, depicts a man and a woman in tinted silhouette. The piece has a romantic allure and an elegance of form, but this is a brittle sophistication at once seductive and false. The images of contracts and keys being exchanged – repeatedly used by Price as a logo-esque device often printed in ink on small Dibond diamond shapes – smacks of corporate conspiracy theories or perhaps just the banality of real estate. The claustrophobic accumulation of artificial material achieves a certain resonance, a critical mass.
Price’s illustrated essay ‘Dispersion’ (2002–ongoing) is freely available to download from his website. The piece is a succinctly idiosyncratic assessment of distributed media, art production and the socio-economic forces shaping everything from the status of objects to the position of the audience. This essay, establishing a pitch and tone developed in more recent works such as Redistribution, is one of the most significant art works to come out of New York in the early 21st century.
Price has recently screen-printed ‘Dispersion’ in sections over a series of – again, now signature – high impact polystyrene knot pieces. Here rope knots are presented still encased in the polystyrene. The panels are titled Essay with Knots. p. 1 (2008), Essay with Knots. p. 4–5 (2008) and so on, to pages 16–17. This work is a chilling piece of visual styling and a stunningly corrupt act of redistribution.
Title Variable (2001–ongoing) consists of a series of music compilations, accompanying packaging and art work plus journalistic essays, all produced by Price: for example, Video Game Soundtracks 1983–1987 (2001), NJS (2002) and Industry (2003). The soundwork is available to download as audio files from Price’s website and UbuWeb. Print versions are available in a range of formats from CD hand-outs to limited art editions. The articles are placed in a number of music magazines.
The sampling method and strategies for distribution of the compilations are fairly commonplace; it’s the thoroughness and quirks, the strategic references in Price’s approach, that give the project shape. The listening experience here is always analytical, never immersive. The packaging has a succinct visual style aping the indie-creative-retro-high design of specialist hip music. The tone of the essays is informed, occasionally theoretical in reach and often creepily journalistic. The articles focus on subcultural resonance and how the development of production technologies defined the shaping of each musical genre. Again with Price you can’t quite figure the position – somewhere between irony and well-researched authenticity or perhaps the odd combination of naivety and cynicism he has previously been accused of.4
In Price’s essay ‘Journalistic Approach to New Jack Swing’ (2002) the pitch is, in fact, darkly reminiscent of the ‘musical interludes’ in Bret Easton Ellis’ novel American Psycho (1991). Ellis’ psychotic hero Patrick Bateman, in between bludgeoning another victim to death, describes with forensic enthusiasm his MOR appreciation – ‘It’s not just about the pleasures of conformity and the importance of trends’5 – for Huey Lewis and the News, Genesis and Whitney Houston. Price’s musical range is obviously much more cultish, but the delivery and attention to detail are similar.
The opening sequence of the film adaptation (2000) of American Psycho leads you through Bateman’s immaculately white designer modern apartment. It is here that many of the brutal killings later take place. The walls of the apartment are lined with 1980s’ Appropriationist classics by Allan McCollum, Robert Longo, Richard Prince and Cindy Sherman. The apartment of a psychopath unhinged from society owing to excessive materialist obsession is perhaps a not inappropriate place for these acutely image conscious works to end up. A Price Vintage Bomber wouldn’t look out of place here.
Price recently published a small, almost pocket-size, book: How to Disappear in America (2008). The text has the intentional, ingratiatingly casual tone of a blog; it’s both chatty and considered. It is, in fact, culled and rewritten from survival texts about how to drop out of society in a successful way. (The fact that dropping out these days can be done successfully or unsuccessfully is a moot point.) The text is peppered with typos and spelling mistakes, and there are sudden lurches in direction from New Age spiritual to military hard fact, from authority to Absurdism.
For example, methodical instructions on how to strangle a dog lead on to a rumination on contemporary technological surveillance devices that identify people through their consumer purchases. There is constant reference to ‘the opposition’ and descriptions of social types or cultural groups – motor-cycle hang-outs or punk bars – that may provide places of refuge from the mainstream. The fantasies of escape are romantically banal. The mythology of an American landscape – that you could submerge into infinite anonymity, drop out, build an alternative existence, find something true and authentic – is enduring.
The notion of disrupting ‘the system’ is curiously outmoded. There is no clear alternative, and there is no clear opposition. We have multiple styles and approaches now. There is infinite access to and collisions of meaning and value systems. There is a plethora of choices and a surfeit of images within the cultural logic of late capitalism. Here, defined by media, image becomes material. Price works in the realm of this new American Sublime.
What does it mean to have so acutely processed Andy Warhol, Conceptual legacies of the 1960s and ’70s, the dematerialization of the art object, failed Utopias, the 1980s (in their entirety), MTV, Colin de Land’s American Fine Arts, Metro Pictures, Artforum, Smithson’s arrested entropy and Serra’s now spectacular weight, Feminism, semiotics, Baudrillard, global travel, terrorism, the turn of American imperialism and the right to freedom and self-expression? What does it mean to be seen to be the heir to the Appropriation artists of the 1980s, having directly lived through the relational aesthetics of the late 1990s? Where do these points connect with navigating the realm of contemporary image and media?
Price’s work turns on a narrative reflecting in on itself. For all its up-to-the-minuteness, it becomes suddenly old-fashioned because America is strangely old-fashioned and nostalgic, reflecting in on itself, at once repressed, neurotic and primitive. Mythology is enduring, and Price works with the mythologies of art history, economics and style. He builds a narrative of production and consumption, value and meaning, strategy and reference. Critical discourse blends easily with aesthetic product. It’s a fairly voracious but straightforwardly aspirational tale of free-market capitalism and cannibalism. This is what it means to choose to participate.

