Elizabeth Price

There is a paradox at the heart of the work of Elizabeth Price (b.1966): it is distinctly recognisable and authored, and yet seems to exist independently from her. Price’s videos carry with them an unsettling autonomy, as though something has crawled in through the gaps or ports of a computer and found a way to manifest its thoughts on screen. This anarchic, yet controlled, quality is indicative of Price’s interest in marginalised or denigrated artefacts, architectural structures and documents. Her approach is rooted in the research and excavation of selected archives and collections, and how they present – or fail to present – social history and experience. Recalling Saidiya Hartman’s ‘critical fabulations’, a term she coined in relation to the omissions in historical records, Price uses moving image to give expression to such oversights and erasures.¹ Gaps are not only filled, they begin to speak, to mock and to self-organise.

Price’s film trilogy SLOW DANS already has an extensive exhibition history; since 2018 it has been shown either in part or in full at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Nottingham Contemporary, the Whitworth, Manchester, and in London presented by Artangel.² At the Glasgow Museum of Modern Art (GoMA), the three films – KOHL (2018), FELT TIP (2018) and THE TEACHERS (2019) – are currently being shown in the cavernous gallery, which has been darkened to the point that its Neo-classical features, including floor-to-ceiling windows, are completely obscured. Each work comprises multiple channels – either two or four – and spans more than six metres in width or height. They continue the artist’s film-making methodology of combining archival material, computer-generated imagery, graphics, speech and sound. The immaculately choreographed cycle totals twenty-five minutes and while one video plays in its entirety, ghostly imprints pulsate on the other screens, semi-dormant and waiting to be activated. At certain points, small tremors or vibrations indicate recognition across the films, such as the revolving fronds of a plant that emerges in both FELT TIP and THE TEACHERS: an indication of a brooding, emerging sentience.

Price has described SLOW DANS as relating, in one sense, to different forms of labour: manual, administrative and executive.³ Indeed, although the films are interrelated in subject-matter, they adopt different narrative tones and frameworks that mimic or align with certain industries or workplace environments. The first, KOHL, is perhaps the least overt in this respect; of the three, it is also the quietest. Shown across four screens, it incorporates photographic material from the archive of Albert Walker, a former miner who photographed coal-mine architecture in the United Kingdom between 1970 and 1990. Each screen is filled with a different linear colour gradient, which slides from inky black to a murky purple, blue or green. At the top of each frame is an inverted black-and-white photograph from Walker’s collection of a mine headframe FIG.1. The images have also been inverted in orientation, obliterating the logic of their design in a simple visual intervention. A succession of photographs is shown throughout the duration of the film, creating an upended, industrial landscape that is continuously reinvented.

As is typical of Price’s film-making, the appearance of text and image on screen is preceded by the crisp sound of typing on a keyboard and the click of the mouse. In KOHL the narrative is delivered solely through written text, which scrolls slowly upwards on each screen, ultimately subsumed by the realm of upside-down mines FIG.2. In it Price imagines that all coal mines are connected, creating a vast underground liquid network in which water flows through pits, seams, colliery systems, tunnels and drifts to create ‘one, big, wet grid’. The description of the rising water levels and the infiltration of a complex web of subterranean architecture engenders a sense of unplaceable dread, as though resurfacing a long forgotten trauma.⁴ This is augmented by Price’s inclusion of mysterious apparitions called ‘Visitants’, which ‘seep out of the foundations, bubbling up, like inky spit’. The ‘reality’ of the ‘Visitants’ is intermingled with myth, legend and suspicion. Their supposed existence appears to relate to a nebulous, encroaching threat as much as a specific protagonist: ‘The superstition that mine water is a medium never fully died out and is lately revived in all the new stories about the Visitants and their sudden appearance’. The behaviour of the text on screen mirrors the imagined coalescence of water, running across screens, back and forth, and always accompanied by a flashing cursor that indicates a state of incompletion.

Whereas KOHL comprises four screens arranged side-by-side, FELT TIP is shown on two stacked on top of each other, creating a tall, narrow frame that mirrors its titular object. It also parallels the central visual component of the film: Price’s collection of men’s neckties dating to the 1970s and 1980s. Their embroidered patterns appear to relate to emerging technologies of the time, evoking pixels, memory chips, circuit boards or microprocessors FIG.3. Signalled again by the click of the mouse, we see a sequence of close-up tie details, so that their characteristic shape is removed and their isolated designs appear to relate more and more to the inner workings of computer hardware. The narration of FELT TIP is spoken as well as written, and is mostly delivered by a female voice that, although seemingly computer-generated, is acerbic and knowing. The single voice represents a collective: ‘the administrative core’ of an unnamed data store, cache or repository. In the instalment of the three films at GoMA, FELT TIP is the central component: it is hung in the middle and its span dictates the height of the other two films. It is not surprising then, that Price has also referred to it as the ‘key’ to the series, with the felt-tip narrator overseeing the dystopian, filmic realms that neighbour them on each side.⁵

The decision to anthropomorphise a felt tip and give it an administrative, corporate role was instigated by Price’s discovery of a copy of Sexuality and Class Struggle (1968) by Reimut Reich in a charity shop. The book was annotated throughout in purple felt tip – ‘a trivial, adolescent pen’ – which, to Price, seemed to contradict the argumentative nature of the notations.⁶ The purple felt tip, therefore, became her narrator: a tool to interject and challenge an established system or history, like belligerent marginalia. Adopting this framework of the dominant narrative and its unruly challenger, the voice veers between neutral and subversive, sincere and caustic. It presents a ‘short history’ – written, of course, in felt tip – of the man’s necktie, which is described variably as a cliché of phallic expression, a symbol ‘used to communicate authority and class distinction’ and a carrier of insignia to ‘silently convey’ a background of privileged education. Gradually, however, the administrative core begin to claim the technologically inflected patterns of the ties as their own resource, co-opting the embroidered memory-chip-like pixels to record their own experience. At this point, the voice multiplies, the music intensifies and the tie, which is likened to a long tongue and a soft pen nib, is repositioned as a symbol of demographic and technological revolution in the office space.

