- «The human mind – consciousness, cognition, wisdom, naivety – has been the same for 50 thousand years. During this time you have always kept busy with the creation of art, beliefs and culture, most of which are unknown to you, for your history begins just 6,000 years ago, with the invention of writing. All previous achievements are lost forever: the great religions, the myths and epic stories, the culinary traditions and fashions, all the different sounds ever used to tell a person “I love you”» Seth Price, Before Writing.
BEFORE AND AFTER WRITING is the exhibition project of the multi-disciplinary artist and American author Seth Price, running until May 4 at the Neapolitan pop-up headquarters of the German gallery Gisela Capitain. The exhibition, organized through the sixteenth-century rooms of Palazzo Degas – where the great French painter and sculptor’s atelier was based – develops around the central nucleus of an unpublished work that gives its title to the entire exhibition, a long leporello volume which unfolds across the central hall of the main floor. Inside this book-sculpture, a series of photographic images generated with HDRI are interspersed with texts silk-screened on glass blocks which, like magnifying glasses, trace and document the lives of human beings in various moments of our distant past remote, from 44,736 to 14,091 BC
In an imaginary reversal of perspectives, Price places his gaze in the prehistoric era, that is, that phase which, by cultural convention, indicates the immense historical period prior to the invention of writing, and turns to the visitor to describe human life in this way. as it was before concepts of time and progress were established, before machines were designed, before white people, disease, and the self were themes. Through an analysis of the most remote times before the birth of technological inventions, social categories and economic systems, as well as gender roles and ideological fields, the artist uses the past to re-determine our point of view on the present and it does so by means of a device assembled with the most traditional artisanal methods combined with the most recent digital technologies.
This tension between organic and inorganic matter is also found in the works on the walls of the room, where some stylized anthropomorphic masks that recall emojis or comics are composed of human muscle tissue scanned by 3D software. These ghostly presences examine the human body as the terrain where the effects of technologies manifest themselves most profoundly, and trace their encroachments and metamorphoses. With this series, Price’s research, which in past years had focused on the use of “digital skins” within his works, becomes more introspective and seems to reflect an attempt to grasp the true essence of the human, beyond beyond the determinations of biopolitical powers.
Price’s artistic investigation, which has always been characterized by multidisciplinarity and the hybridization of the fields of artistic and cultural expression, uses the strategies of appropriation and reconditioning of sounds, images, patterns, symbols and self-generated data to investigate the boundaries of reality and representation. Drawing on the internet as a meta-archive but also as a place of potential for recombination through new directives, the artist moves from dematerialization to matter, entrusting a large compositional component to accidentality, as part of a process that passes from production to post-production and within which time becomes circular.
In the last room of the exhibition, two series of drawings on paper created during moments of recent historical alteration, such as the pandemic, frame the new audio track recorded by the artist, entitled Coinos Driftoscreated on the occasion of the exhibition in Naples.
BEFORE AND AFTER WRITING extends Price’s investigation into the uncertain and labile status of images, bringing the artist’s attention to focus on the effects of historical and political events on human beings, both in their dimension of organic/disorganic corporeity and in their ability to build systems , ideas, languages, social spaces. The exhibition represents neither a farewell to humanism nor a post-humanist turning point, rather it depicts humanity in the process of testing, thinking, experimenting, asking questions and changing profoundly, in a close comparison between past and future.
On the other hand, Seth Price himself stated in 2007: «There is a question to which no work of art has an answer, to which every work of art is susceptible, namely: so what? There is no answer. You ask yourself, as an artist, and there is only silence. It is not a nihilistic question, nor a useless skepticism, because the silence produced is actually useful. This silence records an echo: the artist has made a noise and has prepared some kind of recording device to capture the returning echo. Your expression now has a shadow that cannot be chased away. This is the work.”