1 Sylvère Lotringer, from an interview with Matthew Collings published in Artscribe, no. 88, September 1991, itself an edited version of an interview for the BBC’s Late Show programme ‘Theory in the Art World’, subsequently broadcast in 1992
2 From a conversation with Seth Price, New York, 28 March 2008
3 Ibid.
4 Gwen Allen, ‘Interview with Seth Price’, Art Journal, Spring 2007, p. 82 (from Seth Price’s website)
5 Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho (1991), Vintage Books, New York, p. 343 - Polly Staple  www.frieze.com/issue/article/the_producer/

Links *****SETH PRICE IMAGES: Garment Sculptures Mylar crumpled sculptures Silhouettes Plywood pieces Calendar paintings Videos Books Posters Folklore US Music Continuous Project Vacuum forms Title Variable Headless Prehistoric ***Price Vimeo ***Price Youtube Channel ***Price Video Sale/Rental ***Price Discography ***Price audio downloads on Ubu.com

Some texts 'Lecture On The Extra Part,' from Texte zur Kunst 9/15
Essay by Chris Wiley from 2000 Words:Seth Price
Teen Image, 2009
Was ist Los, 2003-05
Journalistic Approach to New Jack Swing, 2002
'Seth Price's Operations' by Michael Newman, from 'Price, Seth' book (dload)
David Joselit essay from October
2010 Article, Domus Magazine, by Vincenzo Latronico (dl)
Artforum mag. piece, by Tim Griffin (dload)
2009 Interview with Bosko Blagojevic
Frieze mag. piece, by Polly Staple (dload)
download Interview with Reena Spaulings, 2008
download interview- Flash Art
download Johanna Burton essay (from bootlegged Zurich 06 catalogue) Sports, 2004
download interview with Daniel Baumann, parkett 2005
interview with Fia Backstrom, NDP 2005
Download 'Grey Flags' (2005, Press Release and Exhibition Title
--- 2005: Friedrich Petzel Gallery
--- 2006: Sculpture Center, NYC
--- 2006: CAPC, Bordeaux, as 'Drapeaux Gris'
--- 2008: Alogon, Chicago) 'Grey Flags' catalogue, 2006edited by Bettina Funcke, published for Sculpture Center Exhibition
Download translation of "In Stubborn Praise of Information", Serge Daney(From Continuous Project #8, trans. SP)
Dispersion, 2002--
Symposium from Continuous Project #8 book, featuring reps from CP, Bernadette Corporation, Claire Fontaine, and Princeton University 

Works and Installation Pics Silhouettes
Vacuum-forms
Mylar Pieces
Prehistoric
Business Envelopes, Gifts, Twine
Calendar Paintings
Documenta, 2012
'Folklore U.S.'
Guidebook page from the dOCUMENTA (13) catalogue  dOCUMENTA (13): Installation, Kunstbanhof galleries  dOCUMENTA (13): SinnLeffers Department Store  dOCUMENTA (13): Opening Week Fashion Show  dOCUMENTA (13): Fashion show video clip (1)  dOCUMENTA (13): Fashion show video clip (2)  Press Release, Petzel exhibition  Venice Biennial, 2011
'Miam!' at Chantal Crousel, Paris, 2011
'Non Speech, Fire & Smoke' at Friedrich Petzel, New York, 2011
'Die Nuller Jahre' at Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin, 2010
'Die Nuller Jahre' at Capitain Petzel, Berlin, 2010
Museo d'Arte Moderna di Bologna, 2009
Reena Spaulings Fine Art, 2009
Kolnischer Kunstverein, 2008
Kunsthalle Zurich, 2008
Petzel, 2008
'Tricks' at Gisela Capitain, 2007
Modern Art Oxford, 2007 (with Kelley Walker & Continuous Project)
Petzel 2006
Reena Spaulings, 2006
'Sculpture' at Isabella Bortolozzi, 2006
'Guyton/Price/Smith/Walker' at Kunsthalle Zurich, 2006
PS1, 2005
Reena Spaulings, 2004
Year, 2004