The final video to be activated in the sequence is the most recent: THE TEACHERS. Here, from the outset, the spoken voice proliferates. There is, therefore, a progression in the role of speech and the speaker across SLOW DANS: from a collective but silent network to a central spokesperson, to a polyvocal collective. The latter development is especially worth noting as in THE TEACHERS, four narrators speak separately, together and lyrically to detail a story about the loss of language. Supposedly caused by a ‘contagion’, those affected no longer communicate through talking. Instead, they make distinct, repeatable sounds, produce elaborate costumes and perform strange rituals. Price shows inverted black-and-white imagery of the clothing on the screen, doubled and mirrored, so as to create a Rorschach effect FIG.4 and overlaid with text. At times, the outfits resemble creatures, brain scans FIG.5 or wood grain, at others they are armour-like, ready to protect a warrior in battle.

This imagined story uses language to explain the emergence of a group that has jettisoned language: the roots of words are considered, grammatical rules are discussed and the International Phonetic Alphabet becomes a way to translate the group’s noises into words. It is by this process that they are named ‘the Teachers’. The narrators here are four academics who dispute the origins and motivations of the group’s imposed silence. Their collective script is reminiscent of a report or archival research: documents and people are cited by unexplained numbers, and it questions the authenticity of preceding source material. Thus, the work has a central conflict: the Teachers withdraw from language altogether, while those around them can only use language to dissect and analyse their behaviour.

SLOW DANS tells multiple stories, which relate to the nature of labour, memory, gender and technology. Price’s recent exhibition UNDERFOOT at the Hunterian Art Gallery, University of Glasgow FIG.6, mines similar themes – of work, cultural authority and value – but, here, in specific reference to the library and its organisation. The project takes as its starting point the archives of the now-defunct Glasgow-based carpet manufacturers James Templeton & Co and Stoddard International PLC, which are held at the University of Glasgow. These corporate archives contain documents, photographic records and materials used in the manufacture of carpets in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; they are both specific to Glasgow and its textile heritage and representative of wider transformations in technology and labour at the time.⁷ While delving through the archives, Price encountered hundreds of gridded ‘point paper’ drawings, which are fully realised carpet patterns hand-painted onto a grid. It is telling that, as noted by the textile weaver and researcher Jonathan Cleaver, Price chose to examine these as opposed to the designers’ freehand sketches, favouring the regimented, and the visual connection between the pixel and the loom.⁸

UNDERFOOT comprises a thirteen-minute, two-channel video and a textile work FIG.7. The video traverses the various levels and departments FIG.8 of the Mitchell Library, Glasgow, which is furnished with intricate carpets woven by James Templeton & Co, using the Spool Axminster loom. The designs boast remarkable intricacy, with repeated interlocking vegetation, trefoils, flora and ornament, rendered in a colour palette that is plush yet muted. In Price’s treatment of them on screen, the carpets are (un)characteristically black-and-white and inverted, affording them a forensic quality. The clacking of the keyboard is also apparent as text bubbles materialise, interchanging yellow and red text. Although this is posed as a conversation, the dialogue is continuous – as in KOHL – rather than back-and-forth. The appearance of each bubble is accompanied by a sound similar to a computer error message or pop-up. As we are led visually around the library and its carpets, the script recalls the language of a corporate or instructional tour, detailing the number of desks for private study, location of the public bar, canteen and conference suite, ‘which is available for hire’.

Initially the sounds emanating from UNDERFOOT are constrained to the taps, clicks and alerts that mimic computer usage. That is, until Price introduces the carrel: an ‘old word, which names an enclosure, surrounding a single desk’ FIG.9. Here, an immersive soundscape fills the gallery space, and the ‘error’ message sounds become contributing, melodic tones. A carrel, most commonly found in libraries, is a cocoon-like structure designed for private study, group work or the practice of musical instruments. It is connected, the messages inform us, to the carol; both nouns derive from the same source, ‘an even older word, meaning circle’. Thus, two words, one relating to silence and one to singing, share the idea of a sonic surround: one projects inwards, whereas the other projects outwards. As is apt for a library, the music is abruptly cut off.

The control of sound in a library is achieved through design, manners and materials. Price’s imagery centres on such elements, most notably the carpets, but also the veneered wood panelling that lines the walls and desks. Different departments are panelled with different woods: Language and Literature with oak, the Department of Art with walnut FIG.10, and the Department of Social Science with teak. Close-up details of the wood recall the Rorschach-like images in THE TEACHERS. But here, conversely, the mirrored grain of the wood takes on an anthropomorphic quality, with knots coming to resemble eyes or mouths. In the latter part of the film Price employs animation to illustrate the point paper designs, and their eventual process through the gargantuan Axminster loom FIG.11.

In Price’s practice there is a sense of threat that does not seem to relate to the future of technology, but rather to the past. Through her research into archival erasures and omissions, and the methodologies in which things – tangible and not – are recorded, she acts as a sort of anachronistic interlocutor. In her rigorously crafted film-making, she appears to speak from the perspective of that which we have discarded, missed, misused or moved on from. It is an unsettling, radical realm, where absences are given substance, learn how to communicate and threaten to spill out from the screen.