Selected films and videos Free-circulating music videos, folk tales, etc.
Redistribution (2007--)
Freelance Stenographer (2007) With Kelley Walker
Chords (2007)
Digital Video Effect: "Editions" (2006)
Untitled (Left) (2006)
Untitled (Right) (2006) Koln Waves/Blues (2005/08)
COPYRIGHT 2006 SETH PRICE (2006)
Folk Music & Documentary (2004)
Digital Video Effect: "Spills" (2004) 
Digital Video Effect: "Holes" (2003)
Rejected or Unused Clips, Arranged in Order of Importance (2003) 
Romance (2003) 
Modern Suite (2002)
2 For 1 Piece (2002)
Playground (2002) With Michael Smith.
NJS (2001-02)
New York Woman (2001)
Industrial Synth (2000-01)
'Painting' Sites (2000-01) 
American Graffity (2000)
Triumf (2000) 
Analogue (1999)Can You Pass the Mirror Without Looking? (1999)
Chaplin (1999)

Recital (1999)
Primitive Technology/Binary Code (1998)
Good Thoughts v. Bad Thoughts (1998)
Sub Accident (1997)
Ghost Story/ Curiousitas (1996)


Books/Catalogues
Fuck Seth Price (2015)
Drarrings (2015)
Folklore U.S. (2014)  Folklore U.S. Lookbook (2013)
Price, Seth (2010)
Was ist Los (2010 facsimile of 2003 essay)
Freelance Stenographer (2010, with Kelley Walker) Museo D'Arte Moderna Di Bologna (2009)
For A Friend (2009)
How to Disappear in America (2008)
Wade Guyton, Seth Price, Josh Smith, Kelley Walker (2008)
Dispersion (2008 facsimile of 2002 book)
Modern Art Oxford/Continuous Project 12 (2007)
Freelance Stenographer (With Kelley Walker) (2007)
Notes on This Show (2006)
Decor Holes (2006)
New York Twice (2005)
Poems (2003)
Global Taste (with Josh Smith) (2004)
Black Book (with Josh Smith) (2003)
Stay At Home/Go Home (2003)
Dispersion (2002--)


Performances or Lecture-Performances Redistribution, 2007--
Freelance Stenographer (2007) With Kelley Walker
TBA (performance at Sculpture Ctr), 2004
Radio Arte Mobile Story (2004)Folk, 2002
New York Woman, 2001 (lecture on music production, with video and CD distribution)
Girlfriend (2001) Triumf (2000)
Can You Pass the Mirror Without Looking? (1999)
Chaplin (1999)

Title Variable Discussion of the project, in Art Journal (download)
Downloadable texts and music files in the project

'8-4 9-5 10-6 11-7,' 2007. (8-hr audio file) [click to stream, or left click/control click to download]
'For A Friend' essay, written to accompany 8-4 9-5 10-6 11-7 (download)
Order 'For A Friend' booklet

'Akademische Graffiti'/'Unique Source,' 2005. [click to stream, or left click/control click to download]
Essay written to accompany Akademische Graffiti (published as 'Decor Holes', 'Depletion', 'Unique Source/All Natural Suicide Gang', & 'Was ist los,')
this version designed as an insert for the Reena Spaulings vinyl LP (download)
Download printable version. 'Industrial Fist'/'Industry'/'Industrial Ist,' 2004, cassette side A. [click to stream, or left click/control click to download]
Cassette side B.
Essay written to accompany Industrial Fist (download)
Purchase some versions from free103point9

'NJS'/'Nieuw Jaczx Swynjge,' 2003. [click to stream, or left click/control click to download] Essay, written to accompany NJS (download) Purchase later-release CD from free103point9 'Soundtrax'/'Game Heaven'/'Game Soundtracks 83-87,' 2001. (click to stream, or left click/control click to download) Essay written to accompany Video Game Soundtracks(download) Packaged version from printed matter related: NJS video Title Variable I covers download TV I -neurosis Title Variable II covers download TV II -perversion Title Variable III covers download TV III -psychosis Title Variable IV covers download TV IV schiz

Others What is Continuous Project?PDF Excerpt, by Vic Brand, from 'In Numbers: Serial Publications by Artists Since 1955,'
edited by Andrew Roth and Phil Aarons, designed by Garrick Gott, 2010 Our original website, domain mistakenly forfeited and then allowed to lie fallow, here preserved Video Distribution (EAI)  Leopard Press Crousel gallery Spaulings gallery Capitain gallery Bortolozzi gallery Petzel gallery Discogs

 Posters
Folklore US Poster, Petzel Folklore US Poster, Documenta 13 Die Nuller Jahre Poster Radio Poster Bortolozzi Poster RSFA 04 poster K-hole Zurich 08 poster FP 06 poster RSFA 06 poster Oxford KZ poster Koeln poster Poster edition for 'Poems' book Unaffiliated posterAtonal Music

'Policier'---my first album, cassette-only self released, 1998 (Download)
'Sines'---2003 album (Download)
'Iron Curtain Girl'---2002 album (Download)
'Army Jacket' record--(2009 reissue of older tracks) info and download Click to stream/download cold mix, 2009 Downloads from a 2007 recording session with Stefan Tcherepnin 'NJS'/'Nieuw Jaczx Swynjge,' 2003. [click to stream, or left click/control click to download]
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